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Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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