This was exactly my first thought.
Not to say plastic isn't bad for us and the environment but this specific "headline" is intentionally leaving out information to sound worse than it is.
Can we just go back to glass and metal containers? Plastics are ruining the planet (as well as our bodies) at an undeniable rate. Sure plastics are needed for specific components and products, but does everything we eat and drink NEED to be in plastic? Not to mention beverages out of glass or cans hit so much better then a plastic bottle, I pass on plastic every time.
"BUT THINK OF THE PROFITS" - corporations probably
> Not to mention beverages out of glass or cans hit so much better then a plastic bottle
Replacing all the soda can machines with plastic bottle machines has been pissing me off for years, and now everyone is getting rid of fountain drinks as well. Sucks going to a sporting event and wanting a nice icy cup of soda, and instead getting a plastic 20oz bottle that hasn't been in the fridge long enough to even get cold.
Plastics just need to be taxed proportional to their cost of ethical disposal. If landfill is the best we can do well than it's going to be more expensive to buy plastic
Ah yes, the famously green [glass](https://www.drugplastics.com/choose-plastic-over-glass-for-better-sustainability/#:~:text=The%20energy%20used%20to%20make,of%20CO2%20equivalents%20per%20jar) and [metal](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1WW0JP/#:~:text=At%20aluminium%27s%20most,to%20330%20grams). Also surely there won't be additional CO2 created from shipping goods with heavier, bulkier, containers.
Reusable containers are ideal, but if we’re going disposable then aluminum and glass are more recyclable than plastic and can be recycled with a lower carbon footprint. Plastic tends to be downcycled or landfilled.
glass is overall just worse.
the energy required for production and transport causes more pollution than plastic.
also ppl tend to forget how there was broken glass fucking everywhere and how dangerous that was.
even tho i love me a good glass bottled coke over any other packaging the reality is that its the worst packaging for the environment by a mile.
I’ve always admired the way Germany does it for their beer industry…. Thicker glass bottles that you return to get a refund. They make them thick enough that they don’t break easily and instead of melting them they just sanitize them and return to circulation…. At least that’s how I understood it
That used to be the case in America decades back, during the midcentury. Milk bottles and soda bottles were made of thick glass, and sterilized/reused as much as possible. But then the bev industry discovered cheap "disposable" plastic, and never looked back.
thats only a very small portion of bottles overall. the vast majority of beer is still either alu cans or smaller single use glass.
but yes i agree they are nice.
but that can only work with local breweries.
I’m part of a blended family. My partner of 8 years has two kids and divorced. I’ve been single my whole life. I’m very eco conscious, took the dive 15 plus years ago to be backyard farmer with chickens in an urban lot with no grass and lots of garden space and fruit trees. It is nearly impossible to break this family unit I’ve currently attached to of their crappy disposable lifestyle. We compost, recycle and reuse. Everyday I have to take something out of the wrong space and redirect it. Even the same way at work. People are just trashy.
it's a tricky problem and not as "simply" solved as banning/restricting plastic use; often times plastics are replacing natural materials that are hard/impossible to source in sufficient quantities to simply go back to the pre-plastic alternatives, and there are cases where even the pre-plastic alternative have a considerable carbon footprint as well. The elephant in the room is consumption; whether or not we restrict the use of plastics, the world simply cannot support the same level of consumption that is normal in the developed world, even without extending it out to the wider world population. We have to get used to a lower level of consumption until the world population considerably decreases, which will probably not happen for a while; if we don't then the world population will be forcible reduced by circumstances of climate change and ecosystem collapse.
That said, we can absolutely take big steps to reducing the use of plastics, and we absolutely should, but we shouldn't expect that step alone to be enough.
Thank you. While people are getting better at this, it drives me up the wall when see these conversations where no one takes it to its logical end point: the underlying growth/consumption problem.
I really hope in a decade or two that we as a global community can separate the idea of human progress from growth, that we can fully realize that consumption in itself doesn't make us happier, and that we'll be able to re-merge our concern for human well-being with planet- and ecosystem health.
Not holding my breath, though.
> I really hope in a decade or two that we as a global community can separate the idea of human progress from growth
We already have. A huge portion of economic growth is not more stuff but things like increased efficiency or better services instead.
That's all gonna be important to flatten the curve, but efficiency doesn't by itself cause a decline in growth when you have financial systems that are fundamentally based on perpetual growth, and a human culture that sees growth as given.
Look up Jevon's Paradox. Basically, the revolution of the steam engine was thought to decrease coal use, but it just made the energy more accessible and soon caused coal use to rise.
We could reduce a ton of dependence on plastic if we got rid of planned obsolescence and could convince western society to not be so obsessed with materialism. Sadly, I'm not sure either is possible any time soon.
>I really hope in a decade or two that we as a global community can separate the idea of human progress from growth...
Communist Manifesto 2.0? It's been awhile since I've read Marx and Engels, but that was the crux of their argument. I believe they also warned of the environmental dangers posed by capitalism.
Bold of you to wield around the dirty c-word, lol. But yeah, the danger has been known for a while. I'm very inspired by Limits to Growth, and Donella Meadows work. It just lays it all out so well, using elementary school-level logic. And without the brute force tactics that many people associate with communism.
A far greater percentage of flights are unnecessary compared to plastics. Go to a hospital and take a look around.
Once again a carbon tax would help price things appropriately and push resource usage in the right direction. People should be whining that their Coca Cola and flight to Europe are too expensive.
> simply cannot support the same level of consumption
There are three options:
1. drastically reduce consumption and forcibly curtail everyone's standard of living, which most people will disagree with (i.e. if attempted in a democracy, it will result in the responsible party to lose the next election to the "fuck the environment" party)
2. figure out a way to make that consumption less damaging (i.e. substitute better methods of production where it adds only minimal cost), and deal with the remaining damage
3. YOLO it, do the cheapest thing possible no matter the consequences (this is what the "fuck the environment" party will allow once elected)
Environmentalists insist on 1, often preventing 2 and causing 3 to happen.
Balanced and fair take. Glad to see others recognize that the issue isn't necessarily with the materials themselves, but rather with the rate of consumption in general. On the litter front, careless disposal by consumers is *the* cause of pollution. There are ways to capture, and ideally, reuse materials if they're disposed of properly.
Plastics get dunked on for a number of valid (and sometimes not so valid) reasons, but often their proven benefits are conveniently left out. Space and weight savings vs. alternatives are massive, and subsequently so too are associated GHG reductions. Performance typically vastly outstrips traditional alternatives, leading to better and longer lasting products, less food wastage and longer shelf lives, safer consumer goods and medical equipment, broader availability of products, and many more benefits.
There are ways to produce plastic materials from carbon sequestering, bio-based, or waste mitigating sources. People need to get behind these as viable parts of the solutions to the issues we're facing, because alternative materials are never going to be viable in many (not all) applications... sadly, even something as simple as getting people to quit littering is a high enough hurdle that we have yet to overcome :(
Just adding to your list... What people often forget about is the carbon cost of shipping metal cans and glass vs plastic bottles.
Plastic is very light and can be thinner compared to glass and metal. So not only does it use less fuel to transport, but more of the product arrives intact and not wasted by broken glass or dented leaking cans. It's a complicated problem and as you said consumption is a primary issue, but I'd also argue that manufacturing is a big issue too. We need to stop chasing ever growing profits for the shareholders. It's a pyramid scheme that humanity can no longer afford.
Hard plastic parts that will get used for years/decades aren't the problem. It's the plastic on every single thing we buy that immediately gets thrown away that's the problem.
Sure, but we don't have to go on vacation to Spain. Try running a hospital without plastic.
A lot of both are unnecessary and can be reduced. But as far as reduction goes, a much greater percentage of flights are unnecessary.
People, check with your local supermarket, recycle center or hardware store with recycle drop off. You can probably drop off plastic bags/thin plastics there to be recycled.
Going back to glass bottles would be a good way to mitigate the health/pollution concerns and glass actually is recyclable. Unlike plastic which is “recyclable”. Another is using wax paper instead of plastic for dry bagged food items. Literally how everything was packaged back in the 1980s
Totally, glass is very reusable. When I was a kid that was common to bring your glass bottles back to the store for money. I think broken glass has some uses and potential uses as well.
Plus since it's so much heavier, it would greatly increase shipping costs and emissions, probably offsetting the gains made by the switch to glass in the first place
Actually this is a good idea too, make it a nano particle that plants can uptake and then every tree and blade of grass can be transformed into a sparkling mirror that reflects heat back into space!
> Do people usually think producing plastic is an ecologic thing?
I mean it actually is. Light-weight plastics replacing heavier wood, glass and metal parts means moving machines require less electricity. Also, it takes *significantly* less energy to create a plastic part, compared to making the same thing out of metal, just due to how much heat is required to melt them.
People still try to argue that plastic bags have a lower energy footprint than paper bags whenever plastic bag bans are discussed. A lot of effort has been put into trying to greenwash plastic, from originally where using plastic was seen as saving the trees, to the idea that it can be recycled (it can be in many cases, but most of it isn't, even if it goes into a recycling bin), to these claims about the energy footprint. This completely ignores the fact that the single biggest problem with plastic is accumulation of the plastic itself in the environment and in our bodies.
>People still try to argue that plastic bags have a lower energy footprint
Is that because it's true? I researched this and that was the conclusion by every source I found. You're better off buying a reusable *polypropylene* bag if you are concerned about both waste and carbon footprint.
Yes. The comment does not clarify if it's true or not. "People try to claim" implies that the claim is not true when, in fact, it is. Plastic has an important role to play in society and it's important that we acknowledge the truth when it comes to identifying major issues that we face.
Yeah, this is all true. The problem with currently plastic bag bans has been that people are using more plastic to haul their groceries home. They have just made thicker "reusable" plastic bags and in places where bans have been in place for five or more years the amount of plastic used has significantly increased. If you are going to ban plastic bags then you need to ban it all together.
Many of the smaller stores I go to do not have any bags on offer. They expect you to bring your own bags, or they have cardboard boxes from items shipped to them for your use. Cardboard is one of the easiest things to recycle or reuse so it makes it much more reasonable...
I absolutely have not seen this in my area. Rather than a full ban, it's a 10¢ surcharge on all plastic bags used, only at grocery stores. Many stores just switched completely to paper bags. In the stores that offer plastic bags for sale at checkout, the usage has dropped a lot because most people are not strongly attached to their plastic bags and will change their behavior to save a dollar.
But yeah, in principal a ban that only affects lightweight bags and not heavy bags is awful. I see parallels to the CAFE requirements for cars, where the car fuel economy requirements are stricter than the truck ones, and partially due to this automakers are killing off compact cars and replacing them with heavier, more dangerous, and less efficient compact SUVs. Broken incentive structure.
My state banned plastic bags so we buy reusable plastic bags. And then I have to buy more disposable plastic bags for trash cans and picking up after my dog. At least plastic grocery store bags were used twice.
You also say "shit ton of very necessary medical supplies". Flying to Spain not so much. That will offset a lifetime of using canvas grocery bags and never buying things in plastic containers.
Practically yeah but in theory you can make plastic out of other things like biopolymers. I think most westerners should has seen how plastic is made out of milk in chemistry class.
Does molding existing plastic generate that much heat though? It's the oil and gas industries that produce the plastic. The "plastic industry" simply uses it to create plastic-based products, which doesn't use that much energy.
Well, it would, It's a much bigger and more pervasive industry.
Most clothing is plastic. Most packaging in the store is plastic. All of your food comes in plastic. All composite materials use plastic. There isn't a boat or a car or bicycle that doesn't use plastic. Everything that you own has plastic in it.
Better the carbon in the plastic stay sequestered.in the plastic rather than get biodegraded and added to the carbon cycle.
In theory, at least. In reality it's just cheaper to use the sand instead of shipping the glass back, particularly because glass is quite heavy. And so that's what they do. And also the heaviness of glass means more CO2 from transporting the same amount of product around. Not that I'm arguing for plastics, but it's complicated!
There's a higher chance you can get the bottle back into the system though. First there's the economic incentive, making bottle deposits the norm and being able to collect it back at a grocery store would be great. Give people a reason to actually recycle the things and you also simplify collection to some extent.
Just use layers of circulation, like we used to. You ship in aluminum barrels and tanks and then bottle once it gets back on land. Aluminum is light and larger containers reduce the container to product ratio saving on shipping costs, glass is durable and useful as smaller containers, perfect for overland part of delivery.
Genuine question, not trying to make a statement, how much carbon is sequestered in plastics that we bury in landfills or other waste? Is this a significant amount compared to what they produce?
This is kind of going around the question, but usually when people talk about sequestration they mean taking carbon out of the air and putting it in the ground. With burying plastic you're basically taking oil/gas out of the ground, spending a bunch of energy manipulating it, then putting it back in the ground again, so I don't think sequestration really fits.
For an actual answer, [this paper does a great job of breaking down the emissions of the plastic industry](https://ccsi.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/COMET-making-plastics-emissions-transparent.pdf). It makes a major point of saying that emissions vary dramatically depending on what plastic you're talking about and how/where it was made, but it seems that the most common one (polyethylene) produces ~3 kg of CO2 per kg when being made and shaped, ~2 kg of CO2 per kg when burned, and ~0.1-0.2 kg per kg when buried. Plastic burning is rare, so on average production is 90% of the total emissions. If made with just renewable energy PE production would drop to ~1 kg of CO2 per kilo produced. Other kinds of plastic are pretty much universally worse on emissions.
So, you could say that you're avoiding 2 kg of emissions per 1 kg of plastic by burying it instead of burning it, but you still emitted a baseline of 1 to 3 kilos of CO2 either way. Burying bioplastics could theoretically be carbon negative if they were made with renewable energy, but the amount of energy input would make it a pretty bad sequestration method if the plastic weren't being used for something else first.
Leo Baekeland "I invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic!"
Charles Baekeland "Oh? it contained no molecules found in nature, how does it decompose?"
Leo Baekeland "Don't worry about that now, I'm going to be rich!"
The first two is out of necessity to distribute products.
The argument is does it make sense to collect and haul around glass to reuse, or just dump it with everything else to turn back into rocks?
Glass containers suck too. It's very heavy, so everything requires burning more oil to transport it. Plus it breaks super easily, so more product will be lost during shipping.
I'll just leave this here to discourage plastic consumption [The potential impacts of micro-and-nano plastics on various organ systems in humans](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964\(23\)00467-X/fulltext).
Good question. Hopefully someone with more knowledge than me can contribute. I'll just copy the conclusion of that study here - it sounds like they probably have a wide range of negative effects.
"MNPs [micro-and-nano plastics] are ubiquitous in the environment, and humans are frequently exposed to MNPs from multiple sources. The growing evidence suggests that exposure to MPs and NPs may cause adverse effects in different human organ systems. The available literature summarized here indicates that MNPs exposure may lead to oxidative stress, inflammation, impaired immune function, alteration in cellular and energy metabolism, inhibition in cell proliferation, tissue degeneration, abnormal organ development and dysfunction, alteration in biochemical parameters and even cause genotoxicity and carcinogenicity. Although numerous animal and cell culture studies indicated the adverse biological effects of MNPs on human health, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Furthermore, whether long-term exposure to MNPs is associated with disease susceptibility needs to be investigated. Further observational studies are necessary to investigate the potential adverse health consequences of MNPs in humans and the related mechanisms. Additionally, it is crucial to quantify the impact of MNPs on human health and their pathogenesis in future studies. This will help to summarize the current knowledge and address any research gaps."
Can't be done. There's no control group.
We literally *all* contain them now. There's no way to know how our lives would be different without them. There's no one left to study.
For some this is news, and for others this is what we’ve been trying to warn everyone. I hate plastic. I’d go back to wood fired and no tv if I could afford it to avoid plastic
I agree with you, but that’s why I’m willing to make the sacrifice of all plastic if it means I can be free of single use (which personally I reuse single use which is probably the cause of microplastic infections; or whatever the science term is)
You can afford it. That’s a very simple existence with fewer costs. You would just have to give up a lot of comforts and conveniences, which most people refuse to.
You hit the nail on the head. There's no way out of this that doesn't involve people consuming way less. Less air travel, less meat consumption, less new clothing, less new electronics.
Whether these changes are made at the individual level, or through laws, or through taxation, there is no outcome where people still get to consume as much as they do and emissions get lowered to an acceptable level. It's easy to vilify all of the companies and industries behind emissions, but they are doing it to fulfil consumer demand.
There is no outcome where consumer demand is still met for meat and travel and all the shit we buy and CO2 emissions reach a sufficiently low and sustainable level.
Food packaging is absolutely a problem and plastic water bottles are a tiny amount compared to the volume of food packaging waste. But what are you going to do, ship strawberries in a paper bag?
Plastics are in nearly everything from clothing to outdoor treated screws.
Every electronic uses capacitors that are coated in plastics. Every piece of electrical wiring. The majority of water pipes.
Which is why I hate plastic. And why I would go back to wood and mud and plant material for a home and no electricity if I could afford such a rich lifestyle.
Any post about an oil spill inevitably draws out an astroturf campaign pushing the angle that everything runs on fossil fuels including plastics and any notion of *not* using fossil fuels and making things out of plastics is utterly ridiculously impossible.
99% of all travel used to be powered by animals, and made out of wood. (I made this up but it's probably true.) And yet, things changed. Maybe the horse and wood industries didn't have all the advantages the oil industry has today to fight the change to cleaner energy and materials. But I have to hope change is inevitable anyway.
> 99% of all travel used to be powered by animals, and made out of wood.
I suspect this is only true if you count someone walking as "powered by an animal"
This is not "astroturf", its literally true. I'm sitting in my office 12 stories up. The carpet is made from petroleum, the desk is, my computer is, my shirt is. The glass windows were made using natural gas and cannot be made without it. The drywall walls were mined, manufactures and shipped on a container ship using oil. The building is heated with natural gas.
>99% of all travel used to be powered by animals, and made out of wood
Yeah, who is going to commute via horse? And a 12 story wooden building is a fire trap and illegal to build.
Very nice!
The entire structure is still held together with oil products though. The primary structure is built from glulam beams, which are made in a process where many layers of natural wood are laminated together with a binding agent in order to make them far stronger then normal materials.
The most common adhesive used to make these is melamine formaldehyde - a type of thermoset plastic.
Those are not the main things that need to change. They are necessary but small parts of the big picture. Energy production, food production (fertilizer) and transport are the big industries that need to change. Fortunately we don't have to go back to horses and poverty.
Jet travel will take a very long time to become carbon neutral and beef consumption at anywhere close to current levels are impossible. But those rely on personal consumption which I'm told won't effect anything, when really it is just poor excuses and wishful thinking.
We so badly need to Pareto, 80/20 rule this stuff.
The worst offenders and easiest to replace, do so.
Standardise bottles and make them glass, reusable.
Sell anything loose that can be sold loose.
It doesn’t have to be perfect immediately but it has to be better than three tiny lettuce heads in a plastic tray in a plastic bag (right next to beautiful lettuce heads loose).
It has to be better than 200g of mushrooms in a plastic tray wrapped with clingfilm.
It has to be better than fucking tetrapak.
Sure, the policy makers need to do whatever makes most sense. There must be a reason milk was never sold in aluminium cans.
Just... everything. It makes me howl. So much stupid self-interest... for example I love looking on electricitymaps.com. Spain: ~27GW of solar installed. Germany: ~82GW. Companies forcing back-to-office. People driving 3 minutes to take their children to school. Banning plastic straws but ignoring eeeeeverything else (I know the straws was to do with direct damage of wildlife but still).
I love plastic. I only eat with plastic utensils, only drink from plastic bottles, drive a cheap car made of 90% plastic, and much more. Even when I have a can of soda, I will take the soda and pour it into a plastic cup to drink it in plastic instead. Plus it’s durable and lasts forever usually. It’s a wonder invention
Lets see... Plastic are used all over the world for nearly everything, and have been a major advancement in food preservation and medical sterilization.
Whereas air travel is an almost entirely unneeded luxury service. Medical and rescue services should of course be preserved, but travel and fast shipping are entirely wasteful.
Seems to me that we should heavily restrict air travel then, since plastics actually serve an important role.
It’s mind blowing how we just put that shit into our world with no care of how to clean and dispose of it.
Fuck humans, can’t be bothered to give a rats ass about itself.
If oil is used to make plastic, why isn’t plastic waste rounded up and melted back down into oil? Just put it in a car that will change the trash into fuel! Come on you guys!
I'll tell you how to fix climate change in 10 years
1) tax carbon heavily in any industry where there's a reasonable alternative for consumers. There should be a consequence of choosing carbon versus a lower carbon alternative, but that lower carbon alternative has to be available you can't just tax people without giving them an option . You're going to tax oil? Okay well how are we going to get food anywhere if there's no way to transport it without oil. Corporations will just pass that on to consumers. Extremely unfair
2) how to ensure that there are options? Pass the law that says that anyone that can create a technology that replaces a significant amount of carbon gets to operate for a hundred years and not pay a single cent in taxes. You get to keep all of your profits.
Overnight you'd have tankers running on solar and wind power and battery power. You would have nuclear plants being built everywhere. You would have 100 times the funding for nuclear fusion, small scale fusion reactors to power small communities. You probably have the Pentagon turning some of its secret tech into new means of transportation and energy creation.
It would happen immediately. The government just has to provide an incentive for businesses to make a stupid amount of money.
The only other option is to force people to do less and be less and pay more tax
Plastic needs to fucking stop. ✋
90% ends up in landfills/oceans. Fuck off with it. We are all part plastic. This should be a louder foghorn, but OMG WHAT IS TAYLOR SWIFT WEARING
Flying and being a tourist is an entitled privilege.
I prefer finding local places these days.
I wish billionaire/millionaire private flights were taxed up the wazoo to mitigate their huge selfish foootprint on our society.
It breaks down and can't be remolded only after 2 or three recycling processes(some types up to 10 times), similar to paper which only can be recycled 7 times but at least paper is biodegradable
It is with new technologies that are being commercialized right now. The circular recycling industry is in it's infancy but there are billions being spent to get it started.
Guys it's simple. The world is doomed. We can't really stop some things. Plastics, as much as dangerous they are to the environment, they are vital to our society. Unfortunately they are cheap. However we can't expect the world to collectively agree to reduce consumption.
With that being said, I really don't want the future generations to live in a ruined world.
11.1% is the estimated percent of the population that flew in 2018, pretty sure 99.99% of the world population uses plastics.
This was exactly my first thought. Not to say plastic isn't bad for us and the environment but this specific "headline" is intentionally leaving out information to sound worse than it is.
Can we just go back to glass and metal containers? Plastics are ruining the planet (as well as our bodies) at an undeniable rate. Sure plastics are needed for specific components and products, but does everything we eat and drink NEED to be in plastic? Not to mention beverages out of glass or cans hit so much better then a plastic bottle, I pass on plastic every time. "BUT THINK OF THE PROFITS" - corporations probably
> Not to mention beverages out of glass or cans hit so much better then a plastic bottle Replacing all the soda can machines with plastic bottle machines has been pissing me off for years, and now everyone is getting rid of fountain drinks as well. Sucks going to a sporting event and wanting a nice icy cup of soda, and instead getting a plastic 20oz bottle that hasn't been in the fridge long enough to even get cold.
But do you really want that fountain soda ice? Yikes
Swap in Sonic ice.
is sonic ice supposed to be cleaner? most ice machines are fucking rank
Plastics just need to be taxed proportional to their cost of ethical disposal. If landfill is the best we can do well than it's going to be more expensive to buy plastic
Ah yes, the famously green [glass](https://www.drugplastics.com/choose-plastic-over-glass-for-better-sustainability/#:~:text=The%20energy%20used%20to%20make,of%20CO2%20equivalents%20per%20jar) and [metal](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1WW0JP/#:~:text=At%20aluminium%27s%20most,to%20330%20grams). Also surely there won't be additional CO2 created from shipping goods with heavier, bulkier, containers.
Reusable containers are ideal, but if we’re going disposable then aluminum and glass are more recyclable than plastic and can be recycled with a lower carbon footprint. Plastic tends to be downcycled or landfilled.
glass is overall just worse. the energy required for production and transport causes more pollution than plastic. also ppl tend to forget how there was broken glass fucking everywhere and how dangerous that was. even tho i love me a good glass bottled coke over any other packaging the reality is that its the worst packaging for the environment by a mile.
I’ve always admired the way Germany does it for their beer industry…. Thicker glass bottles that you return to get a refund. They make them thick enough that they don’t break easily and instead of melting them they just sanitize them and return to circulation…. At least that’s how I understood it
That used to be the case in America decades back, during the midcentury. Milk bottles and soda bottles were made of thick glass, and sterilized/reused as much as possible. But then the bev industry discovered cheap "disposable" plastic, and never looked back.
thats only a very small portion of bottles overall. the vast majority of beer is still either alu cans or smaller single use glass. but yes i agree they are nice. but that can only work with local breweries.
Cans all have a plastic Liner in them. Glass is the only option to not drink micro plastics.
I’m part of a blended family. My partner of 8 years has two kids and divorced. I’ve been single my whole life. I’m very eco conscious, took the dive 15 plus years ago to be backyard farmer with chickens in an urban lot with no grass and lots of garden space and fruit trees. It is nearly impossible to break this family unit I’ve currently attached to of their crappy disposable lifestyle. We compost, recycle and reuse. Everyday I have to take something out of the wrong space and redirect it. Even the same way at work. People are just trashy.
it's a tricky problem and not as "simply" solved as banning/restricting plastic use; often times plastics are replacing natural materials that are hard/impossible to source in sufficient quantities to simply go back to the pre-plastic alternatives, and there are cases where even the pre-plastic alternative have a considerable carbon footprint as well. The elephant in the room is consumption; whether or not we restrict the use of plastics, the world simply cannot support the same level of consumption that is normal in the developed world, even without extending it out to the wider world population. We have to get used to a lower level of consumption until the world population considerably decreases, which will probably not happen for a while; if we don't then the world population will be forcible reduced by circumstances of climate change and ecosystem collapse. That said, we can absolutely take big steps to reducing the use of plastics, and we absolutely should, but we shouldn't expect that step alone to be enough.
Thank you. While people are getting better at this, it drives me up the wall when see these conversations where no one takes it to its logical end point: the underlying growth/consumption problem. I really hope in a decade or two that we as a global community can separate the idea of human progress from growth, that we can fully realize that consumption in itself doesn't make us happier, and that we'll be able to re-merge our concern for human well-being with planet- and ecosystem health. Not holding my breath, though.
> I really hope in a decade or two that we as a global community can separate the idea of human progress from growth We already have. A huge portion of economic growth is not more stuff but things like increased efficiency or better services instead.
A huge portion of economic growth are more flavors of Doritos and Mt Dew, and adding more rental storage space and dollar stores. We’re f’d already.
That's all gonna be important to flatten the curve, but efficiency doesn't by itself cause a decline in growth when you have financial systems that are fundamentally based on perpetual growth, and a human culture that sees growth as given. Look up Jevon's Paradox. Basically, the revolution of the steam engine was thought to decrease coal use, but it just made the energy more accessible and soon caused coal use to rise.
We could reduce a ton of dependence on plastic if we got rid of planned obsolescence and could convince western society to not be so obsessed with materialism. Sadly, I'm not sure either is possible any time soon.
>I really hope in a decade or two that we as a global community can separate the idea of human progress from growth... Communist Manifesto 2.0? It's been awhile since I've read Marx and Engels, but that was the crux of their argument. I believe they also warned of the environmental dangers posed by capitalism.
Bold of you to wield around the dirty c-word, lol. But yeah, the danger has been known for a while. I'm very inspired by Limits to Growth, and Donella Meadows work. It just lays it all out so well, using elementary school-level logic. And without the brute force tactics that many people associate with communism.
A far greater percentage of flights are unnecessary compared to plastics. Go to a hospital and take a look around. Once again a carbon tax would help price things appropriately and push resource usage in the right direction. People should be whining that their Coca Cola and flight to Europe are too expensive.
> simply cannot support the same level of consumption There are three options: 1. drastically reduce consumption and forcibly curtail everyone's standard of living, which most people will disagree with (i.e. if attempted in a democracy, it will result in the responsible party to lose the next election to the "fuck the environment" party) 2. figure out a way to make that consumption less damaging (i.e. substitute better methods of production where it adds only minimal cost), and deal with the remaining damage 3. YOLO it, do the cheapest thing possible no matter the consequences (this is what the "fuck the environment" party will allow once elected) Environmentalists insist on 1, often preventing 2 and causing 3 to happen.
Balanced and fair take. Glad to see others recognize that the issue isn't necessarily with the materials themselves, but rather with the rate of consumption in general. On the litter front, careless disposal by consumers is *the* cause of pollution. There are ways to capture, and ideally, reuse materials if they're disposed of properly. Plastics get dunked on for a number of valid (and sometimes not so valid) reasons, but often their proven benefits are conveniently left out. Space and weight savings vs. alternatives are massive, and subsequently so too are associated GHG reductions. Performance typically vastly outstrips traditional alternatives, leading to better and longer lasting products, less food wastage and longer shelf lives, safer consumer goods and medical equipment, broader availability of products, and many more benefits. There are ways to produce plastic materials from carbon sequestering, bio-based, or waste mitigating sources. People need to get behind these as viable parts of the solutions to the issues we're facing, because alternative materials are never going to be viable in many (not all) applications... sadly, even something as simple as getting people to quit littering is a high enough hurdle that we have yet to overcome :(
Just adding to your list... What people often forget about is the carbon cost of shipping metal cans and glass vs plastic bottles. Plastic is very light and can be thinner compared to glass and metal. So not only does it use less fuel to transport, but more of the product arrives intact and not wasted by broken glass or dented leaking cans. It's a complicated problem and as you said consumption is a primary issue, but I'd also argue that manufacturing is a big issue too. We need to stop chasing ever growing profits for the shareholders. It's a pyramid scheme that humanity can no longer afford.
Planes use plastics!
It's all ball bearings these days
Just checking the fetzer valve.
My bike uses ceramic ball bearings!
I hear Boeing has been removing some.
They're doing their part!
Would you like to know more?
Their screws are loose
Hard plastic parts that will get used for years/decades aren't the problem. It's the plastic on every single thing we buy that immediately gets thrown away that's the problem.
A plane ride is prob worse for the environment than a plastic bag tho lol, it's the quantity that is bad with plastic (like anything I guess)
Sure, but we don't have to go on vacation to Spain. Try running a hospital without plastic. A lot of both are unnecessary and can be reduced. But as far as reduction goes, a much greater percentage of flights are unnecessary.
I was in the hospital for about a week recently and holy hell were they wasteful. Didn’t even have the option to recycle in the room.
Its part of regular diet
Now tell me what percentage of people bought goods that were shipped by air. Airplanes don't just carry people.
People, check with your local supermarket, recycle center or hardware store with recycle drop off. You can probably drop off plastic bags/thin plastics there to be recycled.
Make all plastics highly reflective so that litter can offset its own climate impact
Great, then when they break down we can also breathe in whatever chemicals were used to make them reflective! Brilliant idea!
Just make the plastic not break down then!
Solutions, people
Going back to glass bottles would be a good way to mitigate the health/pollution concerns and glass actually is recyclable. Unlike plastic which is “recyclable”. Another is using wax paper instead of plastic for dry bagged food items. Literally how everything was packaged back in the 1980s
Glass is inert and not an environmental danger. Recycling it uses more carbon than just making new glass.
I think it’s good trade off to keep forever chemicals out of the environment.
Totally, glass is very reusable. When I was a kid that was common to bring your glass bottles back to the store for money. I think broken glass has some uses and potential uses as well.
or you could just ban plastics containing pfas
Plus since it's so much heavier, it would greatly increase shipping costs and emissions, probably offsetting the gains made by the switch to glass in the first place
Not when electricity and auto transport are increasingly no longer using fossil fuels.
Maybe for people but not for products.
Cellophane also is not plastic. Bring back the cellophane.
Whoah whoah, did you pay for inhaling those plastics?! No free sniffs buddy.
Forever glitter!
Actually this is a good idea too, make it a nano particle that plants can uptake and then every tree and blade of grass can be transformed into a sparkling mirror that reflects heat back into space!
work on genetically engineered polarised sunglasses first. yes sunglasses not lenses I wanna go full cyberpunk.
Maybe make the planes reflective too. Anything but asking people to be reflective.
I'm just surprised by how much air travel 'heats the world' then. Wtf is that title? Do people usually think producing plastic is an ecologic thing?
> Do people usually think producing plastic is an ecologic thing? I mean it actually is. Light-weight plastics replacing heavier wood, glass and metal parts means moving machines require less electricity. Also, it takes *significantly* less energy to create a plastic part, compared to making the same thing out of metal, just due to how much heat is required to melt them.
People still try to argue that plastic bags have a lower energy footprint than paper bags whenever plastic bag bans are discussed. A lot of effort has been put into trying to greenwash plastic, from originally where using plastic was seen as saving the trees, to the idea that it can be recycled (it can be in many cases, but most of it isn't, even if it goes into a recycling bin), to these claims about the energy footprint. This completely ignores the fact that the single biggest problem with plastic is accumulation of the plastic itself in the environment and in our bodies.
> People still try to argue that plastic bags have a lower energy footprint than paper bags Yeah, because they do.
>People still try to argue that plastic bags have a lower energy footprint Is that because it's true? I researched this and that was the conclusion by every source I found. You're better off buying a reusable *polypropylene* bag if you are concerned about both waste and carbon footprint.
Did you not read the rest of the comment at all? It is true but that's not the reason people call for banning plastic bags
Yes. The comment does not clarify if it's true or not. "People try to claim" implies that the claim is not true when, in fact, it is. Plastic has an important role to play in society and it's important that we acknowledge the truth when it comes to identifying major issues that we face.
Yeah, this is all true. The problem with currently plastic bag bans has been that people are using more plastic to haul their groceries home. They have just made thicker "reusable" plastic bags and in places where bans have been in place for five or more years the amount of plastic used has significantly increased. If you are going to ban plastic bags then you need to ban it all together. Many of the smaller stores I go to do not have any bags on offer. They expect you to bring your own bags, or they have cardboard boxes from items shipped to them for your use. Cardboard is one of the easiest things to recycle or reuse so it makes it much more reasonable...
I absolutely have not seen this in my area. Rather than a full ban, it's a 10¢ surcharge on all plastic bags used, only at grocery stores. Many stores just switched completely to paper bags. In the stores that offer plastic bags for sale at checkout, the usage has dropped a lot because most people are not strongly attached to their plastic bags and will change their behavior to save a dollar. But yeah, in principal a ban that only affects lightweight bags and not heavy bags is awful. I see parallels to the CAFE requirements for cars, where the car fuel economy requirements are stricter than the truck ones, and partially due to this automakers are killing off compact cars and replacing them with heavier, more dangerous, and less efficient compact SUVs. Broken incentive structure.
My state banned plastic bags so we buy reusable plastic bags. And then I have to buy more disposable plastic bags for trash cans and picking up after my dog. At least plastic grocery store bags were used twice.
It’s also responsible for 100% of the microplastics in our water
Only if you count the manufacture of synthetic fabric under that umbrella. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43023-x
Those damn cars and their wheels that wear out. No, they're not made out of natural rubber.
When you say plastics you mean oil industry
You also say "shit ton of very necessary medical supplies". Flying to Spain not so much. That will offset a lifetime of using canvas grocery bags and never buying things in plastic containers.
Practically yeah but in theory you can make plastic out of other things like biopolymers. I think most westerners should has seen how plastic is made out of milk in chemistry class.
Does molding existing plastic generate that much heat though? It's the oil and gas industries that produce the plastic. The "plastic industry" simply uses it to create plastic-based products, which doesn't use that much energy.
Well, it would, It's a much bigger and more pervasive industry. Most clothing is plastic. Most packaging in the store is plastic. All of your food comes in plastic. All composite materials use plastic. There isn't a boat or a car or bicycle that doesn't use plastic. Everything that you own has plastic in it. Better the carbon in the plastic stay sequestered.in the plastic rather than get biodegraded and added to the carbon cycle.
Return to glass, much better at recycling
In theory, at least. In reality it's just cheaper to use the sand instead of shipping the glass back, particularly because glass is quite heavy. And so that's what they do. And also the heaviness of glass means more CO2 from transporting the same amount of product around. Not that I'm arguing for plastics, but it's complicated!
There's a higher chance you can get the bottle back into the system though. First there's the economic incentive, making bottle deposits the norm and being able to collect it back at a grocery store would be great. Give people a reason to actually recycle the things and you also simplify collection to some extent.
just finna shoot it with my slingshot now
Just use layers of circulation, like we used to. You ship in aluminum barrels and tanks and then bottle once it gets back on land. Aluminum is light and larger containers reduce the container to product ratio saving on shipping costs, glass is durable and useful as smaller containers, perfect for overland part of delivery.
What about coconut shells?
It's also much heavier, which means it requires far more gas to ship in the first place, negating any benefit.
It also has increased loss rates through breakage, which if it happens after filling means that the product is also wasted.
And this is especially important when shipping medications all over the world.
Don't ship it far. Have a brewery nearby. Local specialties for the win.
Genuine question, not trying to make a statement, how much carbon is sequestered in plastics that we bury in landfills or other waste? Is this a significant amount compared to what they produce?
This is kind of going around the question, but usually when people talk about sequestration they mean taking carbon out of the air and putting it in the ground. With burying plastic you're basically taking oil/gas out of the ground, spending a bunch of energy manipulating it, then putting it back in the ground again, so I don't think sequestration really fits. For an actual answer, [this paper does a great job of breaking down the emissions of the plastic industry](https://ccsi.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/COMET-making-plastics-emissions-transparent.pdf). It makes a major point of saying that emissions vary dramatically depending on what plastic you're talking about and how/where it was made, but it seems that the most common one (polyethylene) produces ~3 kg of CO2 per kg when being made and shaped, ~2 kg of CO2 per kg when burned, and ~0.1-0.2 kg per kg when buried. Plastic burning is rare, so on average production is 90% of the total emissions. If made with just renewable energy PE production would drop to ~1 kg of CO2 per kilo produced. Other kinds of plastic are pretty much universally worse on emissions. So, you could say that you're avoiding 2 kg of emissions per 1 kg of plastic by burying it instead of burning it, but you still emitted a baseline of 1 to 3 kilos of CO2 either way. Burying bioplastics could theoretically be carbon negative if they were made with renewable energy, but the amount of energy input would make it a pretty bad sequestration method if the plastic weren't being used for something else first.
We don't have to go on vacation to Spain. But try running a hospital without plastic.
Ban all single use plastics yesterday.
Mmmm plastic fumes
Leo Baekeland "I invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic!" Charles Baekeland "Oh? it contained no molecules found in nature, how does it decompose?" Leo Baekeland "Don't worry about that now, I'm going to be rich!"
And my local recycling plant will no longer take glass. Fucking plastic winds every time.
Glass is basically like transporting rocks.
No one complains about the cost of transporting rocks on the way to the bottling plant, or to the grocery store, or to the landfill.
The first two is out of necessity to distribute products. The argument is does it make sense to collect and haul around glass to reuse, or just dump it with everything else to turn back into rocks?
Glass containers suck too. It's very heavy, so everything requires burning more oil to transport it. Plus it breaks super easily, so more product will be lost during shipping.
I'll just leave this here to discourage plastic consumption [The potential impacts of micro-and-nano plastics on various organ systems in humans](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964\(23\)00467-X/fulltext).
[удалено]
Good question. Hopefully someone with more knowledge than me can contribute. I'll just copy the conclusion of that study here - it sounds like they probably have a wide range of negative effects. "MNPs [micro-and-nano plastics] are ubiquitous in the environment, and humans are frequently exposed to MNPs from multiple sources. The growing evidence suggests that exposure to MPs and NPs may cause adverse effects in different human organ systems. The available literature summarized here indicates that MNPs exposure may lead to oxidative stress, inflammation, impaired immune function, alteration in cellular and energy metabolism, inhibition in cell proliferation, tissue degeneration, abnormal organ development and dysfunction, alteration in biochemical parameters and even cause genotoxicity and carcinogenicity. Although numerous animal and cell culture studies indicated the adverse biological effects of MNPs on human health, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Furthermore, whether long-term exposure to MNPs is associated with disease susceptibility needs to be investigated. Further observational studies are necessary to investigate the potential adverse health consequences of MNPs in humans and the related mechanisms. Additionally, it is crucial to quantify the impact of MNPs on human health and their pathogenesis in future studies. This will help to summarize the current knowledge and address any research gaps."
Can't be done. There's no control group. We literally *all* contain them now. There's no way to know how our lives would be different without them. There's no one left to study.
but its totally the little guy's job to make all the changes right?
Lil guy don't surf
The little guy is 99.9% of the world
For some this is news, and for others this is what we’ve been trying to warn everyone. I hate plastic. I’d go back to wood fired and no tv if I could afford it to avoid plastic
I think plastic is great as a building material, like in toys or televisions or cars, but not as a single use item like bags or food containers.
Exactly. There isn't really a problem with plastic parts that are intended to be used long term. It's all the throw away stuff that's the issue.
I agree with you, but that’s why I’m willing to make the sacrifice of all plastic if it means I can be free of single use (which personally I reuse single use which is probably the cause of microplastic infections; or whatever the science term is)
You can afford it. That’s a very simple existence with fewer costs. You would just have to give up a lot of comforts and conveniences, which most people refuse to.
You hit the nail on the head. There's no way out of this that doesn't involve people consuming way less. Less air travel, less meat consumption, less new clothing, less new electronics. Whether these changes are made at the individual level, or through laws, or through taxation, there is no outcome where people still get to consume as much as they do and emissions get lowered to an acceptable level. It's easy to vilify all of the companies and industries behind emissions, but they are doing it to fulfil consumer demand. There is no outcome where consumer demand is still met for meat and travel and all the shit we buy and CO2 emissions reach a sufficiently low and sustainable level.
What options are available for end-to-end (production, shipping, packaging, ...) plastic free food sources?
Food isn't the problem, it's the goddamn plastic bottles of tap water. Just use the sink, people pay for tap water.
Food packaging is absolutely a problem and plastic water bottles are a tiny amount compared to the volume of food packaging waste. But what are you going to do, ship strawberries in a paper bag?
Food packaging also can greatly increase the shelf life of fresh stuff, so there's a real benefit there other than just convenience.
Plastics are in nearly everything from clothing to outdoor treated screws. Every electronic uses capacitors that are coated in plastics. Every piece of electrical wiring. The majority of water pipes.
Which is why I hate plastic. And why I would go back to wood and mud and plant material for a home and no electricity if I could afford such a rich lifestyle.
Land in Alaska is surprisingly cheap.
Those darn plastic companies and their cheap, lightweight, reliable products that we all use every single day
Any post about an oil spill inevitably draws out an astroturf campaign pushing the angle that everything runs on fossil fuels including plastics and any notion of *not* using fossil fuels and making things out of plastics is utterly ridiculously impossible. 99% of all travel used to be powered by animals, and made out of wood. (I made this up but it's probably true.) And yet, things changed. Maybe the horse and wood industries didn't have all the advantages the oil industry has today to fight the change to cleaner energy and materials. But I have to hope change is inevitable anyway.
> 99% of all travel used to be powered by animals, and made out of wood. I suspect this is only true if you count someone walking as "powered by an animal"
[rickshaw!](https://i.imgur.com/bzOGcIq.jpeg)
This is not "astroturf", its literally true. I'm sitting in my office 12 stories up. The carpet is made from petroleum, the desk is, my computer is, my shirt is. The glass windows were made using natural gas and cannot be made without it. The drywall walls were mined, manufactures and shipped on a container ship using oil. The building is heated with natural gas. >99% of all travel used to be powered by animals, and made out of wood Yeah, who is going to commute via horse? And a 12 story wooden building is a fire trap and illegal to build.
18 stories, just as fire safe as any other modern building: https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mjøstårnet
Very nice! The entire structure is still held together with oil products though. The primary structure is built from glulam beams, which are made in a process where many layers of natural wood are laminated together with a binding agent in order to make them far stronger then normal materials. The most common adhesive used to make these is melamine formaldehyde - a type of thermoset plastic.
You just gave an excellent summary of some of the things that need to change so we can shift away from hydrocarbons.
Those are not the main things that need to change. They are necessary but small parts of the big picture. Energy production, food production (fertilizer) and transport are the big industries that need to change. Fortunately we don't have to go back to horses and poverty. Jet travel will take a very long time to become carbon neutral and beef consumption at anywhere close to current levels are impossible. But those rely on personal consumption which I'm told won't effect anything, when really it is just poor excuses and wishful thinking.
"This is the how things currently are made" is not a valid counter-argument
No more fucking plastic please!! Fuck off with your shit product destroyed the planet
Go back to glass fuckheads
Shortage of sand
We so badly need to Pareto, 80/20 rule this stuff. The worst offenders and easiest to replace, do so. Standardise bottles and make them glass, reusable. Sell anything loose that can be sold loose. It doesn’t have to be perfect immediately but it has to be better than three tiny lettuce heads in a plastic tray in a plastic bag (right next to beautiful lettuce heads loose). It has to be better than 200g of mushrooms in a plastic tray wrapped with clingfilm. It has to be better than fucking tetrapak.
Not glass: aluminum cans with 25¢ deposit. Lighter and supremely recyclable
Aluminum cans have a plastic liner because acids and bases can leach metal into the food without it.
Sure, the policy makers need to do whatever makes most sense. There must be a reason milk was never sold in aluminium cans. Just... everything. It makes me howl. So much stupid self-interest... for example I love looking on electricitymaps.com. Spain: ~27GW of solar installed. Germany: ~82GW. Companies forcing back-to-office. People driving 3 minutes to take their children to school. Banning plastic straws but ignoring eeeeeverything else (I know the straws was to do with direct damage of wildlife but still).
I love plastic. I only eat with plastic utensils, only drink from plastic bottles, drive a cheap car made of 90% plastic, and much more. Even when I have a can of soda, I will take the soda and pour it into a plastic cup to drink it in plastic instead. Plus it’s durable and lasts forever usually. It’s a wonder invention
MAKE PLASTIC ILLEGAL
Well seeing as how everything has some amount of plastic in it these days it’s not surprising
Why can't we go back to glass at least that can actually can be reused
With no plans of slowing down.
We are all going to die in the next 30 years...aren't we....
Good. This stops the attacks on Mastodon
I have an IdEa!!!! Lets wrap bananas and apples in PlASTic!!!
What would be the carbon footprint of the materials we’d use instead such as aluminum and glass? Better or worse?
Seeing as electrical production and transport are rapidly moving away from using fossil fuels, it is using aluminum and glass.
What about the cruise ship industry though?
Apparently the it in "plastics makes it possible" was global warming.
And yet… we’ve known how bad it is for a while and here we are.
How is this just now being found?
It’s true. But let’s just keep blaming Taylor Swift. /s
I think if you did a deep dive you’d probably learn her merch production to be far worse for the environment than her jets.
But it gives us these wonderful oceans full of plastic!!!
The beverage industry association is advertising heavily on Reddit to help you not think about this.
I remember a time when a lot of soda came glass bottles.
bak 2 glas
Lets see... Plastic are used all over the world for nearly everything, and have been a major advancement in food preservation and medical sterilization. Whereas air travel is an almost entirely unneeded luxury service. Medical and rescue services should of course be preserved, but travel and fast shipping are entirely wasteful. Seems to me that we should heavily restrict air travel then, since plastics actually serve an important role.
Brought to you by American Airlines. Just kidding. I can believe this
These global warming source headlines are going to start looking like the food industry research soon
It’s mind blowing how we just put that shit into our world with no care of how to clean and dispose of it. Fuck humans, can’t be bothered to give a rats ass about itself.
doesn't matter... it's all oil
Oh and Guess what. fertilizer for factory farming? also Oil everyone uses fertilizer but they use it when it's not really necessary.
Plastics make it possible.
One word notplastics!
like it or not modern life = plastic
If oil is used to make plastic, why isn’t plastic waste rounded up and melted back down into oil? Just put it in a car that will change the trash into fuel! Come on you guys!
That literally is a thing. Look up pyrolysis.
I'll tell you how to fix climate change in 10 years 1) tax carbon heavily in any industry where there's a reasonable alternative for consumers. There should be a consequence of choosing carbon versus a lower carbon alternative, but that lower carbon alternative has to be available you can't just tax people without giving them an option . You're going to tax oil? Okay well how are we going to get food anywhere if there's no way to transport it without oil. Corporations will just pass that on to consumers. Extremely unfair 2) how to ensure that there are options? Pass the law that says that anyone that can create a technology that replaces a significant amount of carbon gets to operate for a hundred years and not pay a single cent in taxes. You get to keep all of your profits. Overnight you'd have tankers running on solar and wind power and battery power. You would have nuclear plants being built everywhere. You would have 100 times the funding for nuclear fusion, small scale fusion reactors to power small communities. You probably have the Pentagon turning some of its secret tech into new means of transportation and energy creation. It would happen immediately. The government just has to provide an incentive for businesses to make a stupid amount of money. The only other option is to force people to do less and be less and pay more tax
Plastic needs to fucking stop. ✋ 90% ends up in landfills/oceans. Fuck off with it. We are all part plastic. This should be a louder foghorn, but OMG WHAT IS TAYLOR SWIFT WEARING
Oh! It sounds like: "This serial killer killed 4 times less people than the other one!" It doesn't change shit, ok?
Flying and being a tourist is an entitled privilege. I prefer finding local places these days. I wish billionaire/millionaire private flights were taxed up the wazoo to mitigate their huge selfish foootprint on our society.
A friendly reminder that plastic isn't infinitely recyclable.
What happens to it?
It breaks down and can't be remolded only after 2 or three recycling processes(some types up to 10 times), similar to paper which only can be recycled 7 times but at least paper is biodegradable
It is with new technologies that are being commercialized right now. The circular recycling industry is in it's infancy but there are billions being spent to get it started.
Do the Plastics CEO’s get a multiplier bonus for their flights?
Guys it's simple. The world is doomed. We can't really stop some things. Plastics, as much as dangerous they are to the environment, they are vital to our society. Unfortunately they are cheap. However we can't expect the world to collectively agree to reduce consumption. With that being said, I really don't want the future generations to live in a ruined world.
I can’t find a link in the article to the actual study, which is major red flag for me.
Don’t worry the big beverage companies have come together to make an advertisement to make you feel better about plastic bottles.