Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the plastic straw will still be polluting the environment in 10,000 years. Getting macro plastics out of the environment is difficult getting microplastics may be impossible. At some point we have to accept that single use plastics have an environment cost that is totally unacceptable.

As for emotive press stories about dead animals being the only reason people care. Did you know that the average human meal contains microplastics now? That your body contains microplastics right now?

CO2 also pollutes the environment for thousands of years.

"About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." --IPCC AR4

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-lo...

Plastics are a visible but small part of our environmental damage. Plastic straws doubly so.

There are natural processes that remove CO2. There are no natural processes that break down plastics to a safe form.

EDIT: To be clear I am not saying that it is harmless to release lots of CO2 I am saying that we can't compare pollutants by simply looking at the gross tonnage released.

Hopefully, in the timescale of 10,000 years, we'll have refined plastic eating bacteria and the like to get rid of microplastics. It makes more sense to worry about a 20-100 years timescale.

Once we have plastic eating bacteria plastics will serve no useful purpose. Imagine your laptop rotting...

That's unlikely. Microorganisms break down wood too, and we build houses out of it!

Typically all you need to do to keep microorganisms from eating something is keep it dry. We tend to do that for laptops anyway.

And plastic food packaging?

Should probably be abolished anyway. But as long as the outside was dry, and the inside didn't have plastic-eating organisms, then it would still work.

Besides, the assertion wasn't that plastic would still be useful for everything. It just wouldn't be useless.

Bacteria evolve fast, and hydrocarbon-metabolizing bacteria are already known, e.g.:

https://aem.asm.org/content/77/22/7962

I expect they'll be common well before 10,000 years. It's certainly an easier problem than getting CO2 out of the atmosphere.

How is hoping that whole new species evolve and spread without changing ecosystems even remotely an easy problem?

Because those species already exist and we are changing the ecosystem (by introducing micro-plastics everywhere)?

My point is that changing ecosystems will have unforeseen consequences...

The backlash is entirely justified. There's way too much plastic waste, and too much of it is ending up in our oceans.

Plastic vs fuel is not an either/or thing: they're both problems. We probably can't eliminate either of them completely, but we should try to cut back on both as much as we can.

A tax on plastic packaging would be a very good idea.

The oceans are being polluted with plastics at an alarming rate and will be littered for thousands of years without human intervention. And littering isn't the big problem, it's the broken system/lifecycle of plastics which doesn't have a safe, efficient way of disposal, reuse, or breakdown.

Even if you take every plastic and drop it into a bin, you're either going to burn it or dump it. Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it. Until we have a proper process for disposing plastics safely and cleanly, we must reduce using it in the ridiculous way we're using it. Single-use plastic bag should never be used if you have a way to use a reusable cloth bag instead.

> Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it.

Because people in the first world won't stand for modern incineration plants. The NIMBYs who would personally be negatively affected spread FUD about a .00001% increased chance of getting cancer or some crap like that.

Burning trash in general is a damn good way to get rid of it. You're left with ash which takes up a fraction of the space and is much easier to contain than the original trash product. Sure, it emits some nasty stuff but when you run an incinerator in the first world you can scrub that out of the exhaust. When you ship that stuff to the 3rd world you lose oversight of what happens to it.

Plastic bag bans and similar movements are about increased quality of life too! We need to avoid the either-or mentality that arises in discussions like this. We can have a shared economy that prioritizes value for consumers and care for our ecosystems, but we need to expand our imaginations with regard to what's possible.

Plastics cannot be reduced to their CO2 impact, they cause tremendous damage to marine animals, they are pollutants themselves, they release endocrine disruptors in the environment, they can persist many many years in the soil and water. The equivalence you imply is not valid.

> The solution [is] enforcing existing laws against littering

That's the classic industry argument: it's not their fault if there is pollution, it's the end users that irresponsibly throw stuff away. Ignoring their heavily-funded lobbying to avoid plastic reduction laws and minimize recycling obligations.

The greenwashing is the anti-littering laws and bodies.

Vermont was planning to introduce laws to require reuse of drinks bottles in the 1950s. Coca Cola, Philip Morris, Budweiser and others clubbed together to form and fund "Keep America Beautiful" to advertise and lobby for the problem to be landed on the consumer instead of the businesses that created the problem.

The solution is putting blame back on the producers, where it belongs. Require them to own that externality they created. Oh, and discouraging litter.

Are people really 'trading' these things? That seems like a bit of a stretch.

I'm having a hard time imagining somebody justifying flying more/further because they aren't using plastic straws in their day-to-day life.

Surely we can work to improve the world on multiple fronts at a time, and if single-use plastics present themselves as both unsustainable long-term and a low-hanging fruit (compared with air travel) in terms of sourcing replacements, then it's reasonable that people would seek to make that small change independent of what is happening in the rest of their lives.

I find this trend of slapping "virtue signalling" on all but the most lofty goals to be a bit disingenuous. It must assume that there is one section of society that is empowered to make all of these changes and that by choosing to pursue single use plastics they suffer the opportunity cost of not developing an alternative means of rapid transport or improved environmental law enforcement.

A single-use-plastic tax which truly takes into consideration the cost of enforcement / cost to the environment and landfill / depletion of a finite resource would have the same effect, sure. I'm not convinced it would escape the "virtue signalling" label, though.

I don't think the cost in Oil is the issue.

We need to do lots of things, this particular thing is easy to do so we should do it.

I don't buy the argument that because we aren't doing other things that we should not do this too.

You can use the same logic to never do anything at all.

The best thing about these bans is they are very visible and raise awareness, giving you the critical mass you need to solve other issues too.

>The best thing about these bans is they are very visible and raise awareness, giving you the critical mass you need to solve other issues too.

I think it's more likely to reduce the chance of solving other issues because it uses up people's mental charity budget. Humans are not naturally utilitarian, and good causes compete with each other based on emotion. There's a huge risk of scenarios like this:

>Save the poor orphan puppies!

"Sure, they're cute. Take all the money."

>Repair the historic building!

"Eh, I guess it's important. Here's a small donation."

>Feed the starving children in Africa!

"Didn't we do that already? Not my problem."

>Prevent the death of billions through climate change!

"I'm sick of all these demands. I'm going to start rolling coal just to spite you."

We need to focus on numbers, not emotion, and the numbers don't justify the backlash.

Using alternative to plastics sounds like a much easier and better solution than trying to stop littering.

Same way than having shorter circuits to reduce transport, or packaging at the end of the chain, or even smarter selling unpackaged good is a much smarter way to deal with transport pollution.

I love this backlash and I'm really happy to try to my small contribution

I think banning plastics here seem like a silly empty gesture as most of the plastics are flowing into the oceans from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

We would be way better of funding cleanup efforts in these rivers.

false dichotomy and i'd argue that small minority isn't so small.

> They improve people's quality of life

Plastic straws improve quality of life? Give me a break.

Without a doubt that plastic is a usability improvement over paper. Sure it's only a minimal improvement in overall quality of life but it's non-zero.

> they didn't use a half gram plastic straw, and then burn a quarter ton of jet fuel traveling by air.

what about people who do neither.

go back to

- ~consigned glass jars - fiber bags

Whataboutism