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Comment by galangalalgol | Hacker News Reader

Is there a good list of what things we can reasonably replace? As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions.

Edit:. Looking around, electrical insulation, seals, and shock absorbers are the three things that I cant think of a good replacement for. Some seals like for weather proofing you could use spring bronze.

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Large, durable plastic use is less of a concern, if I understand correctly. Plastic use around food (and packaging in general), for instance, has a lifespan of approximately 6 months. Compare to the 13 years for plastics used by the automotive industry.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782

There's TONS of packaging that could be replaced by other materials -- particularly materials that can non-toxically decompose in the environment in a reasonable time frame.

Anything that can be made from paper, should be. Primarily bags, shipping containers, product packaging, etc. I've seen Amazon replace plastic bubble wrap with paper-based bubble wrap, for example. They use really fine bits of paper and presumably glue to create the "bubbles".

Instead of using plastic to wrap shipping containers, you could use a more re-usable material. Or perhaps we could come up with cardboard "rings" or other techniques to keep stuff together instead of wrapping it in plastic.

We might have to use more soap or other sterilization techniques, but where practical, using glass containers and aluminum cans would still make sense. I'm certain that if plastic single-use containers were eliminated in convenience stores for a country, we'd see a switch to cans, glass and waxed paper instead, almost overnight. Same as in alcohol stores, perhaps.

Cans for food is iffy, without the liners doesn't it disintegrate the metal? Jars work well and can be reused. Bring back deposits!

Cans for food is actually one thing I would like to see addressed with an alternative. With how ubiquitous cans are, it was a source of plastic in contact with foods that is difficult to avoid.

True to a point, but plastic and the cloud were transitioned to for many things a few years ago because of "saving trees". And then overused to the point of surpassing paper's previous carbon output.

Calling to mind palm oil, adopted as more healthy and sustainable. And then also over-done.

Disposability seems a deeper issue: a retreat to forest products doesn't seem the solution.

The fish-catching clear plastic rings that you throw away, or cut up, are bad, the cardboard packaging coated in paints is bad, but the craft beer heavy duty Paktech rings [1] and Roberts' Craft-Paks [2] seem harbingers of a more reusable + indefinably recyclable future, regardless ultimately of the specific materials involved.

A piece of the wider craft brewery innovation of the '10s in the U.S. [3]

1. https://paktech-opi.com

2. https://shop.robertspolypro.com/collections/craft-pak

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-b...

I wonder if tiny bits of solidified glue (plus paper, wood fibers, etc) in the environment are much better than tiny bits of plastic?

Yes. Nature has evolved ways to dispose of those (unless it’s a synthetic glue that doesn’t decompose)

What characterizes a "synthetic" glue, chemically?

Don't glues generally involve polymers, like plastics?

> As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions.

Respectfully, CV boots on car suspensions have a lifespan of several years, same with phone cases potentially.

As a first step I'm more interested in replacing the things that hundreds of millions of people discard multiple times a day. Starting off by thinking about CV boots and phone cases strikes me as being precipitously close to the "we can't replace everything so lets replace nothing" path.

Not at all, I agree packaging and liners should never need to be plastic. Lets ban them now. Glass and ceramics can replace almost everything that metal can't. Recycle the metal and reuse the glass/ceramic. I was just astounded how few things really needed to be plastic.

The big problem is that there has been little to no effort on what to do with waste plastic. It's cheap to produce but it looks like it's expensive to deal with the waste. Right now it costs money to discard it so people and companies do their best to shift the burden to some one else.

Plastic is an important part of our modern society but we need to use it and get rid of it wisely.

Don't throw away your phone every couple of years and that phone case will last many, many years. Think of anything plastic that you throw away. The items you list are durable goods and are likely environmentally better and less toxic than what was used prior to plastic.

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