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Not sure how the "it's to late to do anything about it" is supposed to contribute to this debate. It's also factually wrong. The production of new plastics coul

by tfourb 3y ago

Not sure how the "it's to late to do anything about it" is supposed to contribute to this debate. It's also factually wrong. The production of new plastics could be drastically reduced through regulation of both the production itself and its use cases. Most food and drink containers could be made from non-plastic materials. I've built a house that uses maybe 5% of the plastic that is common in construction where I live. You could pull out the cables, window seals, roof cover and switches and basically leave the rest of the house to compost. The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics. There are a thousand ways to drastically improve this problem, fatalism only contributes to it.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
> The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics. We already have this. It's called trash can. How would letting the producers handle this instead would change anything? The plastic was still produced and will end up in a landfill or the ocean.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I couldn't speak for other brands, but Brother will give you a free shipping label so you can send your empty toner cartridge back to them. It's not charity, they want it back because they can reuse most of it in ways that a melt-and-remold style recycling scheme can't. I see no reason the same couldn't be true of most packaging, in addition to things like TV's. If you built it, you ought to be uniquely positioned to recycle it. In addition to trying to get consumers to change their habits we should also be fining/billing manufacturers when their stuff end up as litter or in a landfill. If they don't like it, they can redesign their processes to avoid it.
  - mrob 3y ago
    I think we should be subsidizing plastics that end up in landfill. It's the best place for it, as it's both safely contained and impractical to take out again, making it a reliable form of carbon sequestration.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      That sounds like a fine idea to me, so long as the product was designed to end up there rather than it being the catch-all solution for anything whose maker didn't think ahead.
- tfourb 3y ago
  Why not pay people per kg to return plastics. We have a scheme in Germany where you get something like 30 cents per glass bottle that you return. Even people who don't care about this small sum leave their beer bottles in a convenient place for others to pick up as a result. Mandating a non-trivial payment per kg of plastics would create the incentives for people to not only throw stuff in the bin if they find it convenient, but also for others to collect plastic trash that nobody else feels responsible for.
  - simiones 3y ago
    Collect it for what? Glass is somewhat easily recyclable, most plastics are not. Even if it's collected with utmost care, it will be taken to a landfill, or "sent to China for recycling" (spilled in the ocean) or burned in a power plant - none of which is that great. Conversely, if it's thrown in the regular trash, it will probably end up in a landfill, which is probably right now the best solution for it.
    - tfourb 3y ago
      This topic is about plastics getting into the environment in an uncontrolled manner being a huge problem. The first step to do something about this would be to make sure that you collect as much of the plastic currently in circulation as possible. Offering a financial reward for collection would be one way to achieve that. If recycling is not an option, burning would at least solve the problem of microplastics, if a complete burn of these materials can be achieved. Controlled storage in a landfill would be another option, until there are better solutions to handle this type of trash. My point was that there are some policy options to approach this problem and "all is lost" neither a constructive, nor factually correct point of view.
swalling 3y ago
Most people have microplastics in their body, and even babies in the womb are being exposed (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020322297 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...). The most remote, otherwise pristine environments have microplastics due to atmospheric transport (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36868287/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36868287/). It is too late.
- amake 3y ago
  I suppose it was too late to ban lead from gasoline because everyone alive at the time had already been exposed.
  - jf22 3y ago
    I think the person meant it is too late to avoid consequences, but not too late to take action.
    - swalling 3y ago
      Correct. Eliminating plastic pollution will be a benefit not to us, but to our children's children. The same with reducing carbon emissions.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  And of course if it doesn't help people who are currently alive only our children we should never do it and it's too late to bother?
  - swalling 3y ago
    Plastic replacement isn’t like leaded gasoline or ozone-depleting substances where you had just a few applications to design alternatives for. It’s in fucking everything. Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously. It’s going to take generations for it to be fixed, and it probably won’t happen until humans and other animals get much much sicker.
nukeman 3y ago
I’m curious to hear about what you did with the house (I’m thinking about building/renovating a house in a few years). Did you go DIY or hire a contractor? What were some of your replacements for plastics?
- tfourb 3y ago
  We basically built an all-wooden house: Timber posts and beams (not the flimsy sticks that are used commonly in construction in the US but solid 8" posts), interlocking OSB-boards on the inside for air tightness (this can also be achieved with other wood-based techniques, my house has an air tightness comparable to passive house construction), wood fibre insulation material (15+ inches on all sides and the roof), clay plastering on the inside (great for thermal mass). The house is really air tight but moisture can get out through the walls easily without causing rot. There are thermal bridges. Window frames are from oak. We have a bit of plastics-based insulation around the foundation and the roof is covered with an oil-based-rubber, but that's about it except for smaller items like cable insulations, switches, etc. We did some of the interior stuff DIY but the major parts of the construction were done by various contractors.
  - nukeman 3y ago
    Interesting, what made you go for wood fiber insulation versus something like ICF? Also, UK or Canada? Noticed the spelling difference.
    - tfourb 3y ago
      Germany, actually ;-) We chose wood fibre because we wanted the house's CO2 footprint to be as low as possible. We are slightly above passive house levels in terms of ongoing energy use (mostly because the house has an inefficient shape = not a cube) and we produce more kw/h from solar power each year than we use despite having a relatively inefficient electricity-based heating system. But we also wanted to reduce the CO2 emitted during construction and cement/concrete is really bad in that regard. The wood fibre insulation has a fraction of the embodied energy/CO2 emissions of concrete and fossil fuel based insulation and it is fully compostable. I could theoretically also be reused if the house is demolished at some point, as it doesn't deteriorate if it stays dry (or is allowed to dry quickly after getting wet), though I think that would be unlikely to happen. Also, wood fibre is an excellent insulator against heat, which is nice given that our summers can get quite hot. The wood-only construction also eliminates all thermal bridges, as wood is itself an insulator and the required fasteners are small diameter and do not reach through the entire wall.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by tfourb 3y ago

iforgotpassword 3y ago

> The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics. We already have this. It's called trash can. How would letting the producers handle this instead would change anything? The plastic was still produced and will end up in a landfill or the ocean.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I couldn't speak for other brands, but Brother will give you a free shipping label so you can send your empty toner cartridge back to them. It's not charity, they want it back because they can reuse most of it in ways that a melt-and-remold style recycling scheme can't. I see no reason the same couldn't be true of most packaging, in addition to things like TV's. If you built it, you ought to be uniquely positioned to recycle it. In addition to trying to get consumers to change their habits we should also be fining/billing manufacturers when their stuff end up as litter or in a landfill. If they don't like it, they can redesign their processes to avoid it.
- mrob 3y ago
  I think we should be subsidizing plastics that end up in landfill. It's the best place for it, as it's both safely contained and impractical to take out again, making it a reliable form of carbon sequestration.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    That sounds like a fine idea to me, so long as the product was designed to end up there rather than it being the catch-all solution for anything whose maker didn't think ahead.
tfourb 3y ago
Why not pay people per kg to return plastics. We have a scheme in Germany where you get something like 30 cents per glass bottle that you return. Even people who don't care about this small sum leave their beer bottles in a convenient place for others to pick up as a result. Mandating a non-trivial payment per kg of plastics would create the incentives for people to not only throw stuff in the bin if they find it convenient, but also for others to collect plastic trash that nobody else feels responsible for.
- simiones 3y ago
  Collect it for what? Glass is somewhat easily recyclable, most plastics are not. Even if it's collected with utmost care, it will be taken to a landfill, or "sent to China for recycling" (spilled in the ocean) or burned in a power plant - none of which is that great. Conversely, if it's thrown in the regular trash, it will probably end up in a landfill, which is probably right now the best solution for it.
  - tfourb 3y ago
    This topic is about plastics getting into the environment in an uncontrolled manner being a huge problem. The first step to do something about this would be to make sure that you collect as much of the plastic currently in circulation as possible. Offering a financial reward for collection would be one way to achieve that. If recycling is not an option, burning would at least solve the problem of microplastics, if a complete burn of these materials can be achieved. Controlled storage in a landfill would be another option, until there are better solutions to handle this type of trash. My point was that there are some policy options to approach this problem and "all is lost" neither a constructive, nor factually correct point of view.

swalling 3y ago

Most people have microplastics in their body, and even babies in the womb are being exposed (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020322297 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...). The most remote, otherwise pristine environments have microplastics due to atmospheric transport (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36868287/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36868287/). It is too late.

amake 3y ago
I suppose it was too late to ban lead from gasoline because everyone alive at the time had already been exposed.
- jf22 3y ago
  I think the person meant it is too late to avoid consequences, but not too late to take action.
  - swalling 3y ago
    Correct. Eliminating plastic pollution will be a benefit not to us, but to our children's children. The same with reducing carbon emissions.
light_hue_1 3y ago
And of course if it doesn't help people who are currently alive only our children we should never do it and it's too late to bother?
- swalling 3y ago
  Plastic replacement isn’t like leaded gasoline or ozone-depleting substances where you had just a few applications to design alternatives for. It’s in fucking everything. Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously. It’s going to take generations for it to be fixed, and it probably won’t happen until humans and other animals get much much sicker.

nukeman 3y ago

I’m curious to hear about what you did with the house (I’m thinking about building/renovating a house in a few years). Did you go DIY or hire a contractor? What were some of your replacements for plastics?

tfourb 3y ago
We basically built an all-wooden house: Timber posts and beams (not the flimsy sticks that are used commonly in construction in the US but solid 8" posts), interlocking OSB-boards on the inside for air tightness (this can also be achieved with other wood-based techniques, my house has an air tightness comparable to passive house construction), wood fibre insulation material (15+ inches on all sides and the roof), clay plastering on the inside (great for thermal mass). The house is really air tight but moisture can get out through the walls easily without causing rot. There are thermal bridges. Window frames are from oak. We have a bit of plastics-based insulation around the foundation and the roof is covered with an oil-based-rubber, but that's about it except for smaller items like cable insulations, switches, etc. We did some of the interior stuff DIY but the major parts of the construction were done by various contractors.
- nukeman 3y ago
  Interesting, what made you go for wood fiber insulation versus something like ICF? Also, UK or Canada? Noticed the spelling difference.
  - tfourb 3y ago
    Germany, actually ;-) We chose wood fibre because we wanted the house's CO2 footprint to be as low as possible. We are slightly above passive house levels in terms of ongoing energy use (mostly because the house has an inefficient shape = not a cube) and we produce more kw/h from solar power each year than we use despite having a relatively inefficient electricity-based heating system. But we also wanted to reduce the CO2 emitted during construction and cement/concrete is really bad in that regard. The wood fibre insulation has a fraction of the embodied energy/CO2 emissions of concrete and fossil fuel based insulation and it is fully compostable. I could theoretically also be reused if the house is demolished at some point, as it doesn't deteriorate if it stays dry (or is allowed to dry quickly after getting wet), though I think that would be unlikely to happen. Also, wood fibre is an excellent insulator against heat, which is nice given that our summers can get quite hot. The wood-only construction also eliminates all thermal bridges, as wood is itself an insulator and the required fasteners are small diameter and do not reach through the entire wall.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]