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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking these days, that when I was a kid some 20 years ago, people were all the rage against paper, because you had to cut trees and whatnot, everything was switching to plastic so you could "save the trees"

I still wonder what that was about, all it did was screw the paper companies that had their own private forests, and cause the stupid plastic patch on the pacific ocean, and now everyone has to switch BACK to paper.

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Maybe the overarching moral of the story is that single-use "disposable" products aren't a good environmental option regardless of what material they're made of.

This is true but the incentives are currently not calibrated to ensure that more durable products are used. Making disposable bags more expensive, or similar to, reusable bags would go a long way here, I think.

And there are some cases where disposables are important for hygiene and safety, like medical usage. But it would be best to reduce production to those things that have a strong reason to be disposable.

I have a little bit of a different take here.

Paper products represent carbon sequestration. Single use paper products are great in that they are capturing and locking atmospheric carbon.

Trees are renewable resources that can be farmed. I never understood the "save the trees" argument. From what? Most modern lumber harvesting not only cuts down trees, but plants new trees for later harvest. Same way we plant other consumables. Where's the "save the potato!" movement?

Well, the slogan should be something like "Save diverse fauna, flora and funghi which goes through a natural life cycle inside of a vast forest with trees of varying species and ages", but that doesn't fit on a t-shirt :).

Edit: Apparently all living organisms are collectively called "biota", cool.

Fwiw I never heard the "save the trees" only "save the rainforest" (which still makes sense). I grew up with 10k trees per capita though and now it's probably more because farmland is abandoned.

Sequestration only works if the carbon stays locked up.

If you dispose of the bag, and it decomposes to methane in the landfill and is then burned, you've barely done any sequestration

But that’s rarely been highlighted. Plastic bags in grocery stores are banned but I’ve always reused them multiple times. Now I just buy bags to replace the ones I don’t get now.

If the message is “be diligent and minimize use of materials” that’s a pretty agreeable statement to most.

I wish the plastic packaging of the toilet paper was even better suited as a liner for the bathroom bin. It's just good enough as it is, but the producers don't even seem to be aware of this fantastic secondary function.

Turn the single use paper into soil erosion blankets and fight desertification.

When I was traveling in India, the vendors would sell food in small terracotta bowls that you could simply throw down and step on when you were done. I thought this was a nice single-use, disposable and easily recyclable product.

30-40 years ago logging was running at an unsustainable clip, so it was probably a fair criticism at the time.

Then you had a different experience from me. Some teachers in e.g. elementary school forbade binding our loaned books with plastic and had us use paper instead even though that broke much too fast and we had to redo it all the time. This was in Germany.

Could have been a PR campaign from Big Oil to sell more plastics only.

If previous environmental outcries were driven by PR, what's driving the current plastics outcry? Why should one believe that "this time is different?"

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