8 ms·

What I learned about a plastic-free life

johnklos 2y ago
It's practically impossible to avoid plastic without great effort. I think even if we collectively don't do much towards that goal, each of us should think about it while we go about our daily lives. For instance, there are times where the choice is wholly ours. Eggs, for instance, often come in plastic or cardboard, so aside from taking a few extra seconds to consider the kind of eggs we want, that's easy. If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic. But there's still so much we can do. When we know that a store puts plastic utensils in an order without asking, and/or gives us our purchase in a plastic bag, it's simple to ask them for neither. It's also simple to carry a reusable bag or two, or a travel mug, et cetera. Spending just a little energy can easily reduce default plastic use quite a lot. This story is a good reminder that perfect should never be the enemy of good, so at very least we should try where we can.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Eggs are such an interesting example to me. I'll speak mostly to the US here, but a good chunk of the population could absolutely raise their own chickens for eggs I'd they really were interested in an easy way to reduce impact. A flock of 6-8 hens don't require too much space, and ideally you can use them as bug control and fertilizer replacement in their lawn. I live in an area with quite a few commercial chicken houses. Its an absolutely disgusting industry today, from how the animals are treated to the nasty conditions workers have to deal with. Getting rid of plastic and styrofoam packaging would be a nice win, getting rid of at least a portion of the market for industrial bird operations would be the real win in my book.
- d_sem 2y ago
  Car dominated societies inevitably will expose their inhabitants to micro plastics through synthetic tire rubber dust. There is basically no possible way to avoid them without regulation.
  - ricketyricky 2y ago
    [flagged]
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Plastic is too perfect to stop using. Honestly we need to find some miracle plastic that is completely biodegradable after say 10 years. The byproducts of the biodegradation process should be completely harmless as well. I know people are going to say that we already have biodegradable plastic but the key point here is degrade more or less around 10 years, not earlier.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Just implement better recycling programs, and develop better technology for recycling (so "contamination" isn't a problem, etc.). This might not work so well for societies where it's socially acceptable to just throw your trash on the ground and have trash littering the landscape though.
    - lozenge 2y ago
      If no new plastic was available, maybe we could recycle better, but at a very high energy cost. Even Japan, famous for its recycling where end users clean and sort their plastic in great detail, burns a lot of their plastic for energy.
    - FredPret 2y ago
      Recycling is hard because different plastic molecules don’t always play nice together - and the same goes for metal. So you need to sort everything carefully. This is hard, slow, and way too imperfect. I wonder if a better approach could one day be to burn it and then use some future catalyst or reaction to convert the smoke into something useful, or to chop the raw plastic up and feed it to a vat ful of special bacteria.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Yeah, that's why I said we should develop better recycling technology, because what we have today isn't that good. The bacteria idea is a good one I think. We already have microorganisms that can eat plastic, so it seems like it should be possible to genetically-engineer better plastic-eating bacteria for this purpose.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Cardboard and glass packaging used to be a lot more common. The key to reducing to use of plastic is fiddling with the economics. It's cheap for companies to use plastic as long as they don't have to worry about cleanup or recycling. As soon as you start charging them for the privilege of mass polluting our world with their cost savings, they can adapt pretty rapidly. In the Netherlands, there are some discussions about going back to using cardboard packaging for dairy products. That was basically all there was when I grew up. Before cardboard, glass was very common for this stuff. But In recent years, a lot of plastic bottles were used for milk. But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled, that just got a lot less attractive. Plastic is only convenient if you don't have to recycle it. Same with plastic bags. At some point those stopped being free (in most of Europe at least). And then people started pushing for paper bags. Problem solved. There are a lot less plastic bags now. I actually carry a nice foldable plastic bag made out of recycled plastic in my backpack these days. Fits behind the laptop compartment. So, I rarely need to buy paper bags.
  - ttyprintk 2y ago
    In USA, I hope we can talk about: The amount of plastic in junk mail. Maybe instead of stamps, we sell envelopes without a window. The concentration of plastics in receipts. Maybe we replace those printers with photographable screens, and have a separate lane for people desiring print. Receipts expose you to far more plastic than more-emotionally-attentive items like shampoo.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    > But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled Statiegeld! I really liked this scheme there for beer bottles. When I lived there most milk came in tetra pak though. I thought it was recyclable?
  - SECProto 2y ago
    Note that cardboard for liquid packaging often has a plastic lining, aluminum cans have plastic/epoxy lining, glass containers have plastic seals in the lids, etc.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
  Yogurt is fun and easy to make at home. And pickles. And beer. And bread. The only drawback is it takes time.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  Does that actually matter or is it yet another PR campaign where we shift the blame from companies to consumers?
- xiconfjs 2y ago
  For yogurt, milk and so on there is glass - no need for plastics.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  >If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic. Ceramic and glass containers are quite available in my area, i just think that's really big waste. It they were reusable it would be one thing but we are talking about 4g of plastic vs 100g of glass...
kvark 2y ago
It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use. In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.
- chrismcb 2y ago
  It is interesting you complain about money distribution and then your next statement talks about being cheaper. The reason paid is so prevalent is because it is cheaper and more convenient. I'm not sure what you mean by "healthy society" but the reason money is distributed is to try to make something else cheaper and more convenient. But that takes time and money.
  - kvark 2y ago
    I think you missed my point. The high level role of money is to direct people’s energy to activities beneficial for society. You come to work and help someone achieve their goals, you get paid back. If we collectively agree that plastic production and waste needs to stop, we ought to reflect this decision in our money distribution. In practice, it could mean government incentives and penalties.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  How could avoiding one of the greatest, most versatile materials humans have ever invented be "more convenient and cheaper"? Plastic is a literal miracle material, it is one of the most important ingredients to industrial society. Removing plastics is unthinkable, for most of its applications there are literally no alternatives.
  - Arn_Thor 2y ago
    It is amazing. And essential. And has gigantic external costs that either nobody is paying right now or that the government is picking up the bill for. I.e. the true cost is not being priced in
- strogonoff 2y ago
userbinator 2y ago
tl;dr: live like the (early) 19th century. It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article. Everything will get recycled eventually, and the majority of plastics are inert --- which is why they're used in the first place. People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again. Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere. Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications --- and if you're worried about carbon emissions from shipping, all that extra weight and volume should make you ponder.
- NateEag 2y ago
  > It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article. That's quite a large straw man you have there. I expect there are some people who want to eliminate all plastics. I think they're a small minority. Speaking for myself, I understand that there are many important jobs that can't be done without plastic. That doesn't stop me from trying to reduce my use of non-essential plastics. I'll choose the cardboard egg carton over the plastic almost every time, and it has no negative impacts on me. Ditto with making my own sandwich bread - I keep it in plastic containers so it stays fresh, but those containers last way longer than the single-use bags at the store. The list goes on and on. Yeah, we need plastics until materials science produces usable semi-stable alternatives, and maybe we'll never get rid of them entirely, but we can absolutely use fewer of them.
- MVissers 2y ago
  Thing is- We’re only now starting to realize how bad plastics really are, because we only recently acquired the tech to measure this. Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years? Probably plastic. They found that humans had 3x higher concentration of plastics in their testicles than their pet dogs, and that pet-dogs have a dose-dependent reduction in viable sperm count inversely correlated with the plastic concentration. Have a plaque in your blood vessel body with high plastic concentration? Since this year we know it has a 4x (!!!) increase in a new heart infarct in the next year compared to when there is less plastic. It’s starting to show that it is really bad, and it’s virtually everywhere in our body, most likely causing a ton of issues.
tjpnz 2y ago
Having toddlers I've thrown out multiple larger plastic items over the years - think things like diaper bins and stools. I now look towards the plastic slide they've since grown out of and feel only despair. For some items there are opportunities for donation, but everything else gets walked down to our building's trash room and I fucking hate it. Companies who bring such items into the world should bear some of the responsibility for their disposal and certainly shouldn't get to walk away as they currently do.
robertclaus 2y ago
We have done a lot of work trying to price the societal cost of carbon emissions into the cost of doing business... Why haven't we done the same with things like plastic waste?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Have we? Gas is still only 4 USD per gallon and broadly considered a thing the President controls
siliconc0w 2y ago
If we charged companies the true cost of plastics we'd have a perfectly adequate biodegradable alternatives by now
constantcrying 2y ago
Plastics certainly is one of the most useful materials known to humans. It is incredibly versatile and cheap. Any area of life has been significantly effected by the use of plastics as a material. I think articles like this are laughable, the plastic use of individuals in their daily lives is just a tiny, tiny peak of the iceberg. Beneath there sits an industrial society which could not exist without it. No, you can not live "plastic free". The first and most important questions these people have to ask is: how do you make anything without plastics?
kkfx 2y ago
Few practical observations: - plastic packaging, single use plastic stuff, tend to be mostly needed in cities and cities only. That's simply because in dense cities people keep moving from residential buildings (used less than half a day), to other buildings (offices, commerce etc, also used for less than half a day in mean), in a continuous very short-range commuting, getting continuous non-block-able ads (shop windows), so they tend to eat on the go, buy small stuff they have to carry around etc, also smaller residential emplacements demand small stock at home of anything, so more packaging; - plastic it's not only packaging, large slice of tissues are plastics, menstruation related products are plastic, electricity cables insulation is plastic, windows joint, many plumbing materials, cars tires and many cars elements, ... are all plastic of some kind. So to say: we can't being plastic free on scale, simply because when we was it was another era with less humans on earth and much more resources needed for personal wellbeing even if we have had much less back then. Yes, we can have natural fiber dresses, BUT not for anyone, we can make cars without plastics (almost) but they would be much more expensive and energy consuming and so on. What we can do is AVOIDING living in dense cities, witch is appropriate for many reasons, also to reduce single use plastics. Cities are NOT green at all despite finance capitalism propaganda.

It's practically impossible to avoid plastic without great effort. I think even if we collectively don't do much towards that goal, each of us should think about it while we go about our daily lives. For instance, there are times where the choice is wholly ours. Eggs, for instance, often come in plastic or cardboard, so aside from taking a few extra seconds to consider the kind of eggs we want, that's easy. If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic. But there's still so much we can do. When we know that a store puts plastic utensils in an order without asking, and/or gives us our purchase in a plastic bag, it's simple to ask them for neither. It's also simple to carry a reusable bag or two, or a travel mug, et cetera. Spending just a little energy can easily reduce default plastic use quite a lot. This story is a good reminder that perfect should never be the enemy of good, so at very least we should try where we can.

_heimdall 2y ago
Eggs are such an interesting example to me. I'll speak mostly to the US here, but a good chunk of the population could absolutely raise their own chickens for eggs I'd they really were interested in an easy way to reduce impact. A flock of 6-8 hens don't require too much space, and ideally you can use them as bug control and fertilizer replacement in their lawn. I live in an area with quite a few commercial chicken houses. Its an absolutely disgusting industry today, from how the animals are treated to the nasty conditions workers have to deal with. Getting rid of plastic and styrofoam packaging would be a nice win, getting rid of at least a portion of the market for industrial bird operations would be the real win in my book.
d_sem 2y ago
Car dominated societies inevitably will expose their inhabitants to micro plastics through synthetic tire rubber dust. There is basically no possible way to avoid them without regulation.
- ricketyricky 2y ago
  [flagged]
dyauspitr 2y ago
Plastic is too perfect to stop using. Honestly we need to find some miracle plastic that is completely biodegradable after say 10 years. The byproducts of the biodegradation process should be completely harmless as well. I know people are going to say that we already have biodegradable plastic but the key point here is degrade more or less around 10 years, not earlier.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Just implement better recycling programs, and develop better technology for recycling (so "contamination" isn't a problem, etc.). This might not work so well for societies where it's socially acceptable to just throw your trash on the ground and have trash littering the landscape though.
  - lozenge 2y ago
    If no new plastic was available, maybe we could recycle better, but at a very high energy cost. Even Japan, famous for its recycling where end users clean and sort their plastic in great detail, burns a lot of their plastic for energy.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Recycling is hard because different plastic molecules don’t always play nice together - and the same goes for metal. So you need to sort everything carefully. This is hard, slow, and way too imperfect. I wonder if a better approach could one day be to burn it and then use some future catalyst or reaction to convert the smoke into something useful, or to chop the raw plastic up and feed it to a vat ful of special bacteria.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Yeah, that's why I said we should develop better recycling technology, because what we have today isn't that good. The bacteria idea is a good one I think. We already have microorganisms that can eat plastic, so it seems like it should be possible to genetically-engineer better plastic-eating bacteria for this purpose.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Cardboard and glass packaging used to be a lot more common. The key to reducing to use of plastic is fiddling with the economics. It's cheap for companies to use plastic as long as they don't have to worry about cleanup or recycling. As soon as you start charging them for the privilege of mass polluting our world with their cost savings, they can adapt pretty rapidly. In the Netherlands, there are some discussions about going back to using cardboard packaging for dairy products. That was basically all there was when I grew up. Before cardboard, glass was very common for this stuff. But In recent years, a lot of plastic bottles were used for milk. But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled, that just got a lot less attractive. Plastic is only convenient if you don't have to recycle it. Same with plastic bags. At some point those stopped being free (in most of Europe at least). And then people started pushing for paper bags. Problem solved. There are a lot less plastic bags now. I actually carry a nice foldable plastic bag made out of recycled plastic in my backpack these days. Fits behind the laptop compartment. So, I rarely need to buy paper bags.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  In USA, I hope we can talk about: The amount of plastic in junk mail. Maybe instead of stamps, we sell envelopes without a window. The concentration of plastics in receipts. Maybe we replace those printers with photographable screens, and have a separate lane for people desiring print. Receipts expose you to far more plastic than more-emotionally-attentive items like shampoo.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  > But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled Statiegeld! I really liked this scheme there for beer bottles. When I lived there most milk came in tetra pak though. I thought it was recyclable?
- SECProto 2y ago
  Note that cardboard for liquid packaging often has a plastic lining, aluminum cans have plastic/epoxy lining, glass containers have plastic seals in the lids, etc.
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
Yogurt is fun and easy to make at home. And pickles. And beer. And bread. The only drawback is it takes time.
diffeomorphism 2y ago
Does that actually matter or is it yet another PR campaign where we shift the blame from companies to consumers?
xiconfjs 2y ago
For yogurt, milk and so on there is glass - no need for plastics.
Iulioh 2y ago
>If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic. Ceramic and glass containers are quite available in my area, i just think that's really big waste. It they were reusable it would be one thing but we are talking about 4g of plastic vs 100g of glass...

kvark 2y ago

It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use. In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.

chrismcb 2y ago
It is interesting you complain about money distribution and then your next statement talks about being cheaper. The reason paid is so prevalent is because it is cheaper and more convenient. I'm not sure what you mean by "healthy society" but the reason money is distributed is to try to make something else cheaper and more convenient. But that takes time and money.
- kvark 2y ago
  I think you missed my point. The high level role of money is to direct people’s energy to activities beneficial for society. You come to work and help someone achieve their goals, you get paid back. If we collectively agree that plastic production and waste needs to stop, we ought to reflect this decision in our money distribution. In practice, it could mean government incentives and penalties.
constantcrying 2y ago
How could avoiding one of the greatest, most versatile materials humans have ever invented be "more convenient and cheaper"? Plastic is a literal miracle material, it is one of the most important ingredients to industrial society. Removing plastics is unthinkable, for most of its applications there are literally no alternatives.
- Arn_Thor 2y ago
  It is amazing. And essential. And has gigantic external costs that either nobody is paying right now or that the government is picking up the bill for. I.e. the true cost is not being priced in
strogonoff 2y ago

userbinator 2y ago

tl;dr: live like the (early) 19th century. It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article. Everything will get recycled eventually, and the majority of plastics are inert --- which is why they're used in the first place. People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again. Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere. Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications --- and if you're worried about carbon emissions from shipping, all that extra weight and volume should make you ponder.

NateEag 2y ago
> It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article. That's quite a large straw man you have there. I expect there are some people who want to eliminate all plastics. I think they're a small minority. Speaking for myself, I understand that there are many important jobs that can't be done without plastic. That doesn't stop me from trying to reduce my use of non-essential plastics. I'll choose the cardboard egg carton over the plastic almost every time, and it has no negative impacts on me. Ditto with making my own sandwich bread - I keep it in plastic containers so it stays fresh, but those containers last way longer than the single-use bags at the store. The list goes on and on. Yeah, we need plastics until materials science produces usable semi-stable alternatives, and maybe we'll never get rid of them entirely, but we can absolutely use fewer of them.
MVissers 2y ago
Thing is- We’re only now starting to realize how bad plastics really are, because we only recently acquired the tech to measure this. Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years? Probably plastic. They found that humans had 3x higher concentration of plastics in their testicles than their pet dogs, and that pet-dogs have a dose-dependent reduction in viable sperm count inversely correlated with the plastic concentration. Have a plaque in your blood vessel body with high plastic concentration? Since this year we know it has a 4x (!!!) increase in a new heart infarct in the next year compared to when there is less plastic. It’s starting to show that it is really bad, and it’s virtually everywhere in our body, most likely causing a ton of issues.

tjpnz 2y ago

Having toddlers I've thrown out multiple larger plastic items over the years - think things like diaper bins and stools. I now look towards the plastic slide they've since grown out of and feel only despair. For some items there are opportunities for donation, but everything else gets walked down to our building's trash room and I fucking hate it. Companies who bring such items into the world should bear some of the responsibility for their disposal and certainly shouldn't get to walk away as they currently do.

robertclaus 2y ago

We have done a lot of work trying to price the societal cost of carbon emissions into the cost of doing business... Why haven't we done the same with things like plastic waste?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Have we? Gas is still only 4 USD per gallon and broadly considered a thing the President controls

siliconc0w 2y ago

If we charged companies the true cost of plastics we'd have a perfectly adequate biodegradable alternatives by now

constantcrying 2y ago

Plastics certainly is one of the most useful materials known to humans. It is incredibly versatile and cheap. Any area of life has been significantly effected by the use of plastics as a material. I think articles like this are laughable, the plastic use of individuals in their daily lives is just a tiny, tiny peak of the iceberg. Beneath there sits an industrial society which could not exist without it. No, you can not live "plastic free". The first and most important questions these people have to ask is: how do you make anything without plastics?

kkfx 2y ago

Few practical observations: - plastic packaging, single use plastic stuff, tend to be mostly needed in cities and cities only. That's simply because in dense cities people keep moving from residential buildings (used less than half a day), to other buildings (offices, commerce etc, also used for less than half a day in mean), in a continuous very short-range commuting, getting continuous non-block-able ads (shop windows), so they tend to eat on the go, buy small stuff they have to carry around etc, also smaller residential emplacements demand small stock at home of anything, so more packaging; - plastic it's not only packaging, large slice of tissues are plastics, menstruation related products are plastic, electricity cables insulation is plastic, windows joint, many plumbing materials, cars tires and many cars elements, ... are all plastic of some kind. So to say: we can't being plastic free on scale, simply because when we was it was another era with less humans on earth and much more resources needed for personal wellbeing even if we have had much less back then. Yes, we can have natural fiber dresses, BUT not for anyone, we can make cars without plastics (almost) but they would be much more expensive and energy consuming and so on. What we can do is AVOIDING living in dense cities, witch is appropriate for many reasons, also to reduce single use plastics. Cities are NOT green at all despite finance capitalism propaganda.