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> Plastic is only used for convenience and cheapness, let's make it less convenient and cheap than glass and metal. Plastic is cheap and convenient, but its ma

> Plastic is only used for convenience and cheapness, let's make it less convenient and cheap than glass and metal. Plastic is cheap and convenient, but its material properties are also advantageous. It's lightweight, allowing more actual product to be transported on trucks. If it breaks, it doesn't make a dangerous mess the way glass does. We should absolutely work to reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order of priority, but we need to recognize that other costs exist too, such as more product being damaged and more higher transportation costs (monetary and pollution wise). All that said, I agree companies respond to incentives, and given sufficient costs, they would lean towards more recyclable products.

wkearney99 4y ago
It doesn't make as immediately a dangerous mess, that's true. Long term though, it's markedly worse.
tomp 4y ago
> We should absolutely work to reduce, reuse, and recycle, No, we shouldn't. We should primarily work on scaling up our energy production. I was long in favour of nuclear, although apparently there's some exciting development in deep geothermal as well. (inspired by https://elidourado.com/blog/geothermal/ https://elidourado.com/blog/geothermal/ ) We shouldn't even try recycling the plastic, but simply burry it. Oil from the ground, plastic back into the ground. With enough energy and a viable waste management process in place, we don't need to bother with reducing, reusing or recycling, but can simply enjoy our lives to the fullest.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  How about we at least “work to reduce, reuse, and recycle” _until_ we have energy scaled up sufficiently to do what you describe?
- thecrash 4y ago
  The invention of breakthrough energy sources are not being blocked by efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle. They're being blocked by difficult thermodynamics, engineering, and materials problems. I'm hopeful, but as far as we know it could take many hundreds of years to solve these problems - they might even be practically unsolvable. So it makes sense to also hedge our bets by making the systems we currently depend on more sustainable, rather than just assume we will transcend them on-schedule.
- alfor 4y ago
  I think that’s a counterpoint we need to hear more to the current ’reduction’ narrative. Small nudge to push innovation in a positive direction is an important tool, but we are getting overboard with control and regulation. Here in Québec the law forbid plastic bags in stores, but plasticulture, packaging is a far worse problem, the law is virtue signaling instead of pushing for meaningful changes. There is strong case to be made for progress, more energy, more food, more housing for the whole planet. In a 100 years we will be so far away in technology that our current problem will seem like a joke. But I think it important to be careful with things that could never recover: ocean and land diversity, contamination of groundwater/soil.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    Many "green laws" like plastic bags are signaling>effect. This is true. Sometimes this is even recognised. Awareness-raising and such. That said, externalities don't generally get solved without laws. I totally agreed that human progress, technological and otherwise cannot be ignored. On plastics... It's undeniably true that a large portion of the garbage you might find in the woods, streets, fields, lakes or oceans is plastic. Meanwhile, a lot of landfills and other waste disposal systems suck. They pollute by design, aren't used properly or designed correctly. It's also true that a lot of that plastic is pretty low value... It doesn't add much to a consumers' wellbeing. If it wasn't available, we'd find alternatives and be fine. Not all the plastic. Some is good value and some is essential. Most though So... people look at all this mess. Some say "we should just stop making/using it." Others want to stop littering and improve waste disposal. In our inspired age, a common take is "market correcting." Try to internalize externality costs and "let the market work." None of these are unreasonable. Lame or failed attempts at implementing them are not disproofs of concept. They're just failed attempts... and "politics" is often to blame, making everyone extra upset about the whole thing. So, yes, I agree. We are progressing technologically, and that is very relevant if we're talking about ecological issues. OTOH, for all our current might, we're pretty impotent when it comes to simple basics like garbage. If plastics did not exist, we'd forgo the convenience of using plastic. We'd gain an end to our plastic waste problems. So perhaps/probably there are ways of ending our plastic waste problem that are more efficient. If they are higher, than it makes sense to just ban plastic. Where are they? Why haven't they happened? The cost ceiling isn't that high. Low performance.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  > We shouldn't even try recycling the plastic, but simply burry it. We can burn it in an arc reactor or properly filtered incinerator at a lower price than raw oil to produce energy
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  The second law still applies no matter where you get the heat. GHG is a problem because it reduces the earth's ability to reject waste heat by several tens of joules for every joule of work we get. Simply moving tens of joules of heat to the surface would have the same effect even if doing it affordably weren't scifi. There's a limited budget of everything on earth's surface from metals to waste heat to space and we're running head first into all of them. We could spend it on allowing a tiny portion of the world to be wasteful and craven, or we could use it for everyone to thrive.
  - tomp 4y ago
    LOL no. Humanity’s heat sources (burning fossil fuels, fission, geothermal) are a drop in the bucket compared to solar irradiation and the resulting heat.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Lol no the bucket's about 5% full, we couldn't even all live as wealthy americnans do now. Current primary energy: 17TW Total insolation: ~ 180PW Total GHG forcing: 5W/m^2 Ratio of insolation to total forcing: 40:1 USA domestic and imported primary energy per capita: 14kW Ratio to world average: 7 Remaining headroom above US averag for 5W/m^2 (catastrophuc climate change): 75kW per person. Remaining headroom above US average for 1W/m^2 (still bad): 3kW per person
- palata 4y ago
  No, we shouldn't. The world is running on fossil energy, and that energy is going to go down. We should primarily work on preparing for a world with reduced energy.
birksherty 4y ago
> other costs exist too This is the problem that is destroying the planet. It should not be about capitalism.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Some of those costs are the pollution and energy used to produce and transport plastic alternatives. That is not capitalism, it is economics. The secondary affects can offset the benefit of the original intent.
ericmay 4y ago
One issue I see is that even when the advantages of plastic are practically non-existent people will still demand its use either out convenience or habit. Plastic bags come to mind as an obvious culprit. There are others though, too. My pet theory is that we're basically stripping the planet of all of the good, usable materials for "stuff" and plastic is a nice stop-gap to keep prices low. We don't do a good job of recognizing how inflation is tied to resource depletion.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Plastic bags are an interesting example. There was a study a little while back that plastic bag bans at stores resulted in an overall increase use of plastic. The thinking was that people reused the thin store bags at least once (i.e. as a small trash liner for a work desk). Without those as an option, people switched to buying plastic bags, which were thicker and used much more material. Personally, we always opt for plastic bags at the store, and they always get reused once if not many times. Paper bags just don't seem to hold up as well for some reason.
  - tedivm 4y ago
    The problem there is that the law didn't define "reusable" bags well enough, so stores just made slightly thicker plastic bags and called them reusable even though they really aren't. As a result people ended up using the same amount of bags but with far more plastic.
    - cptskippy 4y ago
      > The problem there is that the law didn't define "reusable" bags well enough There is no one law, this has occurred independently in municipalities across the globe.
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      Anecdotally, the thicker ones are very reusable; but consumers (the 90 percent) are ignorant about reusing and recycling.
    - 4y ago

wkearney99 4y ago

It doesn't make as immediately a dangerous mess, that's true. Long term though, it's markedly worse.

tomp 4y ago

> We should absolutely work to reduce, reuse, and recycle, No, we shouldn't. We should primarily work on scaling up our energy production. I was long in favour of nuclear, although apparently there's some exciting development in deep geothermal as well. (inspired by https://elidourado.com/blog/geothermal/ https://elidourado.com/blog/geothermal/ ) We shouldn't even try recycling the plastic, but simply burry it. Oil from the ground, plastic back into the ground. With enough energy and a viable waste management process in place, we don't need to bother with reducing, reusing or recycling, but can simply enjoy our lives to the fullest.

CogitoCogito 4y ago
How about we at least “work to reduce, reuse, and recycle” _until_ we have energy scaled up sufficiently to do what you describe?
thecrash 4y ago
The invention of breakthrough energy sources are not being blocked by efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle. They're being blocked by difficult thermodynamics, engineering, and materials problems. I'm hopeful, but as far as we know it could take many hundreds of years to solve these problems - they might even be practically unsolvable. So it makes sense to also hedge our bets by making the systems we currently depend on more sustainable, rather than just assume we will transcend them on-schedule.
alfor 4y ago
I think that’s a counterpoint we need to hear more to the current ’reduction’ narrative. Small nudge to push innovation in a positive direction is an important tool, but we are getting overboard with control and regulation. Here in Québec the law forbid plastic bags in stores, but plasticulture, packaging is a far worse problem, the law is virtue signaling instead of pushing for meaningful changes. There is strong case to be made for progress, more energy, more food, more housing for the whole planet. In a 100 years we will be so far away in technology that our current problem will seem like a joke. But I think it important to be careful with things that could never recover: ocean and land diversity, contamination of groundwater/soil.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  Many "green laws" like plastic bags are signaling>effect. This is true. Sometimes this is even recognised. Awareness-raising and such. That said, externalities don't generally get solved without laws. I totally agreed that human progress, technological and otherwise cannot be ignored. On plastics... It's undeniably true that a large portion of the garbage you might find in the woods, streets, fields, lakes or oceans is plastic. Meanwhile, a lot of landfills and other waste disposal systems suck. They pollute by design, aren't used properly or designed correctly. It's also true that a lot of that plastic is pretty low value... It doesn't add much to a consumers' wellbeing. If it wasn't available, we'd find alternatives and be fine. Not all the plastic. Some is good value and some is essential. Most though So... people look at all this mess. Some say "we should just stop making/using it." Others want to stop littering and improve waste disposal. In our inspired age, a common take is "market correcting." Try to internalize externality costs and "let the market work." None of these are unreasonable. Lame or failed attempts at implementing them are not disproofs of concept. They're just failed attempts... and "politics" is often to blame, making everyone extra upset about the whole thing. So, yes, I agree. We are progressing technologically, and that is very relevant if we're talking about ecological issues. OTOH, for all our current might, we're pretty impotent when it comes to simple basics like garbage. If plastics did not exist, we'd forgo the convenience of using plastic. We'd gain an end to our plastic waste problems. So perhaps/probably there are ways of ending our plastic waste problem that are more efficient. If they are higher, than it makes sense to just ban plastic. Where are they? Why haven't they happened? The cost ceiling isn't that high. Low performance.
smileysteve 4y ago
> We shouldn't even try recycling the plastic, but simply burry it. We can burn it in an arc reactor or properly filtered incinerator at a lower price than raw oil to produce energy
Schroedingersat 4y ago
The second law still applies no matter where you get the heat. GHG is a problem because it reduces the earth's ability to reject waste heat by several tens of joules for every joule of work we get. Simply moving tens of joules of heat to the surface would have the same effect even if doing it affordably weren't scifi. There's a limited budget of everything on earth's surface from metals to waste heat to space and we're running head first into all of them. We could spend it on allowing a tiny portion of the world to be wasteful and craven, or we could use it for everyone to thrive.
- tomp 4y ago
  LOL no. Humanity’s heat sources (burning fossil fuels, fission, geothermal) are a drop in the bucket compared to solar irradiation and the resulting heat.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Lol no the bucket's about 5% full, we couldn't even all live as wealthy americnans do now. Current primary energy: 17TW Total insolation: ~ 180PW Total GHG forcing: 5W/m^2 Ratio of insolation to total forcing: 40:1 USA domestic and imported primary energy per capita: 14kW Ratio to world average: 7 Remaining headroom above US averag for 5W/m^2 (catastrophuc climate change): 75kW per person. Remaining headroom above US average for 1W/m^2 (still bad): 3kW per person
palata 4y ago
No, we shouldn't. The world is running on fossil energy, and that energy is going to go down. We should primarily work on preparing for a world with reduced energy.

birksherty 4y ago

> other costs exist too This is the problem that is destroying the planet. It should not be about capitalism.

Tagbert 4y ago
Some of those costs are the pollution and energy used to produce and transport plastic alternatives. That is not capitalism, it is economics. The secondary affects can offset the benefit of the original intent.

ericmay 4y ago

One issue I see is that even when the advantages of plastic are practically non-existent people will still demand its use either out convenience or habit. Plastic bags come to mind as an obvious culprit. There are others though, too. My pet theory is that we're basically stripping the planet of all of the good, usable materials for "stuff" and plastic is a nice stop-gap to keep prices low. We don't do a good job of recognizing how inflation is tied to resource depletion.

zdragnar 4y ago
Plastic bags are an interesting example. There was a study a little while back that plastic bag bans at stores resulted in an overall increase use of plastic. The thinking was that people reused the thin store bags at least once (i.e. as a small trash liner for a work desk). Without those as an option, people switched to buying plastic bags, which were thicker and used much more material. Personally, we always opt for plastic bags at the store, and they always get reused once if not many times. Paper bags just don't seem to hold up as well for some reason.
- tedivm 4y ago
  The problem there is that the law didn't define "reusable" bags well enough, so stores just made slightly thicker plastic bags and called them reusable even though they really aren't. As a result people ended up using the same amount of bags but with far more plastic.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    > The problem there is that the law didn't define "reusable" bags well enough There is no one law, this has occurred independently in municipalities across the globe.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    Anecdotally, the thicker ones are very reusable; but consumers (the 90 percent) are ignorant about reusing and recycling.
  - 4y ago