A historian unpacks the origins of our plastic addiction

I think there are very few cases of companies actually doing planned obsolescence intentionally. It's always about the price: if I can get a paint roller frame on the shelf for 50¢ less than my competitor's product, I'm going to capture some market-share—even if my product will last half the time as theirs.

>Look at something like the handle on a paint roller. A wooden handle will probably last a lifetime, plastic handle - with carefully measured amount of plastic - can be designed to break the second time you use it: At which point we go to the shop and buy another cheap piece of crap that will do the same.

I'm skeptical of this, at least to this extent. What company is going to invest the engineering resources to reliably design a particular failure mode in something as inconsequential and cheap as a paint roller?

It's probably far more mundane. Aim to reduce cost/increase profit > use less materials, or use cheaper materials, or use a cheaper-to-make design.

>but what capitalist company wants to make goods that last a lifetime

Serious question?

Luxury brands (watches on the order of Omega, for example[0]) and makers of professional tools routinely use the longevity of their products as a marketing point.

[0]:"You never actually own a Patek Philippe – you merely look after it for the next generation."

There's an obvious cost/benefit analysis that people do when they purchase products. Unless you're a professional painter, chances are you don't need a roller that will last a lifetime...you just want to paint your kid's bedroom with the little money you have and then not think about painting for a few years until you get that promotion and move to a new place. It's not a conspiracy.

This is very true to me because I just painted over the weekend. I got the nice roller pads (purdy brand) and cheap rollers (Lowes), both of them snapped at the handle and rotate around 360 degrees now. This was the second room using them and eventually got the job done, but with lots of frustration. The worst part is this happened the last time I painted. The problem with things that last a lifetime is finding a place to store them.

According to this paper, glass bottles need to be recycled 20 times in order to reach the same CO2 footprint as a PET bottle (UK, assuming a 60% recycling rate for PET): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257679872_Life_cycl...

This is tied up with untold logical fallacies.

In the UK we used to have electric milk floats with milkmen that would deliver milk in glass bottles. The dairy would be local. The cows would be local. Big cities had trains to get the milk in. Or the milk would travel in tankers.

The bottling plant would be for local distribution. The empties would be carried back on the milk float.

Moving on we now have dairies many, many miles away. They are not a common sight. The milk goes into single use plastic bottles and gets sent to supermarket depots. It then travels by road vast distances to supermarkets and convenience stores. People then drive to the supermarket and buy the milk.

I personally preferred the way milk was delivered. I liked the community value of having a milkman. I liked washing the bottles and putting them out for collection. The milk wasn't homogenised then, it had not the same shelf life.

I don't believe that having four pints (2 litres) of milk driven over two hundred miles of roads is that efficient. Particularly when I can see cows out the window. Then, since it is the EU, milk can be driven from Germany. Or in yogurt form over the Alps in a 1000 mile journey.

So at one level the CO2 emissions of glass are higher but driving milk hundreds of miles is where the CO2 problem really is.

From a capitalist perspective everything is now really efficient and the market is working. But when milk was government and cared for that way, there was a lot more employment going on. We could have kept it all local with solar and other renewables powering the milk floats instead of coal. But when those former dairies have been shuttered and sold for housing developments there is no goin back. We are stuck with mega dairies.

Water is even worse. There are lorries driving from the Alps with bottled water. This is plain absurd. There was a time when tap water was as good as it could get.

Beer is different, as are spirits and wines. Beer should be brewed locally and served in glasses that get washed in a public house. But widgets in cans and other tricks have made canned beer fine, what most people drink.

Anyway, saying that plastic is less CO2 than glass is just not fair to all the issues of globalised food.

Of course, you can find sloppiness and bad examples everywhere, but you don't prove the theory by a few examples. Perhaps cars was a bad example. My point was that the Japanese and European carmakers always tried to get better performance out of engines without scarifying fuel efficiency. I am not a European nor an American, but I lived on both continents. Visually ( I don't have a statical proof) Americans use much more plastic and produce more plastic garbage than Europeans. A lot of people in Europe genuinely care about the environment and are ready to sacrifice convenience for the environment, but very few people in the USA are willing to do so. Our office produces several large bags of garbage, and we don't have that many people. I am the only person on the whole floor who uses a glass cup for tea, coffee, and water. A reusable glass cup good for my hormones, good for the environment, and also much more pleasant to drink from. I have to wash it from time to time, which some people may find it inconvenient, as it is a lot easier to fill a plastic cup with water, drink it and throw it in the garbage.

Rule of Capture and Hotelling's rule aren't ToC, strictly.

>> The sun is clearly breaking it apart, and will continue to do that down to the molecular level.

You are assuming that the fabric of the plastic is consistent in all levels. In reality tho, most stuff demonstrate different characteristics in lower (molecular) levels.

Wow, it took me some time. For the other slow brains like me: he's talking about wood. Good joke tho :).

well could you imagine how long it would take to start this ?

I mean its still a problem. "We're not as bad as the third world" isn't really an argument

You might want to read up on that thing about plastic coming from a few chines and indian rivers, because it's wrong.

Thank you for taking the time to dig for sources and elaborate (although you basically did someone else's "homework" here).

Where does your recycling go? To nations with the fewest environmental controls. Where does it mostly come from? From the West. So much it breaks down their ability to cope meaning local waste now doesn't get recycled much any more either.

Now that Asia has mainly stopped accepting recycling - much of which is too contaminated before it gets out of the bale or container to recycle so gets illegally dumped or burned - even more goes to Africa instead. Except all countries that have had some part in recycling and try and stop or restrict it find they have a major problem of illegal imports and illegal processing - which is easier to stop than the containers. See for instance the Philippines vs Canada recently.

so the West is exporting what seems to inevitably become an illegal industry to every country stupid enough to join in.

If we just banned export and dumped it all in landfill again the world would be better off.

However, the West sends plastic to Asia.

If a country sends plastic waste to Asia and then it's mismanaged there, what country gets the blame for mismanagement in those statistics?

90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order). [1]

[1] Christian Schmidt, Tobias Krauth and Stephan Wagner (2017), Export of plastic debris by rivers into the Sea

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368

Plastic pollution is a general problem for everyone, including in the USA.

If we're talking specifically about plastic pollution in waterways, the USA is nowhere close to the top of the list for that particular problem.

In the USA, we have the means to recycle most plastics, but there needs to be political will to get it done. Merely relying on industries to make a profit off of plastic recycling is not nearly sufficient.

We need to enact more regulations to ensure that more products are make with recyclable materials, that the products themselves can easily be recycled, and provide incentives to actually do the recycling. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and in the current political climate, little political will to get it done. This is a big problem in the USA.

> No one ships plastic waste unless ...

Yes. Unless we do. Which we are. And it ends up in the water. And we remain responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions.

The US and various European countries definately ship plastic waste to other countries for "recycling".

There was an article recently about Malaysia sending back inappropriate cargo containers, filled of plastic waste, back to the US.

Most of our plastic "recycling" is shipped. Thousands and thousands of container loads full of milk cartons, bottles etc compressed into bales.

The US exports by far the most. Much is poorly washed or sorted, regardless of which nation sent it, often so it's not suitable for recycling - plastic recycling is very easy to contaminate.

When countries push back and restrict imports they find they have an illegal industry that starts mislabelling containers, and illegal factories spring up.

Now it's "their fault".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46566795