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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

In the same vein : why not produce/use less plastics ?

The long term answer has to be, produce almost no plastic at all, except those cases where it's a genuine necessity such as medical uses.

I don't think so. The raw materials can be literally synthesized from thin air with enough energy input and you can burn plastics to get rid of them again.

What we definitely need to stop completely is letting plastics escape into the environment. Clothes made from plastic fibers for example need to go away.

If you have to keep the stuff under harsh disposal control, that would rather obviate the non essential uses.

That's easy to suggest and hard do. How are you going to change the behavior of entire populations? We are already trying education.

Environmentalists are fighting an uphill battle so long as business, whose packaging decision are practically unilateral, aren't held accountable for their contributions.

The "education" that gets the most funding is simple mis-direction away from supply-side pollution to consumer-blaming "solutions".

Yes, but how do you make businesses accountable? Legislation perhaps? Who's going to vote for those? Perhaps if we could educate people to care, but as I said we're already trying that.

On a individual basis, I guess bringing up the issue more often is the best we can do really, I would definitely appreciate more environmentalism in politics discussions, but it feels very low-impact.

> how do you make businesses accountable?

Well, to whom are businesses accountable currently? Shareholders.

Naive solution: make impacted communities shareholders.

Price it appropriately. For the vast majority of the uses of plastic, it isn't the best solution, just the cheapest. Keep adding tax until something more sustainable is cheaper.

But then people couldn't use 30 disposable water bottles a week.

How do you get the government to add the appropriate taxes? That's also easy to suggest and hard do.

I wonder if people would start drinking tap water or disposable wooden water bottles first.

Milk cartons work perfectly well for water too.

Milk cartons contain plastic.

They don't have to and not all do. There are non-plastic food-safe waterproofing liners for cardboard.

Tap water really is not an option in most of the world.

Make companies responsible for the full life cycle of whatever product and packaging they put into this world.

Reducing consumption is the most impactful thing we aren’t doing.

That is the plan.

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is the mantra, after all.

There’s even two more R’s now:

refuse

reduce

reuse (+repair)

recycle

rot

What’s the difference between refuse and reduce?

My guess would be to refuse some things, like plastic food wrappers where they can be switched out with paper. Reduce is using the same product material but using less of it in a single package.

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