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Comment by Negitivefrags | Hacker News Reader

This movement is really dumb.

Plastic pollution in the ocean is a problem, but it’s not the western countries causing it. There are 10 rivers that cause 90% of plastic pollution, and they are in Africa and Asia.

Plastic in a landfill harms nobody.

The worst part is that people somehow have this linked in thier mind with climate change, as in fixing plastic pollution is going to help with that.

Well if anything, it’s going to make it marginally worse because the replacements for single use plastics consume more energy.

Meanwhile this also has a pretty disproportionate amount of inconvenience for the public, continuing the “Environmental issues are about your personal sacrifice” message which is both unnessissary (companies can have a much Larger impact without you sacrificing anything) and counterproductive.

This is the politicians fallicy in action.

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> There are 10 rivers that cause 90% of plastic pollution

Except, that's not true. The study you're referring to found that those 10 rivers account for 90% of plastic waste going into the ocean from rivers, not all sources[1]. Rivers contribute only 10% or so of the plastic found in the ocean. So not nothing, but far from 90% of all plastic pollution.

Also, probably worth pointing out that quite a bit of that plastic probably originated in the west and was shipped to developing nations to be processed cheaply[2]. Often that amounts to little more than having it burned or dumped into those rivers mentioned.

I personally agree that plastic, when properly stored in a well managed landfill is harmless. But the fact is, that's not happening for far too much waste. Even waste that's used and properly disposed of in developed countries.

[1] https://factcheck.afp.com/widely-cited-study-did-not-show-95...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-plastic-polluti...

It is not dumb. It is about setting an example.

We cannot fix everything everywhere, but we can move the needle. Maybe a youth living near one of those 10 rivers, reading about Canada doing it, will become a member of parliament or a minister and will do something about it. Or not. Maybe here in Canada out of necessity we come up with smart solutions to replaces single use plastics that can be copied all over the world. Or not.

But what we can do, we shall, and as a Canadian, I am fully behind this decision.

>We cannot fix everything everywhere, but we can move the needle. Maybe a youth living near one of those 10 rivers, reading about Canada doing it, will become a member of parliament or a minister and will do something about it.

This kind of attitude only makes sense if it doesn't cost anything. Doubling our CO2 usage (assuming we switched to paper bags)[1], just so we can virtue signal to kids in third world countries is asinine.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Get a cloth bag instead of a paper bag and you'll get something that will out life the single-use bag and be more environmentally friendly after using it about 100 times.

Doubling CO2 usage is only true if things remain single-use.

Trees are a renewable resource, trees pull carbon during growth, paper is recyclable seems paper bags are pretty good.

Are you sure there isn't a cheaper way to get the same effect? Doing a giant useless action just to set an example to others for whom it's not so useless doesn't seem like the obvious first choice.

We’ve been setting an Example of basic garbage management practices for some time.

Instead of setting an example we could just pay for waste management programs in Asia and Africa and be done with it. Would be cheaper, faster and more convenient than the current ban all plastics movement.

> Plastic pollution in the ocean is a problem, but it’s not the western countries causing it. There are 10 rivers that cause 90% of plastic pollution, and they are in Africa and Asia.

> Plastic in a landfill harms nobody.

This demonstrably false. Plastics in landfills can leach into groundwater, for one. Two, a huge proportion of the plastic we use and dispose in much of the west end up in Asian countries because we can't be bothered to make sure it's recycled. Three, micro- and nano-plastic pollution is nearly ubiquitous now: we breathe it in and ingest it daily, with almost no understanding of the effects. It is very literally everywhere, from ambient air to the seafloor.

Expecting large public or private institutions to make a meaningful difference without anybody sacrificing anything is exactly the mindset that got us where we are today. Institutions have independent incentive structures and must be forced to work in our interest, otherwise they will not.

Yes, it's a spell of idiotic faith that's somehow been cast over people. I've tried asking proponents of recycling about about this and the only answers I've managed to squeeze out of them are:

1) Landfills leach toxic chemicals into the water table.

2) Landfills are on scarce land which will run out oneday, making waste disposal more expensive.

3) It can be inconvenient to build over a landfill because you might hit a bale of plastic when drilling holes for your piles.

4) Plastic bags can blow away from landfills and end up in the sea.

5) Landfills may eventually erode into the sea.

1) Isn't true of all plastics or all landfills but nobody wants to encourage the use of the harmless ones. 2) and 3) are such small problems, it doesn't make sense for the whole world to pay whatever it costs to slow them (not even stop them). We'll never run out of land, just prime land in existing cities which is already mostly "lost" to development anyway. 4) is easily solved or a non-problem and probably even worse for recycling. 5) is just a response to a recent news event.

Nobody wants to consider if recycling or banning products costs more than the purely financial future landfill cost problem. I've tried asking someone about the relative costs when they gave me reason 2) and they just responded by saying that their conscience feels better knowing they're doing what's right.

Some of their ideas to solve it cause increased greenhouse gas emissions, like you mentioned with the energy cost. Many people even want to burn it!

> 2) Landfills are on scarce land which will run out oneday, making waste disposal more expensive.

Case 2 is an interesting case, it's a startlingly widespread fear yet seems ridiculous when you think about it for more than a few seconds. Slate Star Codex concluded it's alarmism sparked in the 80s by the media's coverage of the Mobro 4000 trash barge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000

Point 5 ("5. More And More Trash Piling Up Until The Whole World Is Just A Giant Mountain Of Trash"): https://web.archive.org/web/20190102054648/https://slatestar...

Oh, I've never heard of drowning in rubbish! With 5) I'm referring to geological effects causing landfill land to collapse and get washed away. That happened recently in New Zealand and a river ended up full of rubbish from a disused landfill.

Sorry, I mean Slate Star Codex's point 5 addresses your point 2. I communicated that poorly.

Incidentally a nice (rather amusing) example from pop culture of the "landfills are filling up and we'll soon drown in trash" meme is Futurama episode 'A Big Piece of Garbage'* (S01E08) It's essentially a parody of that NYC trash barge incident and the movie Armageddon.

Which part of your point 5 link should I be looking at? Doesn't seem to be related.

Those polluting countries are making stuff that the West consumes, so if we want to stop them polluting we just have to stop buying all this stuff that requires pollution to make. So it is absolutely within our gift to put an end to it.

Go to Asian and see how much plastic is domestically used. It’s far more pervasive (in my experience) than the west. Everything goes into a plastic bag.

> Everything goes into a plastic bag.

This needs to be expanded upon. During my recent trip to Japan (mostly Tokyo, not sure if that's representative of the rest of the country), everything was packed in a plastic bag. Pretty much each individual item (when we were e.g. shopping for ready-made food), was already packed in plastic, then was put into individual plastic bags, and then all of those were again put into a plastic bag to carry. I probably used more plastic bags in a few days than I would have in a few months in the West (UK)!

No. It's consumer products like food packaging. Not industrial waste from producing export goods.

Unless you're saying you want to economically cripple them so they stop being able to afford packaged food or just die out entirely?

This. Thank you. Don't forget that there is no proof that plastic in oceans harms humans. On top of that, the infamous Great Pacific Garbage patch is actually made of fishing gear rather than of the despised plastic bottles.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...

Hmm. I didn't know this and it's a very helpful to me. This means that a private entity could create a mild solution and solve this overnight. Especially since there are multiple organisms eating plastics currently and researchers have created a few breakthroughs.

The first country/company to develop properly biodegradable plastics with similar properties to existing ones will be very rich.

But the market won't create that solution unless regulations create the problem to be solved: no more single-use non-biodegradable plastics.

Taxation (or in this case, just internalizing the negative externalities) is almost always the better solution than outright bans.

> The worst part is that people somehow have this linked in thier mind with climate change, as in fixing plastic pollution is going to help with that.

It sometimes feels as though climate change has sucked all the air out of other aspects of environmentalism. If you want to get people to pay attention to something, you first reframe it in terms of climate change. Want to protest the deforestation of the Amazon? Don't bother mentioning habitat loss and extinctions, people no longer care about that; focus on how it will impact CO2 levels. If the matter cannot rationally be framed in that way, do it anyway. Littering causes climate change because if we admit it probably doesn't, people won't care about it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102054648/https://slatestar...

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