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Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

Plastics are inert. This is why they don't biodegrade easily. It is the additives in the plastics (to make them softer, or color them, or whatever) that are terrible for you.

By the time these things are 'microplastics' I am having a hard time feeling scared that they are harmful. I'm not saying they aren't, but until someone can tie them to an actual problem, I don't see an issue -- especially since there is nothing we can do about it.

That said, one-time-use plastics are absolutely obscene and need to be removed from society as soon as humanly possible.

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It is the additives in the plastics (to make them softer, or color them, or whatever) that are terrible for you.

That said, one-time-use plastics are absolutely obscene and need to be removed from society as soon as humanly possible.

Those seem to be somewhat conflicting viewpoints. The overwhelming majority of single-use plastics are PE or PP, which also don't really have much in the way of additives.

PVC, ABS, and others in those families are what need the really harmful plasticisers, and also cost a lot more; as a result, they aren't going to be chosen for single-use applications unless there are other important reasons to do so.

Then the article goes on to mention PFAS, which is related to fluoropolymers, another very different category. I'm sure FPs are used in some single-use applications, but they are not cheap compared to PP or PE so they'll be massively lower in volume.

I hate how articles like this just promote a "plastics = bad" narrative, and they didn't even mention what type of microplastic they found.

I have dental floss and tape made out of PFAS. Unfortunately its 25% PFAS content is what makes Oral B floss so good and waxy- I haven't found a non-PFAS floss that works half as well

My dental hygienist warned that Oral B isn’t effective and recommended I use a woven floss, like cocofloss. Stay safe out there.

Googled: list of additives in PE plastic

Found:

"Stabilizers are the most widely used additives in the PE industry.

Other additives commonly added to polyethylene are stearates (e.g., calcium and zinc stearates to neutralize acidic catalyst residues and to impart lubricity),

pigments (e.g., carbon black, cadmium yellow, and titanium dioxide),

metal deactivators (e.g., oxalyl bishydrazide for PE cable insulation),

processing aids (e.g., Dynamar, Ucarsil, Viton-A, to improve flow of the molten polymer),

optical brightners (e.g., Uvitex OB to enhance appearance).

Additives commonly added to polyethylene include antioxidants (hindered phenolics and phosphites for process stabilization),

antiblock compounds (e.g., silica, talc, and kaolin to reduce sticking of adjacent film layers),

and slip agents (e.g., erucamide and oleamide to reduce friction)."

"POLYETHYLENE (Stabilization and Compounding)" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/polyethylene-stabilization-co...

Plastics are relatively brittle however without those additives and will break down into harmful micro and nano plastics: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

There’s a lot we can do about it. Clothes tires and mismanaged waste are leading sources for microplastic that can be reduced.

Without the full article we can only go by the abstract of your link, which doesn't say anything definitive except that the effects on humans are unknown.

The precautionary principle would seem to be worth considering in that case.

I'm not sure how freaking out about it is going to help. I am all for removing plastics as much as possible, so the motivation to do that should help the other. In the meantime there are definite, known bad things that I can freak out about health-wise.

"Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don't", yes?

There’s nothing wrong with one-time-use plastics, in countries with good waste management systems.

Paper straws suck.

What's a good waste management system? Honest question.

Burying plastics in the ground; returning carbon to where it came from.

No, burning them in a waste to energy plant.

While we still use hydrocarbons for a while for power, we might as well let some of them hang out as our stuff for a bit before being burned for energy.

I get that argument, but wouldn't it be better to bury it deep so that the carbon is taken away rather than added to the ecosystem?

Sure, small-scale "energy recycling" makes sense, but if everyone did it with all our waste plastic outout then we'd pretty much just be using fossil fuels with extra steps, and the carbon will end up in the atmosphere.

It is fossil fuels with extra steps but see that when you burn garbage for power that’s displacing the equivalent amount of power that would be provided by fossil fuels (almost everywhere around the world today).

Therefore you get to leave some oil or whatever in the ground instead of going to the trouble of burying garbage.

Burning garbage instead of fossil fuels should be carbon neutral with some benefits of not filling landfills etc.

Animals live in the ground and you are talking about filling their homes with garbage? You are sick.

Plasma converter:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

Unfortunately it's more expensive than just throwing waste into a hole in the ground.

There are no countries with good waste management systems. Waste counts as recycled, if it was exported. What happens after that, nobody knows and nobody cares. Even in Europe, just a tiny amount of plastic gets recycled, most is shipped away, so that others should care about.

Edit: Source: "The recycling lie" https://www.daserste.de/information/reportage-dokumentation/... (german)

Mandate plasma gasification instead of plastics recycling. The result is a syngas that can be burned for energy and an inert slag you can dispose of in asphalt.

Edit: MorrisMinor suggests this further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34293509

Honestly go look outside. Go alongside a well trafficed road in the city or the country and take a close look at the soil. The curb or tree lawn is filled with visible bits of degraded plastic, and that's not even seeing abraded tire dust that will just look like soot or dirt.

Go to pretty much any beach and sift through the sand. Again you will find an abnormal number of plastic mixed in. Even in "clean" places with not a lot of litter plastic bits are visibly everywhere.

Own any synthetic clothes? Look at your lint trap after running a dryer or shaking out your clothes. The dust and lint coming off will quickly become microplastics. The wastewater from your washer will also be filled with them

Not where I live?

I worked in a plastic factory for ten years so I feel like I would recognize this if I had ever seen it. I haven't. I will take a look though.

Metal straws (and spoons, forks, knives) are amazing.

Every paper straw I have ever used has been great.

Asbestos is also chemically quite inert. But in small fibers, it can physically interfere with cellular processes. I'm not aware of evidence that microplastics behave in the same way, but a number of other small nonreactive particles do have biological effects, so "chemically inert" doesn't seem like a good heuristic for "harmless".

I don't think that is a helpful comparison. Of course being 'inert' is not a good heuristic for harmless -- a bullet made out of teflon fired into you will harm you quite severely despite teflon's inertness. My implication was that without further evidence there is no reason to assume harm by default, because inert things are non-reactive and there is no known mechanism for microplastics having a mechanically harmful effect on mammals.

But them being inert also makes it very hard for our body to clean it up, so it ends up accumulating in our bodies.

If you don't know it is there and it doesn't affect you, why does it matter?

Because it takes up space in organs etc. It gets in the way. Stuff blocks up. It could become dislodged and accumulate into a blood clot. Lots of reasons why we shouldn't have foreign objects in our bodies.

That sounds an awful lot like 'affecting you'.

I always dream about opening a single use plastic shop in the future, for those who just don‘t care and those who are actively opposed to it being removed everywhere.

For example, drinking delicious Coca-Cola Zero Sugar at McDonalds from a paper straw is disgusting. The straw usually disintegrates before I am done and sticks to the lips at the start.

I love single use plastic.

Why is everyone using straws as an example? First, they are not what I am talking about -- we used to get beverages in re-usable containers and now it is almost impossible to find anything in glass. We don't need plastic to-go containers, we don't need everything in a plastic wrapper or vacuum sealed in a thick plastic container (as evidenced by companies not doing that and having zero problems with their products being damaged). These are just a few things that could be changed with zero inconvenience to the consumer. In fact, the plastic sealed packages that require a chainsaw to open being discontinued would be a convenience for consumers, since I have never met a person who didn't hate them.

Keep your plastic straws.

We must not inconvenience anyone at any cost! Even if it creates a layer of plastic on earths surface and we get microplastic in our spines.

It would have been easier to believe in a better future if people could stomach tiny inconveniences.

I would be so far from shocked if we found out soon that plastic grocery bag / straw bans were a psi-op by big oil/plastic manufacturers to make people hate the idea of reducing single-use plastic. I couldn't have picked a more inconvenient and inconsequential place to start legislating if I had tried.

A ban on plastic soda bottles? Great! There's are existing non-plastic solutions, nobody would be negatively impacted, and we'd see that reducing our plastic use can be easy and not require major sacrifices. Instead we come up against it every time we buy a beverage or go to the grocery store.

The paper straws are pretty inferior but the grocery bag taxes just aren't that annoying. If you live in a place that charges for bags you quickly get used to just bringing bags with you and it's no big deal. Plus it significantly reduces the number of plastic bags blowing around in the wind. Since bags are so light they easily become airborne, sometimes posing a traffic safety hazard and often blowing into waterways.

My city outright banned single-use grocery bags. I was already in the habit of bringing re-usable bags, but every so often I'll have forgotten to grab bags or I'm stopping in on my way home from something else so I don't have them on me. Before the plastic bag ban, I'd just grab a "single-use" bag, and then use it as a trash bag for my kitchen or bathroom. Since the ban I regularly buy kitchen trash bags, I have about a dozen re-usable bags stuffed in the back of a closet, and half the stuff I buy at the grocery store still comes wrapped in a layer or two of excess plastic. For me, net loss. For the city? Probably a minor win in terms of plastic usage and street trash, and a significant loss in terms of people's willingness to ban other forms of single use plastic.

Before the plastic bag ban, I'd just grab a "single-use" bag, and then use it as a trash bag for my kitchen or bathroom. Since the ban I regularly buy kitchen trash bags

I wonder if those who come up with these ideas realise the irony of forcing people to buy bags which are truly going to be single-use instead of reusing what they would've already had.

How many people in your life re-use grocery bags? I'm fairly certain grocery bag bans are a net-win when viewed from the perspective of total plastic usage, because MOST people would have to be using them at least twice for the result to be anything other than a net-win from any perspective but mine. I only managed to use about as many as I was given because I got pretty good at remembering my re-usable bags...

The problem is not the burden of changing my behaviour, or the extra cost of buying exactly as much single-use plastic as I need in the form of a box of trash bags a couple times a year - the problem is why are we starting with this?? I'm dead certain that there are a ton of single-use plastics we could ban that would have close to ZERO impact on 99.9% of people's lives, because it would be handled entirely by industry doing a single re-tooling of their lines, but we're not doing those for some strange reason?

Everyone I know reuses them; not just for trash, but they're handy for whenever you need a bag (or even just a film of plastic) for whatever reason, because they take up almost no room.

Single use grocery bags are problematic in the sense they use almost no resources individually. Anything you're replacing them with uses far more plastic and/or energy to produce. A reusable bag tends to need reused dozens to a hundred times for the material needed to make it. Then add in you need to wash the reusable to avoid spreading food borne contamination and the ratio gets even worse.

I just use a backpack.

My in-group used them extensively. For just about everything.

It doesn't really matter though; the ban on straws and taxes on shopping bags have resulted in a noticably lower amount of said products blowing around main roads. Totally worth it in my opinion.

Now, if we could just get biodegradable coffee and soda lids...

I think you are on to something. It isn't unprecedented -- they did the same thing with 'recycling' -- using a political and media campaign to convince people that plastics weren't bad because they could be recycled, then getting legislation passed to require recycling by households. It is absolutely villainous.

But I want to leave the store with the beaverage and throw away the container afterwards. Another great horror: Thin plastic bottles! Drinks in crinkly plastic bottles that feel like you could just roll them into a ball. Yuck. I want the thick plastic ones you can use to bonk someone on the head. I want back my cheap single use plastic bags that I could just throw away after use, instead of managing storage and availability of reusable ones.

I mean you’ve read the same news as I did, but you still cannot be bothered with not throwing stuff away immediately and managing grocery bags in a drawer at home? Why is it so hard for people like you to contribute a teeny-tiny thing to society once in their lives?

Because more cities have banned plastic straws than have banned plastic bottles.

> we don't need everything in a plastic wrapper

I bought a celeriac the other day, it was in a vacuum wrapped plastic cover. What a waste of resources.

In case anyone else has no idea what a 'celeriac' is:

> Celeriac (Apium graveolens var. rapaceum), also called celery root, knob celery, and turnip-rooted celery (although it is not a close relative of the turnip), is a variety of celery cultivated for its edible stem or hypocotyl, and shoots. Celeriac is like a root vegetable except it has a bulbous hypocotyl with many small roots attached.

I understand I am the weird one here, but I have the feeling must have missed the great straw usage conditioning everyone else went through. I find straws to be something for small children, not grownups.

I'm not sure I've used a straw in my adult life, yet I see people drinking coffee with a straw. Isn't the taste affected? Lots of what we think of as taste is actually smell and texture.

No wine connoisseur would order a straw with their expensive wine! I fail to see why one would be necessary for coffee or water, except for long distance runners and other situations where one needs to drink while moving.

Who even uses straws? Straws should be reserved for the disabled.

Dentists recommend using a straw, especially when you have braces. I don't think you're plan will be well taken.

I was at a bar earlier and there were 2 straws put in my drink. I didn't need them. I didn't use them. Most people don't need straws

I’ve been seeing more and more PHA based straws, and they are great. Look and feel like plastic, but totally biodegradable.

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