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>Not to sound preachy, but did anyone have the "wait isn't this bad for the environment" reaction to any of the other stories on HN today? Starlink? That new Samsung fab plant? Shit, there's an ad on the front page right now for a gourmet dinner delivery startup. What is it about this one that brings out HN's inner environmentalist?

This is one aspect of the tech world (and more broadly the "comfortable knowledge worker" class) that irritates me. There are so many aspects of sustainable development that are only considered from a perspective of NIMBYism mixed with orientalism. The one that bothers me the most is the portrayal of overpopulation as something caused only by people in developing countries, as if the first world wasn't part of the total count.

Plus, the first world inhabitants pollute much, much more than third world individuals. Plane travel, consumerism, person/car ratio, etc etc

Oh “first” or “third”, this is actually the “only one” world we have. The more we want to be rich, the more we destroy it. ...how many want to be rich?

What is rich actually? I still don't understand how can an entire nation be rich without someone (immigrant) or machines doing your job.. or access to latest gadgets? but i still see people struggling to pay for education, finding jobs is extremely difficult etc.. people are still low/middle/upper irrespective of the country. there are several developing nations where people don't have so much struggle to live.

> Plane travel, consumerism, person/car ratio, etc etc

The rest of the world is catching up faster than most people are aware.

Here's a link for daily plastic waste generation per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-per-capita

I don't see an obvious correlation between first world and amount of waste: the #1 country is Guyana, China and Russia are well above Canada, etc.

Similar with CO2 emissions: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe... The #1 is Qatar, we in Montenegro are on the second place.

Yes, there isn't a clear divide between "first-world" and everyone else anymore. That being said, I think the wealthier countries that are more industrialized have a debt to pay with regards to climate impact given that they were able to develop and build before mainstream awareness of the issue, and virtually all of the accumulated pollution today is therefore due to these industrialized nations.

I'd like to see a period in which China, India, and smaller nations are able to use more than their share of the global quota while the wealthier countries in western Europe and North America use less, per capita and in sum.

The one that bothers me the most is the portrayal of overpopulation as something caused only by people in developing countries, as if the first world wasn't part of the total count.

FWIW if you ignore immigration, nearly all first world countries are gradually depopulating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

Of course, that doesn't mean for a second that the solution to the world's problems somehow involves population control in developing countries.

In fact, birth rate decreases after a certain level of development. The first world went through the same process, the developing world today is going through that process much more rapidly.

So the solution is probably to help them develop ASAP.

> So the solution is probably to help them develop ASAP.

There are two kinds of mythologies that have been the cause of reckless and thoughtless procreation leading to overpopulation: 1. Religion 2. ‘Abundance’ mythologies penned by the Peter Diamandis/Steven Kotler ilk.

I have no idea who Peter Diamandis/Steven Kotler are but I doubt they had any large effects on the overpopulation of the world.

Regarding "religion": do you think "religions" came up with the concept of having a lot of children?

You don't think it's simply a natural instinct, like in all other animals? And that in a world where few make it to adulthood, people tried to have more children?

> And that in a world where few make it to adulthood, people tried to have more children?

It's pretty well-established that it isn't poverty per se but gender equality that predicts birth rates.

I'm not sure what your point is here. I simply mean that e.g. during the stone age most children died early, so you needed to have more of them.

Then I obviously misunderstood you, sorry for the confusion.

Genuinely interested, could you share some academic literature on the subject?

The newest I immediately remember is this: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol40/2/

Here is a blog post of the author in case the above is not readable for you: https://www.niussp.org/article/gender-equality-and-fertility...

This study is in the context of previous assumptions of a U-curved relationship: low equality == high birth rates, medium equality == low birth rates, high equality == high birth rates. That study shows that the last part doesn't seem to be true.

Thanks!

Poverty can probably actually lower birth rates by forcing women into the workforce. If a parent is at home, the marginal cost is a lot lower for another child than it is if people are paying for childcare.

Direct correlation of female workforce participation and poverty shows no trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-labor-force-partic...

The macro trend of poverty <> birth rates points in the opposite direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

Data points on the very poor end are all over the place, though.

The high workforce participation -> low birth rate correlation is definitely visible over time: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-and-female-labo...

> Of course, that doesn't mean for a second that the solution to the world's problems somehow involves population control in developing countries.

Why not? A lot of people on the left are saying that having children is bad for the environment, why shouldn't this be true in poor countries?

Because A doesn't automatically follow B.

Fewer children is better for the environment; that doesn't mean one has to favor population control. It's easier, more democratic and probably at least as effective to enforce equality for women in education and economics, and the lower birthrates follow automatically.

Population control doesn't have to mean forced mass sterilizations. If you educate people with at least the partial goal of them having fewer children, that is also population control.

Not that there's anything particularly democratic about "enforcing equality" in foreign countries.

How do you reverse it when it becomes a problem? If we’re taking the long view here, our future generations may be facing a world where there aren’t enough people. Or is that a problem that we’ll leave to them to figure out?

>our future generations may be facing a world where there aren’t enough people

That would be wonderful because it would mean that workers get fair wages. Lack of productivity can be compensated by automation.

>How do you reverse it when it becomes a problem?

That's biologically impossible. Even if you sterilize every human with a birth certificate on earth.

I’m not personally advocating for population control, just couldn’t understand why it would be completely off the table in poor countries.

I think the conversation is just scary for obvious reasons based on human historical tendencies. The topic is not exactly verbotten, but it is genuinely hard to argue for or against dispassionately. Part of the official reasoning is that young population is a poor's country resource. I personally take issue with nations seeing their population that way, but it is not unusual.

I honestly am not sure education is the answer. Both me and my wife are educated. There are arguments against us having children from genetic standpoint and she still wanted to roll the dice. It may work in aggregate, but natural pull is very strong.

Actually that wouldn't be a very efficient solution because pollution is not evenly divided across the world's population. See this map [1] showing CO2 emissions per capita, or this diagram [2] showing CO2 emissions per fertility.

As this article [3] (unfortunately not in English) aptly puts it: "Air travels represents around 5% of the emissions of humanity [4], but 90% of humans have never taken a plane." (the 90% figure is arguably difficult to assess [5]. It comes from an article in French behind a paywall, but other sources [6] show similar numbers).

Finally, CO2 is of course not the only source of pollution. But this map [7] showing meat supply per person shows a similar direction.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/CO2_emis...

[2] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2014;&mar...

[3] https://medium.com/enquetes-ecosophiques/d%C3%A9mographie-et...

[4] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/30987495.pdf

[5] https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-worlds-population-...

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/17/people-caus...

[7] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Meat_sup...

Because your children will pollute and consume an order of magnitude more than poor children. If you're American, your children will pollute and consume twice as much as even Europeans, IIRC.

Of course, this is the average American, which is a deceptive number when talking about countries with high levels of wealth inequality.

Please don’t assume I’m American; anything but that.

I’m not an advocate for population control, but if I were I wouldn’t exclude poor countries from my scope. Many poor countries are “developing” and it seems more reasonable to ask people that were planning to have 8 children to instead have 4 rather than targeting people that were aiming for one or two. Especially when the 8 kid family to be is already poor.

The "twice as much as even Europeans" is even more deceptive as there's a difference of at least a factor of 2 between countries in Europe. For instance, Switzerland's consumption of carbon per capita is almost 3 times that of Bulgaria or Portugal, while Luxembourg is apparently over twice as high as the US (not sure why?).

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

> This take seems trivially and obviously wrong.

I don't think this is obviously wrong at all. Dispersing a fine mist of micro plastics into the environment, where it can enter the air and water system, is very very different than sticking a piece of plastic into the ground, where it will comfortably sit for a thousand years with minimal decomposition.

For a good example, here's [1] a study about how car tires, which slowly disappear into the environment, are a major contributor to micro plastics in the ocean.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/tires...

You’re missing that not all plastics make into a landfill and are around us already leeching microplastics. I’d think that bricking them and covering them with other materials would lock them in better than a bottle floating in a river

I lived in Kenya. Stuff under the road doesn't stay there long. They get incredible abuse and little maintenance. It's hard to think of anything that would generate more microplastics than putting it in a road. Plastic in the ocean, in your garden, in an animal's mouth, anywhere else, just can't compare to the grinding action of thousands of cars daily.

The road? These are footpath pavers.

He obviously didn't read the article.

Footpath state in Nairobi is awful, I haven't spent much time out of the capital.

But if you're able to collect those plastics it would be better to send them to a well managed landfill rather than make them into bricks.

Nobody is recommending that we throw used plastic in the river as an alternative.

> Dispersing a fine mist of micro plastics into the environment

Huh? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this is happening...?

Why would you require the article to suggest this? It’s an uncontroversial consequence of subjecting plastic to a continuous barrage of abrasive forces.

Similarly, if rain is expected, I don’t need the forecast to tell me that rain makes clothes wet.

How does their use in footpaths subject the pavers to a "constant barrage of abrasive forces"?

People will step on the path when they are walking on it. Rubber wears down paths, as does any sort of abrasive sand or rocks between the shoe and the road. There is a significant amount of wear even on stone paths from foot traffic. There are some plastics I would be willing to try, like UHMW, but wear resistant plastics like that are also very slippery and not cheap even in recycled form.

She is essentially making composite decking but in brick form. The sand filler will probably take a lot of the wear. Solid blocks of plastic last a long time so the degradation will be minimal compared to the waste plastic it is being made from.

> with minimal decomposition.

That's the thing - does it actually decompose at the same rate or slower than eg. concrete or brick?

Concrete and brick are a natural, inert, substances that have been present, in some similar form, in nearly all bodies of water, and most natural enviromnents, since the beginning of life. Plastics have been around for 113 years, and they don't quickly remove themselves from the water ways (they're buoyant), as rock dust/sand does.

The rate of decomposition is not the correct metric to look at, in this context.

One possible explanation is that this has an obvious environmental aspect. If somebody is doing something for environmental reasons, it doesn't seem surprising that people are thinking about it from an environmental perspective.

Obviously many things not done for environmental reasons have environmental impacts, but the mere idea itself doesn't automatically invoke that perspective. You can read about a new fab without thinking about the environmental aspects, but you probably cannot read about somebody recycling plastic without thinking about the environment.

That’s called letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The perfect doesn’t exist in this case.

Isn't that interesting? Not to sound preachy, but did anyone have the "wait isn't this bad for the environment" > reaction to any of the other stories on HN today? Starlink? That new Samsung fab plant? Shit, there's an ad on the front page right now for a gourmet dinner delivery startup. What is it about this one that brings out HN's inner environmentalist?

Thanks for bringing this up: Honestly, that thought has never crossed my mind when thinking about these initiatives. Much appreciated: You've changed the way I think.

> What is it about this one that brings out HN's inner environmentalist?

Because the project is literally about plastic pollution solving?

Plastic is so cheap any recycling project faces either an environmental or an economical showstopper. I am glad this one is having some impact.

Iirc, plastic wastes are added to the tar mix to cover roads, to saw dust and glue to produce composite deck boards, etc. I am not informed enough to have an opinion on whether it’s a good or bad thing.

When I visited Kenya, people literally just burned their plastic trash in a pit on the side of the road.

So yeah, any form of reuse/recycling seems better than that.

5 of the 6 points noted in OP’s comment had to do with brick’s rigidity and compressive strength. 1 point was related to the environment. Plastic bricks are an alternative to sand/clay bricks.

Traditional bricks first appeared in China and have been adopted and used by humans across various civilizations for thousands of years.

As engineering advanced globally, the pros and cons of bricks have been well explored and well understood. Plastic bricks are a new contender to this problem.

That said, when you have a new contender to a centuries established and globally adopted solution, it might be more likely to prompt exploration of its potential cons.

Starlink is a new engineering solution with several of its own cons that have been reported in HN. It is difficult to compare Starlink against other alternatives when Starlink has a narrow use case that it particularly excels in (high speed Internet to unserviced areas of the globe)

Because this article specifically deals with the environmental impacts of plastics and how to reduce them. Starlink could raise hundreds of moral/philosophical issues, it would be insane to address them all every time.

If the starlink article involved how much plastic waste they caused the discussion would be around that, if it involved privacy and surveillance we would talk about that, if it involved how fast the speeds are we would talk about that...

> Recycling plastic produces a lot of nasty chemicals and is awful for the environment, but we still do it, because the alternative (chucking it in a landfill) is worse

Manority of plastic waste is NEVER recycled. Lets not spread myths.

There is no need for myths when you can rely on powerful euphemisms such as "thermal recycling"...

"Officially, Japan recycles 84 percent of the plastic it collects, one of the highest rates in the world, but the government designates three types of recycling processes: material, chemical and thermal. Material recycling means the plastic itself is reprocessed into new plastic — PET bottles, for instance, are made into new PET products. This is probably the image of recycling that most people have. Chemical recycling means that plastic waste is broken down into its constituent components, which are then recombined to make new plastic materials. Thermal recycling means that the plastic is burned in incinerators to produce energy."

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/06/national/media-...

Burning plastic to produce heat hardly counts as "recycling"...

Incidentally, in Japan, PET recycling is a very small minority of all plastic collected, so it hardly moves the mark even if that part is recycled in plastic-loving Japan.

> Not to sound preachy, but did anyone have the "wait isn't this bad for the environment" reaction to any of the other stories on HN today? Starlink? That new Samsung fab plant? Shit, there's an ad on the front page right now for a gourmet dinner delivery startup. What is it about this one that brings out HN's inner environmentalist?

The others aren't claiming to be an environmental solution so it doesn't get looked at under that lens first. Plastic as well strikes a nerve by hitting upon other issues like microplastics and past deception of recyclability.

I think it essentially hits a lot of "bad idea flags" combined with a cognitive bias I noticed. A company which casts itself as "pro-worker" company paying $12/hr for say sign-turner jobs when most in the field/area pay only minimum wage getting more backlash than everyone else. didn't "betray them" in spite of paying higher than everyone else. It seems everybody hates hypocrisy in which they are not a participant.

> This take seems trivially and obviously wrong.

Quite the opposite actually. Tires are already a huge source of microplastics pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664766/

> because the alternative (chucking it in a landfill) is worse.

The problem is that landfills aren't living up to their names. They aren't being filled in and buried. Burying plastic is the best thing you can do to dispose of it. It's only when they're left in the open air to break down and be spread all over the oceans by wind that you have a problem.

Yes about Bitcoin and it was a rather large discussion too.

> Recycling plastic produces a lot of nasty chemicals and is awful for the environment, but we still do it, because the alternative (chucking it in a landfill) is worse.

Is it, though? Or was that just a scam to keep us buying plastic shit and to keep packaging unregulated?

It is not trivially and obviously wrong that it might be better to throw plastic into big holes than to spread it all over the surface of the planet. It's not true for nuclear waste. Not to be preachy, but the "at least they're doing something" common sense argument is not good. You have to do the math.

the alternative (chucking it in a landfill) is worse.

How so?

hehehe, I knew someone would challenge that. I don't know the particulars, I am inferring that recycling plastic is better than dumping it in some way from the fact that it's more expensive yet people still do it. I did not mean it in the sense of "I know a lot about plastic recycling and ready and willing to defend the mainstream view against people who think it is misguided."

> I am inferring that recycling plastic is better than dumping it in some way from the fact that it's more expensive yet people still do it.

There is a lot of demand to be told that when you separate your plastic out, it gets recycled. There's no demand for the recycling to actually happen, so mostly it doesn't.

> the alternative (chucking it in a landfill) is worse

Why is that worse?

Plastic is made out of oil. It belongs in the ground.

So if the rate we produce new plastic is slower or the same as decomposition, than it will be a lesser problem than its today?

It's quite common for users to jump down the throats of anyone who talks about privacy/encryption without sufficient perceived weight behind them. I suppose this could be seen as more of the same. But I also wonder if the comments would be less dismissive and condescending if the article were framed differently. There's a lot more to this story than the journalist has bothered to cover and they are partly to blame for the reaction.

"Former data analyst and engineer creates startup to develop award-winning material over five times stronger than concrete from waste, following scholarship in US university materials lab."

> What is it about this one that brings out HN's inner environmentalist?

This is the oldest internet comment phenomena in the world, so why do you only notice it here and not every other time?

People always have the nature to attack and knock down, and stories of an individual building something on their own is a far more accessible punching bag than anything else you mentioned. We get to roleplay as critics, scientists, environmentalists, bureaucrats, and we love it.

pg's "middlebrow dismissal" was coined from watching HNers attack the guy building something in his garage.

> What is it about this one that brings out HN's inner environmentalist?

This is obvious and very easy to see, while the other examples you brought up aren't. Your examples might even be doing more damage, but because the end result is shiny, people are distracted.

Plus, I'm sure there's a part of first world vs third world prejudice: "she's probably uneducated and doesn't know what she's doing, plus her accent sounds that way".