So, in your view, although the bag I see is breaking up into small brittle pieces, there are even smaller pieces that are not been degraded? Is that a theory to you, or do you have first hand knowledge?
If I have understood your position correctly, this is certainly counterintuitive... because if there is not much plastic bag left, you'd think that whatever broke down the bag, would also be able to break down these smaller bits (microplastics). But you are saying that small bits of the bag remain for decades, even though I can't see them.. I just don't see why small bits of plastic bag would remain, when it is evident that something in the ground already degraded the plastic bag as a whole.
> So, in your view, although the bag I see is breaking up into small brittle pieces, there are even smaller pieces that are not been degraded?
They are being degraded, just slowly.
> Is that a theory to you, or do you have first hand knowledge?
It's not a theory of mine, you can find the explanation in practically any explanation of what "microplastics" are.
> If I have understood your position correctly, this is certainly counterintuitive... because if there is not much plastic bag left, you'd think that whatever broke down the bag, would also be able to break down these smaller bits (microplastics)
That's correct, and it eventually happens, the process is just very slow, let me try explaining it to you:
Plastics are made of very long polymer chains, composed of the same small molecule (monomer) chained together millions of times. Let's assume we have a plastic for which half[1] of the connections break down in 50 years. If I'm not messing the math up, it means that every year you lose roughly 1% of the connections between the molecule. So, after one year, your chain of 1 million molecules have been cut in 10,000 smaller piece of 100 monomers. Then the next year, there's again 10,000 connections that will break (~1% of the remaining 990,000 connections), but this time it will just double the number of pieces (if you cut a piece 10 times, you and up with 11 pieces, if you have again 10 scissor hits on the next 11 pieces, you'll end up with 21 pieces).
Of course my model is not entirely accurate because I looked only at the 1D molecular structure, when plastics are actually 3D meshes of these chains, so multiple chains are holding one another and it slows down the macroscopic effect, but you should get the idea of why it first degrades relatively quickly at macro scale and then slower at smaller scale.
[1] half times are a good way to model degradations of chemical compounds, at least the “spontaneous” ones, but keep in mind it's a model: it's not flawless and it's not able to describe every degradation phenomenon (for instance it fails to describe degradation from microorganisms that can grow on a substrate they are degrading hence the “spontaneous” qualifier above).
Thank you for taking the time to explain.
I get how these connections are meant to break down, though not to the detail you provided. It could be like you say, though I don't why the degradation wouldn't be concurrent - ie I don't get why half times are a good way to model plastic degradation, when all of the plastic is exposed to 'scissor hits' all of the times. Ie, once the scissor hits start to impact the bag, I would think the bag would soon fully disintegrate.
Assuming it is like you say, if a plastic bag is brittle, going to dust after just 10 years after being in the ground, (I'm using supermarket bag design as a means to figure out the age of the bag,) that is far from 50 years to break down half the connections. This is too say the metric to measure degradation seems wrong to me... Or perhaps the metric is the case in artificial, sterile conditions, which the ground is not.
> ie I don't get why half times are a good way to model plastic degradation, when all of the plastic is exposed to 'scissor hits' all of the times.
They are all exposed to scissor hits all the time, but it's a stochastic scissor. You can think of every connection rolling many dices every second, and whenever they all land on 1 the molecule breaks. This kind of behavior leads to exponential decay, which is subject to half life.
> Assuming it is like you say, if a plastic bag is brittle, going to dust after just 10 years after being in the ground, (I'm using supermarket bag design as a means to figure out the age of the bag,) that is far from 50 years to break down half the connections.
Why? You don't need to break all connections to break to dust. They are trillions of connections to break if you want to degrade the compound to its primitive molecule, but only thousands if you want to shred it to pieces. Keep in mind that if the monomer measures 1nm, a piece of plastic of 10um still has 10,000 connections. And if at the beginning you have a piece of plastic that's 10cm long (all reasoning are 1D here for simplicity), you just need to cut it 1000 times to get to 10um (so at 10um you're still much closer to the beginning than to the end, even though the plastic is now invisible).
> Or perhaps the metric is the case in artificial, sterile conditions, which the ground is not.
As I said before, it's a model and you're right it's not entirely accurate. Yet plastic doesn't have much enemies living in the ground, so it's pretty close to being sterile from the perspective of the plastic. And that's actually the problem we're facing right now.
We're talking about negative externalities, of which pollution is a perfect example: the effects of pollution are spread across everyone, no matter who emits it, so no one has an individual incentive to change their buying habits. It's a coordination problem, which can be solved democratically by the voters demanding an overall change in incentives (such as an appropriate tax on single-use non-biodegradable plastics).
> Then that's it. Game over. Until buyers stop buying what's already out there, vendors don't have an avenue to sell anything else.
That's pretty fascinating to see that you're reading literally everything backward, like not only the real world around you but even what I'm writing! I'm talking about the fact that nobody is offering the possibility to buy stuff that's not wrapped (and for legit business reasons, it's much easier on their supply-chain management to do so this way), and you're interpreting as if the problem was on the demand side.
And everything is in the same vein: I'm talking about a situation where the supply side is definitely not providing what the consumer want, at least a significant fraction of the population, and you insist in arguing as if plastic packaging was driven by consumer demand: it is not it's cost saving and supply chain ease of use on the supply side, not demand. And that's why you can't find any: why would a business bother doing what the customer want when they can get away with costs savings because customers have nowhere to go.
> Meaning that if I decide to keep my clocks on a constant schedule, it's straight to jail for me?
Chances are that you'll straight up lose your job after a couple days. Then you'll see how your freedom not to change your clock time is respected when you're being evicted because you could not pay your rents due to lack of revenue. By the way that's a good illustration of the difference between freedom in a vacuum, and the actual exercise of freedom in a socially interconnected world where your agency is in fact very constrained by material factors.
> If the state is democratic, the people have to coordinate first. Without such coordination, there is no way for democracy to take place.
Fascinatingly steady with backward-driven thinking indeed! You can't have democracy if you don't have a state entity that's able to run the elections and enforce them. The democratic character of the state comes later, once the people already in charge have been confirmed through the election, or when they decided to step down if they lose. Coordination comes from the state, which can then replicate itself thanks to this coordination. No state started with an election, at the very beginning was always somebody getting power through other means (be it a foreign invader, a previously ruling king, or a group of insurrectionist).
> Laws are useful for keeping the minority dissenters in line with the will of the majority, but in this case once the majority has stopped buying plastic-wrapped food, it is highly unlikely there will be a compelling business case to serve the small handful of people who want to see the world burn.
But without enforcement, nobody will ever be able to buy such food, because nobody has an incentive to sell it in the first place. It's cheaper to sell plastic wrapped food, and because the externalities come for free, the business isn't paying the cost of their behavior. Buyers, or at least a significant fraction of it, realize the cost, but they don't have any leverage on the business because there's nowhere to go. The same way I'm not buying a smartphone that's being manufactured in my country, because there isn't any.
> Laws are useful for keeping the minority dissenters in line with the will of the majority
Not only. Laws are also setting the state budget, the tax levels or food and drugs safety standards, your interpretation of what law is supposed to do is indeed very limited in comparison to what it actually is in the real world.
> he previous commenter's idea of a higher power forcing the people to bend to his will is great and all, but doesn't work with democracy.
No, there's no non-democratic high power in charge up there, it's just a matter of democratic state intervening to fix a market imperfection (negative externalities), but in your now infamous skill to misinterpret everything, you managed somehow invented some authoritarian power in the discussion. Well done.
Maybe you could try reading what other people are writing twice before commenting, or maybe three or four times, just to be sure you're not making things up in your head, because that's a recurring theme at that point.
Edit: oh I found this gem in another comment of yours (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39783570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39783570)
Not sure why would you would choose to reply before reading the comments
The irony is absolutely delicious.