5 ms·

we have paper straws now

lucasyvas 3y ago
And yet, when I'm in the grocery store all those produce bags are still plastic while they brag about paper or reusable checkout bags! There is no solution in sight for us - it's way too late.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Well, it's a continuous spectrum of outcomes. We might have missed the "nice and livable planet without having to change much", but we're not at "Mars climate" yet.
- di456 3y ago
  My city banned single-use plastic bags. For a couple years they went away. Then they came back and are now 10x thicker so they can be marketed as reusable.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    This is how I feel about these "reusable" bags too. If you sell them at a checkout, you aren't making people adjust to remember to bring bags. You're just making them spend more to buy single use bags. They definitely are accumulating enough in my house that I'm contemplating using them as bin liners, which is stupid. But I'm probably not gonna change. Besides, even if I brought my bags 100% of the time when I went to the store, if I ever order my groceries to be delivered, which I do when I'm super busy at work or too sick to go to the store, they seem to arrive packed into as many reusable bags as humanly possible. So anyways, yet another thing that we should be leaning on companies to fix but individuals are being blamed for. Paper bags would have been better but not profitable enough compared to selling "reusable" bags at the checkout line.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  "plastic" is not the issue, "plastic" disposal is the issue. "Plastic" is just too good on the $/weight/resilience ratio. Also, efficient containers like plastics (as in light and thin) reduce a lot the energy needed to transport. And no matter what we do here with plastics, it won't matter without proper trade regulations. It will happen as it did with labour, third world countries will just pick up our share. Third world countries use more fossil fuels, and have way worse waste management, and they don't seem to plan on improving those just like labour is cheap. Their rulers want it that way to keep on competing on price in exportations. Without trade regulations that try to upstream some environmental regulation, all the local rules are useless
dataflow 3y ago
You misspelled PFAS.
tm-guimaraes 3y ago
sorry about the rant: what a nice thing, instead of a plastic straw that we know how to recycle, we get "paper" with microplastics or some other new non-recycleble composite anyway. The issue with plastics is our logistics for waste management, the common plastics are incredibly useful, but because we are shit at managing waste we are replacing plastics everywhere with worse materials that register as "evil" for the general. You can sell "no plastic" as green, or "bio degradable": Replace a plastic with something that is not plastic even though it's still less useful and non recycleable and you can call your product "green". Or say that it's biodegradable, which nowadays anything that doesn't take decades to decompose classifies, so you can have all the nasty stuff, including the very famous "micro plastics" in there and be green. There are so many rich kids in their "first world problems" that are activists and speak in conferences, that you can go to some in theory "respectable" climate conference and one talk be all about the evils of microplastic and the other about how we should use decomposable plastic (yeah, guess what it decomposes to?). The whole Green conversation is controlled by either privileged activists that clearly do not have a related STEM degree, or marketing/campaign departments calling anything "green"/good for the environment, pure manipulation.

And yet, when I'm in the grocery store all those produce bags are still plastic while they brag about paper or reusable checkout bags! There is no solution in sight for us - it's way too late.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Well, it's a continuous spectrum of outcomes. We might have missed the "nice and livable planet without having to change much", but we're not at "Mars climate" yet.
di456 3y ago
My city banned single-use plastic bags. For a couple years they went away. Then they came back and are now 10x thicker so they can be marketed as reusable.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  This is how I feel about these "reusable" bags too. If you sell them at a checkout, you aren't making people adjust to remember to bring bags. You're just making them spend more to buy single use bags. They definitely are accumulating enough in my house that I'm contemplating using them as bin liners, which is stupid. But I'm probably not gonna change. Besides, even if I brought my bags 100% of the time when I went to the store, if I ever order my groceries to be delivered, which I do when I'm super busy at work or too sick to go to the store, they seem to arrive packed into as many reusable bags as humanly possible. So anyways, yet another thing that we should be leaning on companies to fix but individuals are being blamed for. Paper bags would have been better but not profitable enough compared to selling "reusable" bags at the checkout line.
tm-guimaraes 3y ago
"plastic" is not the issue, "plastic" disposal is the issue. "Plastic" is just too good on the $/weight/resilience ratio. Also, efficient containers like plastics (as in light and thin) reduce a lot the energy needed to transport. And no matter what we do here with plastics, it won't matter without proper trade regulations. It will happen as it did with labour, third world countries will just pick up our share. Third world countries use more fossil fuels, and have way worse waste management, and they don't seem to plan on improving those just like labour is cheap. Their rulers want it that way to keep on competing on price in exportations. Without trade regulations that try to upstream some environmental regulation, all the local rules are useless

dataflow 3y ago

You misspelled PFAS.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago

sorry about the rant: what a nice thing, instead of a plastic straw that we know how to recycle, we get "paper" with microplastics or some other new non-recycleble composite anyway. The issue with plastics is our logistics for waste management, the common plastics are incredibly useful, but because we are shit at managing waste we are replacing plastics everywhere with worse materials that register as "evil" for the general. You can sell "no plastic" as green, or "bio degradable": Replace a plastic with something that is not plastic even though it's still less useful and non recycleable and you can call your product "green". Or say that it's biodegradable, which nowadays anything that doesn't take decades to decompose classifies, so you can have all the nasty stuff, including the very famous "micro plastics" in there and be green. There are so many rich kids in their "first world problems" that are activists and speak in conferences, that you can go to some in theory "respectable" climate conference and one talk be all about the evils of microplastic and the other about how we should use decomposable plastic (yeah, guess what it decomposes to?). The whole Green conversation is controlled by either privileged activists that clearly do not have a related STEM degree, or marketing/campaign departments calling anything "green"/good for the environment, pure manipulation.