Hacker News Reader

Comment by docker_up | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing. I had no idea we weren't recycling our plastic and just shipping it across the world, only to get dumped in a forest or into the ocean.

We need to stop producing so much plastic. We need laws to standardize plastics so that only purely recyclable plastics exist and no more single-use plastics, or compostable containers. Anything else should be banned.

I don't care if it runs some companies out of business because the costs are too high. I would rather those companies fail than keep piling up with all this sickening useless and ultimately poisonous garbage from single-use plastics.

We should also make it illegal to ship our garbage outside of the country. That will force us to deal with our own problems.

View on HN

Also it seems likely at this point that the danger has been wildly underestimated.

The rallying cry against plastic used to be that "it takes hundreds of years to break down".

But now we know that when it breaks down, it gets worse. Microplastics are suspected to be bioaccumulating, carrying poisons and bacteria, and possibly could get into cells like asbestos. And the only way to dispose of the stuff that won't eventually become microplastic is incineration - putting all that carbon into the atmosphere, along with other unpleasant combustion products.

Yes, as usual those of us that told us the risk was low or non-existent were wrong again. How often do we have to be duped by so-called experts before we realize that the "experts" have actually no idea how to calculate risk, and that we can't rely on their "assurances"? It goes both ways, where scientists told us that salt and high fat diets were causing heart disease and now both of those have been walked back.

The experts were working with the facts as they were known at the time. Microplastic wasn't obvious. Most things, when they break down, aren't harmful. This isn't a problem of experts. This is a problem of hubristically creating a never seen before material and assuming it would have no impact.

Which experts are you talking about? Before 10 years ago or so I don't remember ever seeing a discussion about plastics in the environment one way or the other.

Problem is that you're putting all "experts" in one bucket. There has been "experts" talking against the use of plastic and single-use for a very long time, but by attacking all experts like you're doing, you make it sound that they are the same people. Clearly, environmentalist were not the ones promoting plastic?

> and possibly could get into cells like asbestos

To be clear, there is no current evidence that microplastics might share any mechanisms with asbestos/CNTs/etc, right?

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but I do know that people with cystic fibrosis have a bad habit of dying of infections from microorganisms that are usually not deemed infectious for most humans. When you google the names of the microorganisms in question, some of them are used by scientists for bioremediation of petrochemical spills.

In other words, they eat petrochemicals. They also think people with CF are tasty as hell while not much caring for "normal" humans, which looks rather suspect to me.

So I suspect that the defect in the CFTR allows plastics and petrochemicals generally, plus metals, to accumulate at higher than normal rates in the CF population. I have run this hypothesis past a guy with a PhD in Biology who suggested that it was not simply straight up crazy talk. He said the function of the CFTR should have some implication for how the body processes metals, IIRC.

(He's a member of HN and is more than welcome to chime in for accuracy's sake if he happens to see this remark, realizes DoreenMichele used to post as Mz and I am talking about him -- hello, nice person with PhD in Biology, and thank you for the awesome feedback.)

Our oceans are getting increasingly polluted with plastic and we increasingly see, for example, dead whales on beaches who are full of plastic and these two things are deemed not unrelated, from what I gather. So it seems that there comes a point past which "normal" humans with a normal CFTR who do not have CF may be unable to avoid similar bioaccumulation of plastics/petrochemicals and other toxic chemicals as I am hypothesizing drive some deadly infections in the CF population.

So, perhaps we can extrapolate from the experiences of the CF community that as our world gets increasingly toxic, it will negatively impact human health generally, including, but not limited to, making us more prone to infection from microogranisms that were never a problem before.

Arguably, this is probably already happening and may be contributing to the rise of Super Bugs. It may not be merely overuse of antibiotics causing this problem. It may also be widespread environmental changes, including but not limited to the increasing prevalence of microplastics across the entire world.

The life expectancy of people with cystic fibrosis in the west doubled in the last 40 years. Using them as a marker things are getting worse sounds questionable.

I'm not using them as a marker for things getting worse. That wasn't my point at all.

When people have chronic illnesses, they often times become immunocompromised, meaning their immune system weakens so much, microorganisms that are normally harmless get the opportunity to infect the host. That's why you see odd microorganisms.

Just because you see microorganisms in people that are also in petrochemical spills does not mean they are consuming petrochemicals within us. Many organisms have multiple metabolic pathways, meaning they can break different things down to get the energy they need. Heck, so many typically aerobic microbes don't even need oxygen all the time, producing lactic acid or alcohol instead.

I understand your concern for the unknown, but be careful about spreading information when you aren't yourself informed or sure of what you are saying.

I'm an environmental studies major who has a diagnosis of atypical cystic fibrosis. Avoiding petrochemicals has been beneficial to me.

I think I am informed and sure of what I am saying. I think I adequately qualified the statement to make sure it doesn't constitute misinformation.

As a science major you should be well acquainted with the dangers of anecdotal evidence. Making claims about cystic fibrosis on the basis of what is "beneficial for you" is bad science. Even with the qualifying your statement, you're implying causalities that you can't possibly justify.

It's a discussion in an online forum, not a thesis for a PhD.

If you can't engage the actual point with a meaty counterargument instead of a personal cheap shot, then you are the one failing at science, not me.

I would be thrilled to absolute pieces if anyone on HN would debate the actual points I sometimes try to make (or otherwise engage me in meaty discourse) instead of being dismissive of me personally. The shallow personal attacks are vacuous and tiresome and in no way help me firm up my understanding of the problem space.

Since I study CF because my actual life literally depends upon it, it would be a tremendous boon to my life to get meaty engagement on such topics. But that never, ever happens. Instead, I get what looks an awful lot like Mansplaining and sounds an awful lot like the subtext is "Meh, girls don't know nothing, so I can't be arsed to come up with anything to say about the actual hypothesis proposed. Besides, I'm not actually that knowledgeable."

Serious question: based on what we now know, does it make sense to revisit incineration of plastics particularly if we can update the stacks to do a better job of scrubbing?

Probably gasification instead, which is much cleaner but more energy intensive.

Incineration still produces tons of ash and chemical waste.

Then some more thinking on how to handle resulting gases.

Nordic countries incinerate almost all non-recycled municipal waste, to the point that they import waster from other countries to keep the incinerators well fed.

Any insights how this is handled there? They are pretty famous for having some of the strictest environmental and health regulations, so I assume these issues have solutions.

I wonder if it could be low-oxygen burned to non-poisonous charcoal? That could be put into the environment without toxicity. (Such as making Terra Preta soil.)

Plastic is our new collective "Chernobyl".

One HBO show and boom: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=chernobyl

The main reason it was done was because all the manufacturing is in China. All those ships bring things here and it was intended to make the trip back more efficient economically by shipping them back full as well. I'm all for less plastic but this is also just a larger issue of consumerism. We need to buy and ship less but that is a cultural change that seems unlikely (unfortunately).

Cultural change happens when the externalities are priced in. See Denmark and Netherlands for example. The biking and public transport culture is a direct consequence of pricing in road maintenance, congestion, and other externalities into the price of cars and gas.

Not really. People in Denmark (Copenhagen mostly) and the Netherlands cycle and take public transport because it is the easiest and most convenient option. If it was the price of car use we should see the same effect in f.ex Norway, but we don’t.

In Denmark, new cars are taxed at 150% of the price of the tax. You pay more in taxes than the entire price of the car.

In The Netherlands it's 40-50% for most cars yet big cars are still seen as a status symbol. Thankfully the cycling infrastructure here is fantastic so I can almost always use my bike :)

> yet

The more difficult to obtain something is, the more it will be seen as a status symbol. It's always been that way.

Well, that and the fact that those two countries are dense, flat, and have decent cycling weather.

if you call half a year of rain, wind and/or snow decent... flat and dense is enough.

Even if it doesn't change cultures, at least it provides some proportional amount of money to (try to) fix the problem, rather than ignoring it or digging into the general tax fund.

Shipping stuff across the world isn't as bad as you think it is. The per-ton fuel efficiency of a modern cargo ship is astoundingly high; far, far better than a tractor-trailer or even a train. Concentrating manufacturing of a particular thing in one place is more efficient; we've been doing this for millennia now (stuff was being traded between Asia and Europe even in Roman times).

The problem is not producing it but pretending to recycle it. If we just buried it in well maintained local landfills, it would effectively never get into the environment and would never be a problem.

You're making a common mistake of thinking that an environmental problem must be solved at all costs. There's no point spending more to solve a problem than the cost the problem will cause. The only reason the environment is important is because it provides value to us humans. We don't need to protect it beyond that. We don't need to ban quarries for breaking ancient rocks into small pieces of gravel. They're permanently destroying the environment, but not a part of it that we have any need to preserve.

No. Microplastics are everywhere in the environment. Our fish are eating this. It's getting into our food chain and we need to stop this. We are poisoning ourselves the same way the Romans poisoned themselves with lead pipes.

They wouldn't be in the sea if they were in a landfill. They get into the sea from street rubbish washing into stormwater drains/rivers mostly in poor countries and from fishermen dropping their equipment overboard.

Microplastics are also not known to be toxic to people. So it's not like lead.

This attitude is completely naive. The idea we could dump all our garbage into the landfill with no loss is impossible. Better to never create it in the first place at the top of the funnel than try to deal with it at the bottom of the extremely leaky funnel.

Of course there will be some leakage, but if it's slower than the plastic is naturally removed from the environment, it won't get worse with time.

Nature is filled with toxic things like oil, asbestos, lead, mercury, uranium, etc. It's mostly safely stored in naturally occurring "landfills" which are harmless. Why can't we do the same?

It might not be better to never create it if that means crippling the world's economy and all the death and suffering that would go along with that by never using plastics. What price is worth paying? Or perhaps you see lack of technology as a good thing?

>It might not be better to never create it if that means crippling the world's economy and all the death and suffering that would go along with that by never using plastics. What price is worth paying? Or perhaps you see lack of technology as a good thing?

Technology spawning problems that need solutions that require more technology, which makes new problems, so on and so forth...

There's a way to advance, and there's a way to advance in the short term at the expense of the long term.

Plastic, and your general policy regarding it's application, and the handling of it's externality falls squarely in the mortgage the future to squander now bucket. Blow up the world and minimal footprint to the point the only thing that can put off catastrophe is "the next big breakthrough." This guarantees development is directed entirely by the excesses of those who have already passed, leaving those just coming in to clean up the mess.

Sustainable development by definition minimizes the long term impact of technological adoption, and incentivized development of systems that are closer to an ideal closed loop system. Doing this ensures that at anytime, a stable system exists from which to innovate and that your capacity to observe the ramifications of changes is generally significantly higher, since you have time, data, and an understanding of how effects propagate throughout the physical and ecological network. Minor tweaks are generally buffered by long cycle processes.

Point being: one way of doing things results in a constant crisis of the week.

The other way results in the foundational understanding that actually enables any crisis to be accurately dealt with, and that overall, the system is in a largely stable configuration.

I know which way I'd go for.

So what's your solution to this issue?

Slow refinement, and avoidance of development directions that produce excessive amounts of unutilizable waste to which the only solution is sequestration.

Avoid unsustainable practices such as excessive monoculture farming; constrain packaging to forms with applications for secondary reuse, or compostability.

Develop technologies that further "closing the loop" on current technologies. Petrophagic bacteria to break down plastics; high carbon sequestering, fast growing plant life.

Concentrate medical research on trying to confirm treatment protocols w.r.t. "traditional" plants/phages/etc.

Focus on nuclear power, and nuclear fuel reprocessing.

Keep things from going over the Rubicon environmentally, and you've suddenly bought everyone enough time to get their stuff together to equalize development levels the world over. Seems humanity's biggest problem other than not paying attention to environmental change is figuring out how in the heck to coexist with each other.

EDIT:

This is just the parts of the mental TODO list that are sitting on top of my head. I've got entire sections that are highly dependent on getting access to information I simply don't have the time/manpower to personally chase down for relevance.

Basic gist is to shore up our present level of development, change up the incentives/structural characteristics of the international market to attempt to decrease the need to move goods as much; shore up and propogate the technosphere so there's a more consistent level of technological development to avail ourselves to in being able to more accurately track, model, and calculate the effects of continuing development as they propagate through the biosphere in real time. This will also be necessarily bundled with significant increases in funding/incentives for research in the Life/biological/ecological Sciences, as well as further refinement of meteorological sciences.

We need to know as much about the state of our biosphere as a whole in the present to equip us to manage our continued development without sacrificing the larger part of the biosphere in doing so.

Parallel research efforts would also be undertaken in porting closed loop ecologies (with humans in the mix) into extreme environs to double down on being able to increase potential biological footprint.

Emergency backup biosphere tucked safely away for a rainy day are pretty cool too.

Anyway. Didn't actually expect anyone would actually ask. So used to people avoiding it.

Why can't we do both? This attitude that we can't ever do anything differently unless it's perfect is why we still ship stuff to China to be landfilled. At least if we keep the waste here we're taking ownership of the problem rather than sweeping it under the rug. Taking ownership is the first stop toward taking action.

> We need to stop producing so much plastic. We need laws to standardize plastics so that only purely recyclable plastics exist and no more single-use plastics, or compostable containers. Anything else should be banned.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but the cost of pretty much everything would go up significantly, along with the incentive to circumvent the regulations.

> cost of pretty much everything would go up significantly

This just includes the short term costs.

You're kidding yourself if you don't think these significant short-term costs can become significant long-term costs.

The whole point of "these alternative solutions" is to compensate long term costs by increasing short term costs.

The cost in dollars would go up significantly. The cost in dollars plus inflicted externalities would remain constant-ish, implementation failures notwithstanding.

That cost in dollars could be enough to sink the middle class and everything under it.

Then the cost in externalities would do the same. That's the whole point of pricing in externalities: if the paper packaging becomes cheaper after you do it, that's because the plastic packaging actually is worse for the would-be dollar-saving population in the long run.

Doing the pricing accurately relies on a bunch of projections we don't have, of course, but we can certainly do better than calling it all zero.

> We need laws to standardize plastics so that only purely recyclable plastics exist and no more single-use plastics, or compostable containers. Anything else should be banned.

Do you have any idea how much this would change the world, if it were implemented?

Say goodbye to many if not most medical plastics - especially those use for artificial joints and similar implantable devices.

Say hello to much heavier engines in automobiles and other devices (until batteries get much, much better - which is on the horizon, and hopefully soon - the IC engine is here to stay for the foreseeable future). Oh - and those batteries also use a lot of plastic, and I am not sure you can make them with recyclable versions.

Say hello to increased fuel usage and shipping costs for all kinds of products because they couldn't be made of recyclable or compostable plastics, and had to be made of other materials.

Most "engineering plastics" - those plastics made for harsh environments and/or uses that have thermal cycling of the environment, or need high mechanical strength - generally tend to be made from single-use plastics; this is because when you recycle plastic - most plastics, actually - their chemical bonds are broken and reformed, in addition to the mixing of various binders and other substances that exist in various plastics - even recyclable - that are used to give the plastic various properties (ie - one manufacturer's PET may not match another manufacturer's in makeup) - this process all adds up to a plastic that, while recycled, has varying properties, generally is a weaker form of plastic, and is difficult to control those properties due to the variability of the recycled feedstock component. Even then, today, there are very few "100% recycled plastic" products; most have so-called "virgin" plastic mixed in to compensate for the variable content of the recycled materials, and to make up for the deficits caused by that. Those products that tend to be "100% recycled" are generally "low-end products" or used as filler material for other products.

Think of paper recycling: Where does the recycled paper get used in 100% recycled paper? Most likely low cost paper for low-end paper books, grey paper for wrapping or other uses, maybe certain paper bags, maybe insulation. Do you recall the low-grade lined paper in grade school, that was grey, and passed out for quick quizzes, or for spelling practice? That was all 100% recycled paper pulp. It tore easily, it tended to be thin, it looked terrible. But for the use it was perfect - but you wouldn't fill a binder or other notebook with it. The reason it had those unfavorable properties had to do with the variability of paper recycling; basically the same issue behind recycling plastic. And so we see similar results with recycled plastic.

Also - each time you recycle the plastic, the worse the end product gets; you can only abuse those molecules and such so much by the reformation process before it becomes completely useless...

So-called compostable plastics have their own issues; they are really just as long-lived as non-compostable plastics, unless they are exposed and worked in the right environment (a landfill is not the right environment). Sadly, this is rarely done. It probably has to do with the costs or other reasons to make such a composting system for such plastics; I've never heard exactly why, I just know that the plastic doesn't really decompose unless in just the right environmental conditions which are rarely met in the real world.

Do we need to do something different in regards to our plastics usage and recycling? Yes - but elimination and bans won't get us there. Switching to pure compostable or recyclable plastics isn't possible, unless you want to eliminate a ton of industries, products, and uses (especially medical).

Your argument is basically "it's too expensive". There will be more than enough incentive for someone to develop a cheap, recyclable but robust plastic that can be used for medical devices.

I'm completely okay with living in a world where there are less conveniences, but we're not poisoning ourselves to death as a planet. This is getting ridiculous. We need to make a stand somewhere and the time is now.

Having a ban will let companies get creative and build equally strong but recyclable plastics. Nothing is impossible, it's just expensive. And if we increase the costs on everything then it works to everyone's benefit.

> We need to make a stand somewhere and the time is now.

Why do you think it's now rather than some time in the past or future?

Obviously, some time in the past would have been better, but we've missed that already, so "now" is the best remaining option.

When we're currently on a course that is degrading the environment of the entire planet for all of us, the sooner we begin to alter that course, the better.

   Your argument is basically "it's too expensive". There will be more than 
    enough incentive for someone to develop a cheap, recyclable but robust 
    plastic that can be used for medical devices.

His argument is more that adding lots of laws will stifle industries and make it much harder for new, inventive products to be created, and that includes life-support systems and the like.

   Having a ban will let companies get creative and build equally strong but
    recyclable plastics. Nothing is impossible, it's just expensive. And if 
    we increase the costs on everything then it works to everyone's benefit.

A lot of the plastics that are used today are thermoplastics, because they're easier to build and manipulate- all you have to do is melt little chips and then squeeze them into a shape and you're more or less done. Things like HDPE- what a lot of plastic cutting boards and gallon milk jugs are made of- are really useful and strong in many use cases. Those other use cases are where things like thermoset plastics- think stuff like epoxy- come in handy. There are many applications where nothing else, including metal, will work well, for various reasons.

Having a ban will let companies get creative and build equally strong but recyclable plastics.- you missed one of cr0sh's points- even if everyone only builds slightly different plastics, it's still hard to get a good fully recycled product.

And if we increase the costs on everything then it works to everyone's benefit. I don't think that that's how this works. I'm pretty sure that if we increase the costs of everything, then the overall cost of living goes up and money gets devalued, the only real difference being that the taxing body has more of your money. I don't think that this is a good idea.

Banning some particularly egregious chemicals (such as CFC's, which absolutely destroy the ozone layer) is a good idea. Saying no to a ginormous subset of plastics is a particularly damaging idea.

I suspect organizations regulating "single use plastics" would competent enough to draw a distinction between single use plastic bags and single use bionic limbs and not require the medical grade plastics used in medical applications to be compostable...

> Say goodbye to many if not most medical plastics - especially those use for artificial joints and similar implantable devices.

Being in (home) dialysis, I generate a lot of waste. I get 30+ boxes of supplies every month. Loads on single use plastic fluid bags, wraps, cassettes, hoses, etc. All need to be single use sterile. Without these disposable materials, they used glass bottles in the past and people would get infections in a manner of weeks to months. I heard it can still happen but much rarer. And people have told me the pain from these infections are quite unbearable.

If the US actually cared about any of this, sure. Unfortunately recycling is a burden placed on consumers to allow corporations to maximize profits.

> We should also make it illegal to ship our garbage outside of the country. That will force us to deal with our own problems.

This is what all the countries should do. The new EU parliament is turning green so I hope we can get such regulation to prevent trash to leave the EU.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com