New recycling discoveries for plastics is good news, but at the same time I feel that people and specially governments should be promoting the old 3R or the 9R framework (Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, Recycle and Recover)
It seems people forget that _recycling is and should be the last thing_ we do with objects/materials that we don't use anymore, it requires energy to create a new object and at the same time recycling materials doesn't always recover 100% of the original materials.
Cardboard recycling seems fairly successful (and perhaps Amazon boxes are already returned directly to Amazon?), but it does seem like there has to be a better way.
Amazon eventually realized that boxed returns were inefficient and implemented unboxed returns via UPS stores.
It seems like unboxed delivery to a store or locker would also be more efficient, but for customers it's less convenient than front-door delivery.
Perhaps delivery workers could also collect reusable Amazon boxes while making deliveries.
Cardboard refuse is environmentally benign. It's wood fibre (and a few other bits) which break down in nature, usually within a few weeks or months at most.
Plastic refuse persists for hundreds to thousands of years, and is itself biologically active, often interfering with endocrine or other bodily signalling functions, if not other long-term chronic poisoning, or sheer physical blockage.
Cardboard sourcing of course has environmental impacts through deforestation, monoculture, and land-use impacts. That's another story.
The thing is that the 3Rs/9Rs are basically anti-comsumerist / anti-capitalist, and as such can’t gain traction in our current system. The system wants you to buy a new widget, not to reuse or repair your old one.
The current recycling paradigm has been an obvious failure of catastrophic proportions.
What is needed is not new recycling processes, but a government that is not beholden to plastics industry lobbying. Can we have a new process for good government too, please?
The problem isn’t that governments are beholden to the plastics lobby; this is more of a ‘bootleggers and baptists’ situation where most people like plastics because they’re cost-effective, and ‘recycling’ lowers their perceived environmental costs
the price of plastics that we pay is not the TRUE cost in my opinion. The solution would be to address this. Then i bet you plastic won’t look as competitive anymore…
For example, are plastic producers mandated to pay for plastic cleanup efforts? No. Well…why not? All the garbage ends up in the ocean and then destroys the food chain slowly. And then new companies like the “ocean cleanup project” have to scrape by and beg for donations to fund their ocean and river cleanup efforts.
Increased plastic prices would also encourage research into alternatives.
Which is what cities tell you to do (Seattle is relatively specific about what kinds of plastic to put in the landfill vs to recycle), but that makes it complicated for consumers.
I went deep sea fishing in Mexico a few years back, and the number of water bottles floating out in the ocean was very alarming. That’s not fishing industry waste, it’s definitely consumer plastics, and it was the only visible waste.
Water bottles floating in the ocean definitely sounds like fishing industry waste. Or whoever is boating and just chucking bottles off the side. I mean think of consumer recycling; only a little fraction of it is probably plastic bottles yet thats all you see in the ocean? Seems hard to believe. There are people who go out and collect seaglass, an industry that exist because boaters throw just that many green brown or blue bottles of beer off the side of the boat to lead to appreciable yields on shore.
No, you’re misunderstanding the scale and making assumptions. It’s widely reported and well known that water bottles polluting the ocean is coming from consumer goods - the volume of plastic trash in the ocean is far far bigger than the entire fishing and all boating industries combined globally. https://plasticoceans.org/the-facts/
The amount of plastic produced, shipped, and dumped is simply staggering. You can ship 99.9 pct of it to SE Asia and still have enough to pollute all the beaches and snorkelling areas at alarming levels.
> In a 2014 study researchers sampled 1571 locations throughout the world's oceans and determined that discarded fishing gear such as buoys, lines and nets accounted for more than 60% of the mass of plastic marine debris.
I live on an ocean front property in Nova Scotia, and spend an inordinate amount of time at the waters edge. And there is massive amounts of plastic washing up, and a lot of it is not from here, its mericun plastic.
The major current (gulf stream) brings it from the US, everything, and I mean everything that will float, and some that doesn't.
I have a growing collection, of, hats, just the nice ones mind, and as anything that has spent days, weeks ,or years in the ocean, is more ir less sterilised, I am happy to keep, pass on, or use.My favorite pillow case, which started of as a lucky find, used to bring MORE, treasures home
is just one thing amongst many.
That does not mean that I dont find eagle feathers, agates, fossils, perfect walking sticks
stripped, sharpened, and lost by beavers, but there is a lot of plastic and sundry junk.
Some of the plastic is admitedly beautiful, fragments of lost toys, polished and worn smooth
by the wind, waves, and sand.
And historical plastic, mint shape, that must have been dumped, burried somewhere and then floated anew, and washing up now.
that’s true. But IMO it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. once it’s in the ocean it travels and affects everyone eventually.
Having people in north america pay less for plastic just because we do a better job not throwing it out isn’t fair either. That would basically be north america “outsourcing” our problems to the poorer countries that don’t yet have the infrastructure in place to properly deal with garbage.
Much of Europe seems to do fine orienting their consumption and recycling around glass (including wash+reuse). I was surprised I didn’t even see aluminum recycling because it was so rare to see a can.
most plastic i see daily is completely unnecessary. it’s simply cost savings for the manufacturer.
I’m all for using plastic where it actually makes the product better. Like a silicone spatula for example, or in medical industry where plastics are used to keep needles, etc sterile.
Is society vastly better compared to 50 years ago? No not really, aside from improved vehicle safety and a few other tech improvements. Yet plastics were used SO much less back then. Maybe i’m missing something.
I think what is missing is the assumption that the replacement product would be better for the environment. Like before we had plastic crap we had steel products. And we know very well the damage that industry causes back when we had a local steel industry polluting the rust bet cities for decades. Maybe you use wood well a lot of the wood they used back then wasn’t really sustainably harvested either.
What we are left with is plastic. Cheap yes but also perhaps the least bad of the other things.
As long as we engage in rampant consumerism we will run into similar rampant consumerism issues no matter the materials used.
Banning plastic for unnecessary goods may rein in consumerism a bit. Consider cheap plastic toys. Without plastic, those toys would cost more, and people would buy fewer of them. I doubt the priciness would cause real harm poorer families, considering how manufacturing has lowered the price of even wooden toys so much. Plus so many stores sell used toys.
I'd only worry about the affect of a plastic restriction on food prices. But, again, it might be a blessing in disguise by steering people towards fresh produce and meat.
I feel like size of the home is the limiting factor more than anything. Before plastic funkos it was little ceramic cherubs grandma was filling all the available shelving with.
This is a bit racist imo, or at the least lacking empathy.
It’s a systems problem. Sounds like you (like me) grew up in the 1st world where your country has the proper trash infrastructure. Additionally, the government and schools provided the basic education about why littering is harmful, and society at large understands it in your country. That’s great.
Just because we grew up with this knowledge ingrained into us doesn’t make us “better” people, or better than a filipino person.
Some poor countries have poor trash infrastructure, and they do a poor job teaching the ills of littering to their people. That’s unfortunate, but doesn’t make us “better” than them imo. It just means they are poor and uneducated on certain topics.
Now to answer your actual question, why should someone in oklahoma pay more. I don’t think it’s ethical or even fair for someone in oklahoma to pay LESS for plastic simply because they do a better job throwing out their trash. Cheap prices for plastic encourage additional plastic use. And additional plastic use means more and more plastic will be entering rivers and oceans around the world, which affects ALL of us, including the person in oklahoma. Plastics enter the food chain, via fish eating them, and even through rainfall once they become microplastic in size. Basically, i’m arguing that “outsourcing” the issue to poor countries won’t solve the problem and is just pushing a cost burden onto already poor countries.
A proper solution IMO would discourage plastic production globally, or at least enforce cleanup by the producers of plastic (make them pay for efforts similar to the Ocean Cleanup Project).
If an educated populace isn't better than an uneducated populace why bother with education? It costs a lot and ties up a portion of your potential work force with what would be a useless waste of time. I think you are conflating the inherent value of a human life vs. the relative value of different things we can do as people to improve ourselves. Education "improves" people, it makes them better. Having proper garbage disposal improves countries (groups of people). This is why we value and promote these things.
And following you to circle back to the original point... Raising the price of plastics for everyone does place the majority of the burden on poor people/countries. If everything costs $0.05 more due to more expensive packaging, that is statistical noise for most people in a 1st world country but would make things unaffordable in poorer countries. But I agree that the only way to do it successfully would be to force a higher cost on the manufacturers no matter where they are located, otherwise they'd just shift manufacturing to the lower cost areas. Pretty much anything that raises the cost of goods will disproportionately impact the poor.
i meant “better” from a moral perspective. This hypothetical person in the Philippines likely doesn’t realize their impact on the environment - and it’s not their fault that trash collection infrastructure is lacking either. If we grew up in that environment we’d probably behave the same way! If all you ever knew was your friends, neighbors, and role models littering.
That's a highly patronizing view that because someone is from the Philippines they are incapable of knowing the impact of littering. They have the same access to information we do, don't they?
it’s a generalized statement. Obviously a curious person can read and learn as much as they want on the internet.
did you read hacker news before you became a nerd (like myself)? probably not. I didn’t even know it existed! Why? Because nobody told me about it and my social circle growing up was mainly into video games and reading books. I only heard about it after i branched out in college and studied computer science, and eventually got my first job in tech. A colleague recommended it to me.
Nobody is going to randomly search “how to properly dispose of trash” lol. People typically get into an echo chamber so to speak, limited by their social circle. If nobody else around you cares about trash disposal growing up, what are the chances you will randomly show an interest in that? Very slim IMO. ESPECIALLY if the main thing on their mind is putting food on the table for their family.
Worrying about garbage disposal best practices is a LUXURY not every society has and i think you forget that. I’m not criticizing individual people at all here.
How is it racist? He just picked a random landlocked first place area and a oceanfront 3rd world place? He could have just as easily chosen South Korea and Brazil or whatever other comparison.
I will agree that littering is very much cultural.
because much of the worlds plastic will be produced useing pattented processes and specialty machinery and components, invented and owned by americans.Plus american natural gas as the major feed stock is sold to make that plastic.
America proffits at every step, so bears a responsibility.
Or, we can get into the idea of "exporting contradictions", and the eventual reconing that will happen, later.....
I should add, that I know a good many rural people who have no issue with taking responsibility for problems that others created,
so unless you are an actual born bred okey, then
perhaps you need to get out there and ask some dirt farmer what they think.
I think if that were really true, so many companies wouldn't go out of their way to create an image of something not being made of plastic when it is. It's resin. It's polymer. It's PU. It's felt. It's acrylic. It's wool (aka 30% wool, 70% polyester like don't piss me off). Or my favorite: they just don't tell you what it's made of at all. A recent example of this is when I was looking for key racks. The hooks on the key racks were painted a metallic silver... obviously to look like metal. They weren't metal though, they were plastic. There was no way to find this information easily without first buying the product and investigating it myself. Why not just say they're plastic hooks?
If plastic were truly a selling point, it would be prominent in all the advertising: "$5 value plastics!" or "Plastic/Wool jacket!" It's not. Because they know that, in reality, people don't actually like plastic. It's just that in an environment where you have a selection of items varying in price where the highest-price item is just as likely to predominantly contain plastic, consumers will choose the least expensive option. It is exploitation of information asymmetry, not a true preference for cost-effective plastics.
The other thing is that there are a lot of products that are very expensive that are still made with plastic. When looking for products online, I always try sorting by most expensive to least expensive to get the higher quality products. Still there is plastic, but it's Gucci plastic! See, this plastic junk is better because it has a household brand name on it.
The capitalism apologia for this behavior is insulting too: No, you need that plastic, it's better than using the non-plastic materials! You wouldn't like it without the plastic! We're protecting you! (Again, if it really is better, then make its betterness prominent. Be proud of the fact that you chose plastic for its cost-effectiveness or its physical properties!)
The solution I'd like to try is requiring that this sort of information be provided directly under the price at the consumer's request. In brick and mortar stores, they can have pull outs under the price label or just have a bigger label (yes this is feasible - retail stores already redo their labels regularly for price changes and new/seasonal merchandise). Online, there would have to be a prominent flippy switch to toggle on that additional information.
In all, I find the claim that people prefer plastic to be dubious and think that, if given the information, a lot of consumers would buy less plastic. I think people prefer their time, not wanting to go down a deep research rabbit hole (where one must dodge the companies who infiltrate information sharing spaces like the Buy It For Life subreddit with false sentiment about their products), and are, at best, indifferent to plastic.
Often plastic really is the optimum material for an application.
There's plenty of plastic on the ISS, where money is no object. If you buy something manufactured with Kevlar or Teflon or Gore-Tex, that will be prominent in the marketing, and it really is better than steel for ballistic protection or oilskins for keeping you dry. If you buy plumbing supplies, the vendor will advertise whether they are plastic, and if so, whether they are PVC or LDPE - neither better nor worse than copper pipes, but with different performance characteristics.
For clothing, polyester is a less premium material than wool - largely because it's cheaper; if wool was free we'd still make plastic clothes - so the seller advertises the wool component.
Yes. When discussing plastics we really should be discussing _single use_ plastics. Plastic food packaging needs to go by the wayside and something better needs to be made.
The fraud that occurs with recycling is hardly a simpleton's morality tale for the masses. AFAICT it's not even discussed.
People are "against recycling" becuase it's stupid or inconvenient, or others are "pro recycling" for "the earth". But recycling is a fraud, largely, as I mentioned - it's not supposed to supplant the reduction and re-use of materials, yet is has. This is because of plastics industry lobbying and marketing.
No one talks about Reduction or Reuse. Now it's "recyclable". you throw it in a green bin and no one asks about it after that. Plastic bags were made a little thicker and euphemistically labelled "reusable". Study disposable single use trash marketed as reusable.
> in an environment where you have a selection of items varying in price where the highest-price item is just as likely to predominantly contain plastic
This thread is so much like the “people don’t want quality” post from a day or two ago, with many of the same observations about information asymmetry, people making weirdly contrived excuses for corporate interests, etc. That thread has one guy ranting about ladles and kitchenware too, like just stamp it once out of steel for the love of god so we can stop rebuying the same junk every year!
Plastic is great where we absolutely need it or ask for it, and the rest of the time it’s just part of the deceptive cost and corner-cutting corporate culture that tends to wreck human health and happiness as well as the rest of the world.
I’m really pissed about this subject lately because I’m breaking a major or minor household appliance like every other day just by trying to gently use it for the intended purpose. I didn’t choose these objects since I’m visiting family, but how much can be blamed on a consumer really before we just call the sale of junk itself shitty and fraudulent? Some people will say “caveat emptor”, but that really only works when choice and information is something that consumers have access to.
Do you have any idea how critical plastics are to medicine? How much more expensive health care would be without them? You could reduce and recycle and in some cases reuse plastics in healthcare, but you cannot get rid of them without significantly affecting the quality of the medical care we all get today.
Nobody’s saying eliminate plastic completely, you don’t need to defend medical uses. Healthcare is maybe ~3% of plastic use (based on very quick googling). I’m sure healthcare plastic use can be reduced, but let’s first go after the 50% of plastic production that’s unnecessarily going to single-serving drinks and food. BTW, in 2024 we use as much plastic for drinks as we produced globally in the year 2000. Plastic production has gone way up, and it doesn’t need to.
the real "solution" is reducing use, not recycling, and re-use, not recycling. Recycling is what should happen with what's left over after the other two "Rs" (remember the 3 R's?).
Instead the plastics industry says "use as much plastic as you want, we'll pretend to recycle it" and everyone pretends that it's actually happening, and it's not. I think that's called "green washing"
This is a specious claim with an unjustified goal. Municipal waste management is not expected to be “cost effective”. We don’t need to recycle because it’s profitable, we need to recycle to reduce plastic production and plastic waste.
Of course we need to reduce demand, you’re right. We need to avoid plastics in the first place, and that should be higher priority than recycling.
But there’s nothing wrong with the idea of recycling. Yes, today’s recycling is not happening as advertised. But that’s not because recycling doesn’t work, it’s because people aren’t doing it. It’s a social problem we have, not a process problem.
The three Rs were in order of priority but because reduced consumption didn't exactly translate into what works for a sustainable economy under current incentive paradigms almost anywhere in an economy with lots of consumption we kind of wound up with the least important of the guidelines being what we could more reliably practice (the reasons are another discussion entirely).
Almost all the most pressing problems for the human species seem to be Wicked Problem classes and it's part of why I don't have a lot of expectation that any of them will be solved even _if_ catastrophic events like constant war and mass deaths happen. I also have doubts that whoever survives any of these kinds of events would be more genetically predisposed to solving these problems in the future either.
This has been a thing in Michigan and likely a few other states for decades, although with a 10 cent bounty at least 10-20 years ago. There was apparently a 90-95% recovery rate last I checked, but I'm not sure how reliable those statistics are.
That still doesn't solve the problem of recycling plastics or bottles in general, which this research may advance.
The ten cent deposit has been in place in Michigan since the 1970s. Back then ten cents was a big deal but over 500% inflation since then has eaten away at the incentive. What has changed is attitudes regarding recycling and waste disposal in general. Back when Michigan put the deposit in place, it made a very noticeable difference in the reduction of litter in Michigan and also in how litter compared to states without a deposit. From my purely personal experience, that difference is mostly gone now.
People hauling empties all over the place doesn't seem as eco friendly as it once did, especially when so many people have recycling pickup curbside with their trash pickup. In deposit states, you can't crush your cans before returning them but in non-deposit states you can, saving space. Eliminating the deposit probably would result in some amount of plastic going into trash cans instead of recycling bins, but it would be very far from being 100%. The math gets fuzzy when you start deciding on if people make special trips to return empties or are they usually returning them when they already were going to the store to shop. Same the more upstream you go. But that recycling bin at the curb is still there, waiting to be used more.
this has 2 major consequences: it invites homeless people to pilfer through the trash - often throwing it down without cleanup. secondly, it invites people to take bottles from outside the jurisdiction of the reward and "redeem" them. Thus stealing money from the program.
In practice, number 1 really never happens in Sweden. Sure, there are people looking for bottles in public trashcans, but they are not exclusively homeless nor do they leave a mess behind after collecting any potential recyclables from the cans. Private trashcans don't really contain recyclables as everyone collects what containers they buy and redeem them at the store when going to buy groceries. Number 2 doesn't happen either because the bottles have to have barcodes that actually grant the reward, which foreign containers do not.
This problem is noticeable here in Amsterdam too -- homeless people tend to just take the whole garbage bag out of the can, and empty it on the sidewalk so that it's easy to spot and collect all statiegeld (deposit) cans and bottles.
It looks like the best solution the municipality has managed to come up with so far is to attach metal cupholder-like thingies to new trash cans, and people are expected to put statiegeld bottles and cans there, so that others can take them later and get a refund. Though I don't know how a regular uninformed person is supposed to figure out what these cupholders are for -- it's not intuitive at all.
Around here they're polite and don't make a mess. But on the flip side you could only go around making a mess so long before you got beat up or something and good luck getting a police response for that so it's probably not in their interest to be obnoxious.
I thought it had more to do with the fact that plastic recycling is largely a scam - i.e., recycling logos are printed on nearly all plastics, less than half of which are actually recyclable. Yet, there's been no crackdown on such brazen fraud. I'm sure the assumption by most is that's due to lobbying.
They're all recyclable. Just not into grades of plastic anyone wants to manufacture things out of.
Recycled plastic are used heavily in things that people touch and need a lot of chonk to them relative to their strength to feel substantial and high quality or stuff that'll almost purely be loaded in compression (like bolt on plastic pads that prevent metal to metal contact or allow nice sliding).
I think recycling, or reuse, could be made to be cheaper or more effective with better policy. This has to come from the top down. For example, by regulation on product design, or better incentives for consumer recycling (like deposits).
Virtue motivated reasoning: a bunch of people are dead set on something being morally bad, and it's deficiencies are interpreted as karmic punishment. Therefore improvements and optimisations are to be opposed or derided.
See also: all the people completely certain that Semaglutide will definitely cause HyperCancer or something "soon".
i’ve basically never seen single stream actually work somewhere… every time i’ve looked into the details it appears they just skim off the metal and landfill/burn the rest
If you do it that way, the garbage contaminates everything else, making recycling much more difficult or impossible. Especially for paper and cardboard, which is very recyclable.
You're almost right about a government mandate. But instead it should mandate that waste management corporations step up their game and actually do the "manage" part. First of all, no more recycling trucks. Force them to sort the garbage and pull the plastic, aluminum, and glass out of the waste stream. This will get trucks off the roads and offload the mental tax (as well as political element) from consumer households. If the separated plastic is able to be recycled, WM can do so. If not, store it and all other materials in segregated areas of the landfill so if that changes in the future, the material can be easily dug up. They are the ones who should be "going green", consumer's job is to use the service they are paying for. There is no reason WM should get a free pass to stagnate while most other companies are innovating.
Unfortunately it seems that in many places, that's pretty much what they're doing instead of doing any actual recycling. If you collect more than you're capable of processing, you inevitably just end up with an ever growing TO-DO pile.
The sad thing is, if you pretend to recycle instead of actually recycling, you're just a landfill operator. And landfills can be run profitably.
In my city, there is a GIANT pile of glass sitting on a slab near a landfill. The commodity price of glass is so low it's not worth selling, so they just store it in hopes of maybe one day selling it. I doubt that will happen and I suspect it's just been put into the landfill by now.
In Sweden, where the main glass recycler claims we're world-leading glass recyclers, the claim is that recycling saves 20% of the energy. That is not nothing ...
not bad, not bad at all, except for the whoh!man!
that a bit too real, but it is actualy implimentable on a very short time frame and exceptionaly low budget, so I will be including that (your?) idea, into my own ,not infrequent rants
I think the fundamentals of material capitalism taken to its current extent do not leave room for ecology.
This article about PET recycling probably won't do much to improve the 6-8% recycling rate for plastic waste primarily because there is no economic incentive to do so.
In fact, market economies are actively avoiding PET plastics for health reasons, so this effort is double dubious IMO.
I don't mean to inject cynicism to downplay their achievements, but I think it's as crucial for ecology that we be honest about the limitations of our existing efforts within the market capitalist/individual materialist paradigm.
China stopped accepting trash long ago. 90% of plastics are trash. Many municipalities adopted thermal trash burners that generate electricity. Expect to see a lot more of these in the next four years.
I sympathize with your concern about the ecological impact of plastics; I also think you vastly underestimate the beneficial effects of plastics. Plastics are incredibly useful materials. There's no going back.
there were, are and will be alternatives. we won't go back but we evolve. plastics ruin taste and they feel bad. people's senses are just a "bit fucked up" due to the many "other" things in water, air, soil, drinks and food.
The alternatives were for the most part replaced with plastic because of plastic's remarkable qualities. There's very few relatively inert materials that are cheap to manufacturer, durable, light, can withstand (reasonably) high temperatures, can be formed into whatever shape you want, and can be as hard or flexible as you want.
Glass bottles used to be much more common but they're more expensive, very easy to break, and heavier, which also increases cost of transportation. Paper containers for things can't be allowed to get wet which often makes them impractical. Metals are expensive, potentially reactive, heavy, and inflexible.
Yes plastics are very environmentally problematic, but they do solve a lot of problems that aren't really solved by any other kind of material.
The following are assumptions based on vague memories from books, articles, documentaries, anecdotes and thinking based on observations of past and current events and economic methods. You'd have to consult historians and engineers to confirm.
The choice was a purely pseudo-economic one.
a) Alternatives needed less than 12 months longer R&D.
b) Alternatives were less than 5% more expensive.
c) Alternatives were reusable/repairable and would not have been single-use, which would have reduced production mid- and long-term.
d) Alternatives would have sparked more industries and would have created more jobs, more captains and more (metaphorical) ships,
especially in engineering and crafts.
e) Alternatives would have meant better production methods and waste that would be easier and more constructive to handle, which would have meant better health and a more thriving environment and natural produce, which would have meant less opportunity to study negative impacts on humans as well as flora and fauna and less opportunity to make all kinds of swarms dependent on corporate "solutions".
Again, alternatives would have sparked more industries and would have boosted our civilization's/colony's R&D by 50 or more years. And the resulting cumulative competition would have boosted R&D even further. More money overall, less of gap between the wealthiest and the rest.
Pretending that the growing populations required unhealthy factory jobs is thus irrational. People were keen to learn and work and thrive and even dimwits like me had enough brains to catch up within a few months or years.
The conventional argument "do we create jobs now or later" is nonsense, as more emerging industries would have meant at least just as many jobs.
I could probably use an LLM and some books to craft a much better and technical answer but I probably won't use any for at least some longer while.
Single use plastics are convenient, are 99% of the problem, and could be phased out feasibly. Perfect is the enemy is good. Not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but people arguing with absolutism on plastics is a dead end.
Never going to happen. People already hate paper straws. No one is going to look at the current replacements and say "Yeah life was better after that" besides activists.
Do they really hate them or do they just complain about them like some bad season of some series they will continue to watch anyway?
Life is better without plastic straws and plastic plates and plastic knifes and so on ... and people who don't care usually care but the brain structure to admit that is premature.
In the same vein, no one hates them unless they didn't grow up with them. If you'd have grown up with glass straws, you'd love glass straws, especially if you'd been brought up being taught about the harms of single use plastics.
99% of these things are entirely cultural and habitual.
I doubt that anyone would prefer a glass or any other hard material straw, straws made out of hard materials are just bad. And I say that as someone who was very enthusiastic about getting steel straws until about the forth or fifth time I nearly broke a tooth on them.
Im not biting down on straws, when putting it into your mouth you aren't holding a straw with multiple fingers like a utensil and it can tap into teeth with the entire weight of the glass and drink behind it because it is not really secured well and it moves. A plastic or paper or silicon or even a bamboo straw its not such a problem because teeth are harder and dig into or bend the material. Glass and steel don't do that and are the equivalent of tapping a tooth with a tiny hammer.
Glass and steel straws sound nice on paper, but using them is a whole different ball game.
I live in a first world G20 country with a greater life expectancy than the US.
In 60 years I don't recall ever seeing a single apple wrapped in plastic in a store.
I have seen a plastic bag of apples pre selected weighed and ready to be grabbed .. but most apples are loose and you bag them yourself picking as many of the ones you want individually.
"how many apples are thrown away" is not just a question of personal responsibility and brains but how the public was "raised" over generations of mass production and cheap methods.
"even" in Germany ( I don't know why I keep saying this ), and in upper class super markets, fresh produce rots much quicker than anything we produce in our gardens. mid-priced frozen stuff triggers unhealthy/gassy reactions in stomach and guts that are not triggered by higher-priced frozen stuff but again, the crowd doesn't care because it was raised that way or does not know.
cheap liquor produce triggers worse reactions in body and brain, short-, mid- and long-term because the production methods are not as clean because producers are OK with the negative outcomes because they were raised to believe that their customers are "fucking stupid".
I understand much of your rambling, but the wax that's sprayed on apples isn't an issue. To the contrary, it increases the shelf life of them, reducing waste. And it's not dangerous either, so pouncing on that particular detail isn't furthering your cause..
I bought a special eco friendly floss that came in a glass bottle. I accidentally dropped it on my tile bathroom floor late one night while flossing and it shattered.
Glass is heavier and more breakable than plastic. I'm not sure I want to give my baby glass cups. He tends to drop and throw things.
I doubt your baby is going to be holding glass objects 5 feet above a tile floor and also being significantly heavier they are pretty hard for babies to throw. So I don't think breakage is nearly the problem you are imagining.
On many occasions my baby has whacked the bottle out of my hand onto the floor. He can be quite strong. He also often grabs the bottle and yanks it quickly out of his mouth. When he's eating solid food in his high chair, he needs water with it. Sometimes we use a bottle, sometimes a sippy cup. The sippy cup generally ends up on the ground. Sometimes this is above a tile floor (a kitchen). Having the high chair above carpeting is not a great idea when it comes to cleaning up food that gets thrown around.
Although, if the goal is to switch entirely off of plastic, I don't think modern glass baby bottles will do that, because the ones I've seen still use plastic caps.
BTW, we just bought some glass bottles (with plastic caps) today. We'll see how they go.
Although, if the goal is to switch entirely off of plastic, I don't think modern glass baby bottles will do that, because the ones I've seen still use plastic caps.
BTW, we just bought some glass bottles (with plastic caps) today. We'll see how they go.
There are lots of wasteful uses for sure. Too much crap out there being produced essentially for the land fill. This can all go away.
But there are many areas where plastics are quite literally life savers and it will be hard to replace them. For example, look at a modern ER and imagine it without plastics. Won't happen.
Is glass manufacturing of a coke bottle better for the environment than plastic manufacturing in terms of say emissions in manufacturing or supply chain?
Glass is much more energy-intensive to create and process than plastic, and its strength-to-weight ratio means that you'll be spending more energy (carbon emissions, whatever) on transportation too. It's also not flexible nor resistant to impact.
I forgot about leaving bottles for the milk man. Certainly a more expensive way of doing business than a one off bottle you don’t have to collect and clean though.
Do you realize just how much plastic we use? Almost everything we use had plastic in it (in some form or another)
Not saying we can't go back, but it isn't as simple as "don't use plastic"
> My understanding is that while glass is reusable/recyclable, nobody is really willing to do it.
Plenty of people have been buying glass over plastic exactly when possible for this reason. Those people show that it's a concious decision and are not to be waved away.
I am not talking about the individual consumers, but rather that even glass that ends up in a recycling stream usually doesn't get recycled unless customers do all the pre-sorting work.
They certainly used to. Why do you say we don’t recycle glass? It’s basically the same process as making new glass, you just add broken up glass in with the silica sand.
You don't HAVE to, but you aren't going to be making clear glass again if you mix it with other colored glasses. Im not an glass expert though and it could be more of a cost consideration in not having to chemically separate out colored elements from glass when you can much more easily just get clean sand again for significantly cheaper.
Irony is, syringes can be reused well after sterilizing with heat.
But I agree that extremism usually just drives people the opposite way. Especially in the medical field plastic will stay, but in lots of other areas it can be reduced.
Is it necessary to mention which university the person is from? I have the same reaction when news titles say things like "34 yo woman discovers blah blah blah" or "Spanish scientists found that ...". No one cares about the meta data of these people, let's get to the point and hear what they did.
> Is it necessary to mention which university the person is from?
This is such a strange statement. He leads a team at The University of Alabama which has been given a grant by the National Science Foundation. He is not a sole inventor working by his own funding in his private time. The University of Alabama has also filed a patent application - so why wouldn't any news article mention the university ?
At least it’s a less known school. Usually they mention only the big names like “Stanford scientists…”. When it’s a lesser known school it’s just “Scientists….”
I was just speaking generally about funding for research.
I don't follow the logic that taxpayers would be happy with the university getting credit. I'm a tax payer, and I'd much rather the researcher get credit.
I mean it's from the University of Alabama news site, hyping a University of Alabama lab. I'd assume it's serving a marketing/"school spirit" sorta purpose as well as sharing the news.
Well I think it is important. With the vast amount of knowledge that is being created every day we have to filter much of it out. If that university has made a reputation as a leader of knowledge acquisition and known for well run labs and procedures then they earn that reputation. The author of the story might just get more eyes on the story if people think it will contain good knowledge from a reputable source.
This is a pretty sad and cynical way to live life. Also, your point isn't even very good. It is useful to know where research is coming from; it's hardly the same as the strawman example of "34 yo woman discovers blah blah blah". Also, this ridiculous notion that "No one cares about the 'meta data'" is silly. Actual academics are interested in the names of the venue of publication as well as the institutions of the researchers involved; is it the primary thing that matters? No, but its pretty weird to be upset about such a minor thing. Though, I'm not surprised to see this kind of comment on HN.
The party reporting the information calling attention to the fact that it's reporting on its own institution by putting the name of that institution in the headline creates that awareness.
Just like last time, and time before that, and the time before that: please stop posting this stuff until there's a solution that actually works at scale. It's like the little brother to cold fusion.
Except worse because plastics are destroying ecosystems and recycling makes people feel better about it despite most recyclable statements being effectively false. Most people have no idea what cold fusion is, and they know even less about why it would be good.
>despite most recyclable statements being effectively false
I keep seeing these sort of statements but have yet to see one backed up by a link to some reputable evidence.
My local supermarket accepts clean soft plastics for recycling and when I investigated I found membership of schemes to ensure full transparency. Looking further I found the companies accepting the waste and financial statements indicating heavy investment in machinery to deal with it.
Plastic recycling, because of what plastics are, is basically impossible at cost. PET recycling might make you think "see, we can recycle plastics" but first and foremost, PET recycling isn't recycling, it's reuse (using the PET as a base material to make something else, like fleece, which cannot be recycled), and second: the majority of plastics aren't PET and literally have no recycling path.
Turns out you can fit a lot of papers in a youtube video when you have a degree in the field and you're doing investigative journalism that you present in a way that people might enjoy watching.
And the final message is definitely a little more nuanced than that =D
It seems people forget that _recycling is and should be the last thing_ we do with objects/materials that we don't use anymore, it requires energy to create a new object and at the same time recycling materials doesn't always recover 100% of the original materials.
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