US Should Create Strategy by End of '22 to Reduce Increasing Ocean Plastic Waste | Hacker News Reader

US Should Create Strategy by End of '22 to Reduce Increasing Ocean Plastic Waste

nationalacademies.org

128 pointsinfodocket116 comments

Relevant: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...

TL;DR: The bulk of plastic entering the oceans comes from China, India, and Southeast Asia; it's still somewhat the US's fault since we dispose of a lot of plastic per capita and send much of our recycled plastic there; accordingly, the author claims, Americans should generally throw plastic in the garbage instead of recycling it.

Relevant quote from that page:

> And zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

And I’m not even in an area that drains into the Pacific Ocean. Last i checked there wasn’t much of a problem at all of plastics flowing down the Mississippi, but I still have to drink out of godawful paper straws.

This is only looking at river waste. The major contributor to plastic waste in the ocean is fishing gear. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...

That's a good point, but "the major contributor" seems like a stretch. That article claims 640,000 tonnes/year of fishing equipment end up in the ocean, which is ~8% of the 8 million tonnes/year of overall plastic waste that end up in the ocean according to https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/paddling-in-...

This might be true, but it seems commonly described as the major contributor because it's 40-70% of floating plastic and macroplastics. On the other hand, microplastics sink to the ocean bed. https://hillnotes.ca/2020/01/30/ghost-fishing-gear-a-major-s... I'm not sure which has more environmental impact.

Plastics that do actually sink to the ocean bed are actually carbon sinks, a good thing as long as they don’t do so much damage to the ecology on the way down.

The two major carbon sinks which really matter are building up global living biomass (i.e. replanting forests) and getting carbon locked in sediment on the ocean floor (by building up living ocean biomass that rains down on seafloor areas which are actively building up sediment.

Yep... but politicians ban plastic straws and then brag how they're saving the planet, while those guys can do whatever they want.

It was meant to be just a starting point of removing one use plastics that are in the background of daily life. The trend ought to continue.

Or it’s a meaningless gesture meant to appear to be doing something because it’s visible but only annoying people and building opposition for something otherwise quite important.

It makes you feel good if you already like it, but really builds an easy win for opposition by demonstrably doing nothing of substance while making life a little more unpleasant. In other words it serves only to be divisive and give an opportunity for people to have strong opinions about something irrelevant; which is actually the point of much of politics, cement your support base by getting people riled up about inconsequential and thus risk free issues.

"builds an easy win for opposition by demonstrably doing nothing of substance "

It has some effect and if you want a big change sometimes it's better to start small. For example, if you wanted to get in shape you start by running a small distance.

"In other words it serves only to be divisive and give an opportunity for people to have strong opinions about something irrelevant; which is actually the point of much of politics, cement your support base by getting people riled up about inconsequential and thus risk free issues."

This is even more disturbing; you think that people on the left (and yes I'm just going to name the sides here) want to help the environment solely to anger the right? I have never met anyone who cares about the environment admitting to me their only and true motive is to anger the opposition.

Is the reason you think this because that's your motive? For example "owning the libs". It is because you can't possibility be wrong about environmental policies that the other side must have another motive?

Do pickup truck owners roll coal on cyclists because they think cyclists are out there riding just to shove that fact in their face? That they are putting all that physical effort as virtue signaling?

> It has some effect

No.

> You think that people on the left want to help the environment solely to anger the right?

He never said that, and I doubt you have psychic powers.

Environmentalists have always favored ideology over effectiveness.

It is more important to show their friends that they are "doing the work", even though the actual results are almost always worse for the environment.

Seventy years of environmentalists fighting against nuclear power is why most of the US is still powered by coal. Bad for atmospheric carbon, bad for the nation, but great if you make your money from NGOs.

> Environmentalists have always favored ideology over effectiveness.

I don't know if that's actually true or not (it would be worth a macro study). Unfortunately, this is often true for almost every group for whatever it's fighting for. It's ideology that brings people together. This is easily seen in NGOs, and is very well examined in Dead Aid [1]. I highly recommend reading it... emotion is what drives most giving, and almost certainly how people fight for a cause. It's hard to be rational all the time.

> Seventy years of environmentalists fighting against nuclear power is why most of the US is still powered by coal. Bad for atmospheric carbon, bad for the nation, but great if you make your money from NGOs.

Can you give evidence to support that environmentalists fighting nuclear is why we have so much coal? Seems like the coal lobby has been pretty strong lately for their own survival, independent of any environmental concerns.

[1] https://dambisamoyo.com/book/dead-aid/

>Can you give evidence to support that environmentalists fighting nuclear is why we have so much coal? Seems like the coal lobby has been pretty strong lately for their own survival, independent of any environmental concerns.

Nuclear is (or at least can be) long-term cheaper than coal, the biggest cost of nuclear is the initial construction cost which can go way down if the process isn't bogged down with local environmental opposition and if instead of a few one-off plants you have a consistent schedule which allows for effectively mass-produced power plants. Government usage of nuclear scaremongering to prop up power and support the geopolitical struggle with the USSR and the environmental adoption of this attitude put the construction of nuclear plants severely behind and limited research and development of better, cheaper reactors. In other words, much of the cost of nuclear can be attributed to opposition to nuclear which if it had not happened would have resulted in much less carbon being burned for electricity. Lobbyists can do a lot but they can't make major economic benefits magically disappear which is why coal shutdown has been slowed but not stopped by the fact that coal is now among the most expensive electricity and nobody wants to buy it.

No I think politicians don’t give a shit and gravitate towards issues that won’t get them in trouble with actual groups (like regulating industrial fishing waste) and are visible to their constituents and get their constituents motivated. Nothing motivating like a polarizing issue that your voters can argue about. And given the political landscape and how people get elected, the only way you win is by focusing on bullshit issues people can argue about.

> Do pickup truck owners roll coal on cyclists because they think cyclists are out there riding just to shove that fact in their face? That they are putting all that physical effort as virtue signaling?

Do you think the kind of person that does this has another more enlightened reason?

Both should be regulated. Constant back and forth “x is worse” is why there’s been zero progress with plastics or CO2.

It's not just a back and forth in good faith. Small changes like plastic straw bans are often used to avoid taking action on things that really matter. It creates the illusion of progress so that the people really causing harm can continue without making any substantive changes to their bottom line.

I spent 4 years living in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It is literally in the culture to just throw shit into the ocean, rivers, everywhere. It is painful to watch how bad it is.

The US was just like that before the environmental movement made it unacceptable a few decades back.

When I was a wee lad the soda cans were not yet engineered to retain the opener ring, and at every national park or scenic view there would be thousands of soda can rings, in addition of course to the millions of cigarette butts.

[edit in response to the almost random downvote that I seem to get at first] Point is that soda can engineering responded to the embarrassment of the ubiquitous littering and made a product that took care of it. The evolution of the soda can in my lifetime is very interesting, starting with steel cans, then aluminum, the retained opener, the elimination of the separate bottom, and finally the ever reducing top diameter and wall thickness to reduce the material use. Cheers!

That’s spot on, it’s like seeing a scene of deja vu from the 1960s where people didn’t give a second-thought about throwing garbage anywhere until the EPA and Clean Water Act entered the scene.

People get used to it being “a thing” in their lives, and just don’t have the awareness or infrastructure for better disposal.

Right - and the thing most folks don’t realize is that when you “recycle” your plastic it gets shipped to those countries. (Used to get shipped to China until they blocked exports of low-quality recycling stock).

I’m increasingly persuaded by the thought that putting plastic in a landfill domestically would be much better for the environment than our current recycling program.

Regardless: shipping waste outside of your community should be absolutely forbidden, there should be no way to externalize waste.

Agreed on throwing plastic away. It's safer in a landfill than having it sold to a SE Asian country where it may be dumped in the ocean or burned out in the open. Plastics can safely wait in our landfills until the day comes when it makes economic sense to dig them up and use them in one way or another.

I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste, just as each individual should take responsibility for their own actions. If we all do that and stop looking to our neighbors to clean up our messes, the world will be a better place. When Americans recycle, we certainly don't understand it gets shipped to Asia and dumped in the ocean. Let's not indoctrinate our citizens to believe it's their fault that Asian countries dump crap in the ocean, you're not doing the Americans who look to the media for training on what to think any good.

I agree with the first part of what you said: individuals should take responsibilities for their actions. You don't just get to claim ignorance that your actions are having negative consequences. Therefore, it's irresponsible to recycle plastic in the US and you should throw it away.

>I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste,

Only one country is home to the Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest producer of plastic waste.

The plastic bottles for Coca-Cola are manufactured all around the world. They don't ship much bottled Coke from the US to other countries.

The franchises follow policy set by Coca-Cola headquarters, right? You're splitting hairs here.

No I'm not splitting hairs at all. The local bottling companies have significant operational freedom. They could stop selling plastic bottles and only use glass or aluminum if they wanted to.

Glass bottles are more reusable and recyclable, but transporting glass burns more fuel. Reuse requires a lot of water to wash the bottles (though perhaps washing can be made more efficient) while remanufacturing crushed glass into bottles uses additional energy.

Still I'd be in favor of going back to glass because they are nicer than plastic and soda seems to taste better in glass bottles, perhaps in part because it doesn't have to be overcarbonated.

I tend to think that the person who buys the bottle and chooses to throw it away or recycle it has produced the waste, no one throws sealed bottles of Coca-Cola away.

If I buy a bottle of Coca-Cola, drink it then throw it out my car window, is Coca-Cola responsible for that bottle being swept into a storm drain and into a river? I don't think so.

Coca-Cola produces valuable goods, if you choose to take an action that results in the bottle floating out to sea, it's your fault, you don't get to blame Coca-Cola. That is what I mean by personal responsibility.

If my local recycling company sells bulk recycled plastic to an Asian commodity broker with the understanding that the plastic will be used to make new goods and the broker decides to dump the plastic in the ocean, is my local recycling company to blame for the plastic in the Ocean?

>Coca-Cola produces valuable goods, if you choose to take an action that results in the bottle floating out to sea, it's your fault, you don't get to blame Coca-Cola. That is what I mean by personal responsibility.

So in your ideal world it is 100% personal responsibility and 0% corporate responsibility, right?

"Phillip Morris produces valuable goods, if you choose to take an action that leads to your body growing a tumour, it's your fault, you don't get to blame Phillip Morris."

Corporations like Coca-Cola have successfully pushed the negative externalities of their product into the world we all have to live in, while keeping the profits.

That is correct, unless you did some due diligence and were fed incorrect information by a universally trusted authority, in that case you were deceived. You need to take personal responsibility until it becomes abundantly clear that you were duped into some behavior. You take responsibility for your own actions, you don't get to blame anyone. If you throw the bottle out the window, you polluted. The comparison to phillip morris is not apt, is Coca-Cola claiming plastic does not harm the environment, no they are not. Phillip Morris claimed smoking did not cause physical harm, very different.

Don't let yourself fall into a state of victimhood, where if you find your behavior producing outcomes that is not optimal you start looking for external forces to blame, you need to start taking responsibility for your own actions.

It’s a good thing many Americans now have more willingness or emotional drive to care more about the environment, but the US really needs to rip the band-aid off on the recycling falsehoods passed down from the 1980s.

It creates a false image that “it’s ok to consume as much as you want, as long as you recycle!” - as if all those Coke and Deer Park bottles go straight from the blue bin right back to the beverage factory, meanwhile they get packed on a giant polluting ship and sent halfway around the world to a poor country then get dumped into the ocean.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Unfortunately in this case - what goes around, comes around.

We should use our collective ecological motivation to create systems that actually address the biggest polluters, which means not just letting them pass the issue on or give a shrug like there’s nothing they can do.

Just the bottled water craze alone is terrible. Drinking water should come from the tap, and if what comes from your tap is not drinkable you should fix that rather than to pay 100 fold what it should cost per liter of potable water to the likes of Coca Cola.

I'm just going to leave this here...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270819/ocean-plastic-po...

The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans (it's something like >30th on the list).

It's effectively 80+% from Asian countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

> Taking a leadership role in preventing plastic pollution would position the U.S. to shape and influence global plastic production, design, and innovation — and possibly create new economic opportunities, the report says.

The U.S. dictating to the poor backwards nations of the asian pacific will go over well.

More likely, a company setup by the family member of several U.S. politicians will receive funds from the U.S. government to aid in "transitioning" these economies to a post-plastics world. None of which will be effective and largely be like the Clinton Foundation in Haiti.

The reality is that reducing crude oil to gasoline production will remove the ability to produce plastics. As plastics become more expensive, different materials will be utilized.

I believe that the feedstock for most plastics is natural gas.

This is correct, the two biggest plastics are polyethylene and polypropylene, which natural gas is the feedstock.

America is the main military and economic power in the Asian Pacific. Currently the US has the power to dictate such terms, but the countries probably can't actually fulfill them

As I understand the United States and others just ship all their plastic to Asia where it is dumped in the ocean so they can claim they are green for whatever consumer advocate.

My county landfill gets paid for the plastic that trucks come and take away (or they put it in the landfill).

Who is supposedly paying to come pick it up, put it on a boat, and so on, instead of just putting it into the landfill?

You! via taxes to local, state, and federal governments, who pay for "recycling" (illusion) programs that citizens demand.

No, I don't want that glib answer, I want an explanation about the flow of funds.

Like is there a federal program handing out money to the companies buying the recycling? Was there a secret government program sending money to Chinese recyclers?

And for instance, metal, cardboard and paper recycling actually work well. How come the may-may about plastic recycling being fake rolled those in?

> Those city departments responsible for trash pickup now incur significant costs, over and above what they would have to pay in the absence of recycling. These costs include the personnel and equipment for separate additional refuse collection (or payment to a contractor to provide the service), as well as the cost of paying firms to accept recyclables, now that they no longer can be profitably resold.

> Some recyclables — notably, aluminum cans — continue to have a relatively high market value. But they are mixed with other materials that have little value and therefore require expensive sorting.

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/recycling-cost-benefit-a...

So, cities pay for recycling to be collected, and then after that pay some company to take it off their hands. They used to not pay much for the latter, sometimes even zero, if enough aluminum could be recovered. But now, they pay for it to be taken too.

These companies that take the recycling, try to make some profit from the money they are paid, and the materials. They also have to look like they are actually recycling. So they used to just spend some of the money (which they are paid by the city, and some from the pure aluminum they can separate) to ship the worthless stuff to China for "recycling" ... and what's left over is profit.

EDIT: better specific data:

> Boston then pays a private firm, Casella Waste Systems, to sort and sell the materials when there is a buyer, or otherwise dispose of them.

> The price that the city must pay Casella to accept these recyclables has been rising, partly because some 25% of the materials are contaminated. A five-year “residential recycling processing contract” that expired in 2019 called on the city to pay $70 per ton for that service;[18] a new contract signed in 2019 increased that fee to a minimum of $125 per ton and a maximum of $160 per ton—depending on market conditions.

What does Boston pay per ton to dispose of garbage?

> Notably, Boston pays a significantly lower tipping fee to dump the unsorted general refuse that it collects: $80 per ton.

Most of the world signed a treaty in 2019 to stop the flow of trash from wealthy countries (Basel Convention).

But worth noting its firms in the poor countries buying the stuff as scrap to recycle, and tossing or burning the stuff they couldn't recycle.

It's specifically recycled material. Stuff that's thrown away makes it into well managed U.S. landfills with no issues.

Nope. Most asian nations (China most notably) stopped or greatly reduces such imports about 5 years ago. And, even when these imports were happening, its was for reprocessing, not disposal purposes. Yes, if recycled plastics prices precipitously fell then some importers may have dumped the imports, but that was not generally the case. You may also be confusing plastic waste with electronic scrap which contains plastic waste. Here again, those imports have largely stopped.

They reduced the imports of stuff that was just garbage.

It stopped in China, not in the rest of Asia.

Nope (again). Malaysia, Vietnam & others have taken similar positions.

They didn't really stop it, but they raised the quality standards to be so high that no post-consumer plastics qualify. Something like less than 5% contamination.

They do still accept "clean" plastic, like from industrial manufacturing. Think custom molded part containers or similar.

And before you start cleaning your recycling before binning it, that automatically uses enough water and energy to defeat the point of recycling.

Why would you say something like that? It makes me uncomfortable even pointing stuff like this out but sometimes people just need to see it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYMuh-5V9fk

> The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans

Does it make it ok for them to throw plastic in oceans?

Go for the low hanging fruit first, then, when you’re done there, go for the slim Pickins. Bang for the buck.

I didn't read anywhere in OPs comment that it was ok to litter in the US because India produces 50x more waste.

Given we have limited time and resources I believe he is implying that it's easier to reduce Indian waste by 1% than reduce American waste by 50%. So we should probably focus on former.

How about showing some leadership from the “leader of the free world”?

>The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans (it's something like >30th on the list).

Coca-Cola and Pepsi are consistently the biggest offenders in plastic waste.

The United States should be the shining global role model we are so often told it is, and legislate to force better corporate behaviour around these issues.

At this point the consumer-blaming logic regarding single use plastic bottles is like "Well, we just make cigarettes, we can't help it if people smoke them and get sick."

Not good enough.

Why? Why should the US shoulder the load that will disproportionately affect the finances of the lower and middle class and make essentially no environmental impact?

Two specious arguments.

1. A 30c-$1 increase in the price of Coke relative to its current baseline will not break the bank.

2. Tens/hundreds of millions of slowly degrading plastic bottles in the ocean certainly do have an environmental impact.

> to reduce increasing

e.g. not to stop it but to make it increase less but still increase?

what we need is a total ban on any plastics. I get free plastic bags doing groceries in Rome, Italy and it's 2021. All of this is going too slow. The whole recycling industry even in Germany, Switzerland and Austria is literal garbage and I hope that instead of talking a big game and making people think we make a difference with 5 different colors of containers we can solve this where it needs to be solved? The price of using plastic needs to be taxed into oblivion so that it is no longer economically feasible to destroy the planet with this shit.

edit: unlike most of you I have seen many beaches in South-East Asia when I was really young, ... these places were free of plastics/garbage and full of marine life and animals that thrived along the coastline. These romantic lone islands ... they are garbage dumps now with fresh new garbage floating in every morning. None of you will ever experience them the same way as I had the opportunity to unless you're looking forward to go snorkeling in a garbage dump. My generation is the one that deserves the blame and I hope they get held accountable and has been robbed of the opportunity to see these things that my generation had.

This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. The alternatives are often energetically quite a lot worse. Most plastics recycling is nonsense outside of a few developing technologies that actually produce Virgin quality precursors.

Plastic should be burned in power plants when it is no longer needed and people shouldn’t litter. When reasonable other polymers should be replaced with PLA which does not have the endocrine disrupting qualities of other things and doesn’t last centuries in the environment (and is just lactic acid which is everywhere in biology).

The plastic most people use absolutely does not destroy the environment or end up in the ocean. This is a littering problem mostly in Asian countries, not a materials problem.

> This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes.

my fist job leaving my home country was working as a PADI diving instructor. We set up a small company in Colombo, Sri Lanka called "Adventure Sports Lanka" and hired a local fisherman in Unawatuna just outside Galle. We (dumb Brits) had no idea what we got ourselves into but because a civil war was also raging (another story) this guy who drove our boat supported his whole family with the salary that he made from acting as the "captain" of our diving boat.

He took me and my students nearly every day out on his boat and waited patiently for us to get back to the surface and into the boat. Once I took out a student to teach them in an Advanced course about project A.W.A.R.E which is basically about how not to have impact on the environment as a diver, never leave anything behind etc. The student was a German girl who was very keen. When we got back from our dive our captain decided to throw an empty water (plastic) bottle back into the sea. I was incredibly embarrassed because he was on my payroll and I was just finishing a whole day of telling her (who was 100% a supporter of the Green party and much onboard with the whole program in this cursed course) about how well we take care about the environment as PADI divers.

Getting back onto the boat I confronted the captain who just shrugged his shoulders and said: "but you know sometimes a bird comes. and they sit on the bottle. they are tired and they sit"-

I had no words for him because I realized how far his reality was from mine. In a similar way I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you.

peace.

It’s not going to reach me because you don’t have a point besides a gut feeling and a sense of moral superiority. If you have no words then don’t use any, unlike what you’ve done here. If your opinions were driven by practical reason and concrete goals you could discuss them and even come to an understanding of different opinions based on differing priorities but instead it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position.

> it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position

I reflected on your comments and it's a shame because the interesting points you made got completely drowned out by you entering the chat with hostility:

> This is nonsense,

it's impossible for anyone not to immediately become defensive after reading this.

Too bad, your way of emotion driven arguments about the real problems the world faces is the threat to solving them and I am unapologetic for my hostility towards that attitude.

If these problems are going to be solved, they will be by people who can survive and continue to engage with people that think their ideas are stupid. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and if we have to coddle them we’ll end up in exactly the echo chambers we already suffer from. Only willingness to be around people that disagree with you to the point they think you’re crazy and not take your toys and go home because people aren’t nice about your opinions is going to enable actual progress.

> your way of emotion driven

don't worry I don't feel a thing when being attacked because I assume the person doesn't know any better. Neither am I here to teach grown men something their mother failed at.

> what we need is a total ban on any plastics... I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you.

You're proposed solution would cause the deaths of at least tens of millions of people yearly and would undoubtedly push a huge chunk of society worldwide into abject poverty. This is among the worse solutions I can think of to address the problem of plastic pollution in Asia.

Plastic is necessary? I think civilization survived just fine for millennia without plastic, actually.

Plastic may be beneficial for applications like medicine or non-disposable applications like buildings and machinery, and nobody's arguing against that. But to wave away all single-use plastics like sauce packets and drink bottles as necessary is IMHO ignoring very recent (like, just 50 years ago!) history. We can have a bigger imagination than that!

Saying plastics are fine, as long as people don't litter, is wishful thinking. People are lazy and they will litter, and even if they don't, people are cheap and irresponsible dumpers will dump trash anywhere to save a buck. Wishful thinking and moral prescriptivism aren't solutions to problems of human behavior. Taxing single-use plastics to oblivion is.

How many people do you suppose the advent and usage of plastic keeps alive today?

For reference, in 1950, there were 2.5 billion people alive.

A plastic coke bottle, a plastic burger wrapper, a plastic child's toy, and a plastic shopping bag aren't keeping anyone alive. That's what we're referring to here: single-use junk plastic.

In terms of plastic used in the fishing industry, the fishing industry did just fine without plastic nets for again, millennia.

And those are all a tiny proportion of the plastics used in the world and banning them would only be an inconvenience, waste of energy, and moral show that would not accomplish the stated goals.

People don’t care about what they can’t see, and focusing on that means you do not really care about the problem.

All that plastic is used for economic/efficiency reasons. Those increases in productivity are part of what allows us to support more than triple the population of the world since plastic's inception.

Plastic --> efficiency --> overpopulation --> more plastic? Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying it.

Overpopulation isn’t and won’t be an issue. With tough economics and dense living, advanced economies have shrinking populations and less advanced economies are all headed in the same direction.

During Covid times several US states have had more yearly deaths than booths which is a all time first occurrence.

You forgot a plastic straw (lol) although I wonder if those are really as bad as the rap they've gotten or there are more detrimental plastics that we don't even think about

Plastic enables us to feed the world and many technologies which enable modern civilization. There were many billion less people in the world before plastics and would be many billion less if you eliminated them.

Disagree; it was synthetic fertilizers[1], not plastics, that made it possible to feed billions. It is perfectly possible to deliver that food to people without single-use junk plastics, and people have been moving large quantities of food around without plastics for millennia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

> people have been moving large quantities of food around without plastics for millennia

There absolutely have not been food supply chains for millennia that looked anything even remotely close to what has been enabled by modern sanitation and global shipping, in big ways enabled by plastics. For millennia the norm was malnutrition and risks of starvation whenever food was out of season locally.

I don’t know how you think eating a plant based diet is possible without plastic in a northern climate in winter.

And if you think food waste is a problem now, wait until supply chains can’t store food in airtight oxygen free environments or how many forests will have to be cut down to use wood instead of plastic or how much shipping fuel usage will increase when packaging that used to weigh grams is replaced with metal that weighs 1000x as much.

Civilization was an utter hellhole for a majority of humanity for millenia, they didn't get along just fine. Life mostly sucked, with only brief moments of prosperity and joy for most human lifetimes.

Plastic is necessary for food with a shelf life of weeks or sometimes months beyond what it would be without plastics. Throw in antimicrobial properties and the lowered spread of diseases through shopping as another ancillary benefit. To get rid of plastics means increasing the cost of goods and lowering quality of life, most drastically for poorer people.

Quickly replacing unnecessary plastics is good, but some plastics are pretty crucial to a high quality consumer lifestyle.

I'd like to see a totally self sufficient, sustainable, and accountable lifestyle for everyone on the planet, but I'm also 100% on team human first, and humans living now take precedence over hypothetical humans later. There are too many interdependent factors requiring plastics for me to get on board with "end all plastics now! "

We should do the best we can do (we aren’t) but this doesn’t mean reverting to the Stone Age or mass suicide.

You don’t need to end plastics you need to use them more responsibly. You don’t need to go after meaningless high visibility targets you need to go after the big ones.

You can benefit now humans and future humans without making blind absolute actions, but you have to actually be able to understand what you are trying to accomplish and be able to make compromises based on mixed effects.

But people are dumb and the mythology that pervades society is good vs evil and people are thus rather unable to see things in any other way than good or bad. Things are complex, almost nothing is without positive qualities or consequences and whether it’sa person, a vaccine, an environmental issue, or an opinion, people need to start being able to accept that everything has risks and rewards, good sides and bad, complexities that can’t just be ignored for an absolutist option.

Plastics are necessary. Just as cars and airplanes are necessary to civilization. Cellphones and computers are also necessary. I just got a life saving operation two months ago. None of these things would be possible without plastics.

Civilizations grow on top of their earlier innovations and we can't just go back to the way things were without a collapse. How do you think the cell phone in your pocket could possibly be made without plastic? Or how about the Starship?

To be fair there really isn’t that much plastic in space hardware, it tends to outgas and deposit itself on everything nearby in a vacuum. Some very specialized polymers sure, but not many, and not much.

That's a fair point on the components themselves. But what about the plastics involved in the production of the components?

It's turtles all the way down.

Eh, when it comes to metalworking or the production of advanced alloys, again plastics really aren't a big part of the process. I bet machinists eat fast food and use plastic straws sometimes :) but maybe that's not the point.

Space rockets just aren't prime examples of how plastics enable modern tech, of course it would be hard to find something that had zero plastic in the production chain, but food, medicine, and biology are really where the plastic shines and consumer goods are where there are lots of times where plastic is environmentally competitive to the alternatives unless your argument involves transitioning to a luddite society.

Is burning plastic better than just burying it? It seems like burying plastic waste would be a decent way to sequester carbon long-term provided it's done in a way that's not going to cause harmful chemicals to get into the water table.

Burning it just turns it back into CO2. You get energy in the process, but is it worth the trouble? Some materials like PVC emit chlorine gas when burned... it seems like that would be a problem, but maybe there's a reasonable solution.

Eh, if you think about burning garbage displacing burning fossil fuels, it seems to be more or less a carbon neutral act (in that the decision doesn't increase the amount of carbon burned, just switching from burning fossil fuels to making oil into something useful for a little while before burning it. It has the added benefit of not having the things like radioactive soot that burning coal has.

Is burying better than burning? I would bet there's a complex cost-benefit analysis to be done there which might not be all that obvious which one is better.

A few observation points from living in SE Asia for the past 13 years: - Singapore incinerates most of its plastic - In places like Indonesia, there aren't great waste collection systems/processes in place. When rainy season comes along, months worth of accumulated garbage/plastic gets washed out to sea. In Bali, Jimbaran beach accumulates literal mounds of plastic waste (google for pictures). - Again in Indo, even if plastic is collected and sent to the trash dump (read: not a land fill), it gets washed out to sea when it rains.

We could stimulate the domestic textile industry to mass produce clothing without plastic fibers while phasing out fabrics that are depositing microplastics in the oceans: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....

Can’t have high seas fisheries with plastic at this level https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26321/

It’s really troubling to see space trash get more concern than ocean trash given our reliance on the oceans (not to downplay the problem of near-earth collisions)

Am I crazy or did we not use hemp ropes for fishing before we invented plastics?

Put fish tariffs on any country who doesn't use hemp rope for fishing.

Strategy: support media efforts in Asian countries making littering a moral issue citing natural beauty and putting sad music over dirty rivers, etc.

That’s how we did it in the US which did have a big littering problem until the mid 20th century.

Or just install a few of those silly water wheel garbage skimmers at the mouths of a few major rivers around the world.

>littering

Coca Cola and others are largely responsible for the notion that it is the individual's responsibility not to "litter" single-use products that are extremely profitable for corporations: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-li...

Given that it's individuals who transported those single-use items to the location where they were consumed, it makes perfect sense that those same individuals should transport them back to trash handling facilities. How else are you going to bring drinks to a picnic, if not in some sort of container, that you are then responsible for regardless of how many times that container can be used or what it's made of?

If you read my link, it's not even about "trash handling facilities", but about the profitability of single-use bottles vs refillable ones for manufacturers.

There are lots of things in what we call civilised society that act as gentle guidance mechanisms to encourage compliance toward some end that is desirable for everybody.

Without some incentive to transport single use items to an appropriate receptacle some people will always just throw them on the ground, as it costs them nothing to do so.

The makers of single use drink bottles have thus privatised profit and socialised the negative externalities of their product. The money goes in their pockets, and the bottles go in the ocean.

But it worked fantastically.

I’m not sure Mother Jones is always the best source of information for accurate historical analysis. I have serious issues with the first paragraph and don’t really feel up to a piece long rebuttal.

As you say in your OP, plastic trash should be a moral issue, but where we appear to disagree is in where the moral responsibility should lie.

I think it should lie at least half with manufacturers who provide their product in plastic bottles that can costlessly be thrown away, into the sea, by consumers.

There is no penalty to the individual for doing so.

Gasoline used to have lead in it. Now it doesn't, because people realised it's bad for us and the world we live in.

When supermarkets used to give plastic bags away for free, it would be common to see them blowing around, floating down rivers in urban areas like jellyfish, etc. Now, in places where supermarkets have either been forced to charge for them (or eliminate them) etc, you rarely see plastic bags as a form of roaming trash.

Somebody took a 1% hit to their profits, maybe. But the world didn't end.

Let's just ban plastic forks and pat ourselves in the back

Why? It all comes from third world countries with no garbage collection. Rivers of plastic garbage flowing into the ocean.

The only strategy that will work is a culture change in those country AND implementing garbage collection.

What will end up happening is a lot of taxpayer money handouts to politically connected contractors who won't focus on the problem and pocket the money, kicking back some to the politicians.

Standardize glass packaging. Deal with this fake recycling issue. Invest in research for better tires

>should make >a strategy >reduce

Anyone who's dealt with iffy deadlines and mediocre management knows that without clear progress metrics and negative consequences for failure, nothing will happen.

Provocative comment that is definitely not Reddit-friendly: Make sure China and India create one too. The bulk of the blame lies on them.

this is a third derivative.

- strategy by (= / delta-t == 1yr)

- reduce increasing (d/dt^2)

Plastic only becomes waste and ends up in the ocean if it is not collected properly. We're solving this problem at Replenysh.

How we think about circularity: https://replenysh.com/blog/an-opportunity-to-evolve

Reduce increasing. Progress.

Make littering a 5 year minimum jail sentence.

Let's ban fishing?

Plastic tax is the only way, force corporations to pay for the plastic they produce and it’s cleanup costs.

Yes, the US really needs to step in and solve this OVERWHELMINGLY ASIAN problem.

https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/countries-that-pollute...

Proposed initiatives / advocacy orgs

https://www.beyondplastics.org

https://www.plasticfreepresident.org

https://camustlead.org

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5845

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