Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health
propublica.org
propublica.org
Not necessary:
- plastic bottles (good only for coca-cola's profits etc., 90% of bottled drinks contain microplastics, use glass)
- food wrappers (use paper & natural wax, not pfoas)
- plastic shopping bags (use textile bags like our grandma's did)
- eshop packages (ever received goods in plastic bags wrapped in insane amounts of additional plastic?)
- tea bags made with plastic (yes, they're there, not biodegradable, lots of microplastics in your tea)
- tooth brushes (what's wrong with wood/bamboo ?)
- textiles ( cotton / hemp / flax. you think you need to run in modern textiles because it's raining ? stay home, i don't need your pfoas in my water )
- polystyrene for home insulation (why not support plant based alternatives, like hemp / hempcrete)
- fishing nets (70% of macro plastic at sea comes from fishing gear, just eat plants people, there are not that many fish left anyway)
Necessary:
- health care
- what have i forgot?
Better to stop producing the crap, than to have to find ways how to utilize it without harming everything and everybody. It's good only for the packaging industry, nobody else.
>bamboo All of the bamboo products for sale are glued together with petroleum derived adhesives and often finished with petroleum based products like mineral oil
More likely is a drying oil, like linseed, or a synthetic finish, like polyurethane or epoxy.
Do you mean necessary to live a risky and brutal life, or necessary to live a comfortable, long, and pleasurable one?
Not that single use plastic items isn't an issue; it clearly is. But I'm guessing that the solution isn't generally to replace the single use plastic item with a single use wood/glass/textile item.
I could also be wrong. If producing plastic stuff has a much larger impact than what I'm assuming here, please do correct me.
Not to mention transporting it. I wonder where the breakeven point is on energy costs.
Soda did come in glass bottles when I was young. I don't know precisely why we stopped, but my guess is because people didn't like getting new drinks in beat up old glass.
Also, changing the material changes the experience of drinking something. At least I find the experience of drinking from glass to be very different to drinking from plastic or drinking from aluminium cans, even if the properties of the liquid itself is completely unchanged.
(I dislike drinks with straws for the same reason; cold glass touching lips and liquid running out from it is a different and better experience than putting plastic in the mouth and letting liquid shoot up into the palate.)
Not only is glass breakage direct loss, its a health hazard. Always pissed me off when dumbasses did crap like break glass bottles in parking lots.
It's a fun novelty, but I think one of the first bottles that I had tasted like soap- probably didn't get fully washed or something. That also ended up being the last one I had. If I'm going to drink soda, aluminum cans are hard to beat.
It's incredibly bad when plastics and disposable batteries start getting burnt, as is inevitable when burning is the primary trash disposal strategy.
I think the other post may be talking about people who burn their trash at home, instead of at an industrial scale? It seems like a neighborhood of people burning their batteries and plastics would not be great, compared to an industrial incinerator.
Or maybe I'm way off base.
Of course, in some areas of the world, both uncontrolled trash burning and unregulated trash dumps are used.
Burning trash is bad. Incinerating properly is crucial.
My uncle used to pick up all the food scraps from a local restaurant and feed those to his pigs. It made a mess in his pickup truck, but it was a lot cheaper than commercial pig food.
Trash bags are just a great time saver and more sanitary. I sure like them.
Its a little more labor intensive, you can't dump liquids in a paper bag at least without paper towels, etc.
All your other points are essentially "If you paid way more, then plastic wouldn't be necessary." However, if you paid more, then you'd have less money for other stuff. So clearly plastic is necessary for our current levels of consumption.
Polycarbonate is a very useful plastic for food containers ("cambros") because it's lightweight, durable, and can be transparent. Sure, glass could work but it's a lot more fragile, especially if you were to try to constantly stack/unstack them in a commercial kitchen.
To a lesser extent the same argument could be made for polypropylene deli containers (for food storage and kitchen prep, not as disposable food containers).
I use plastic wrap probably more than I should in the kitchen (when baking) which could obviously be replaced by lids that fit whatever containers I'm putting the plastic wrap on but in some applications I can't imagine plastic wrap being replaced without some special lid (proofing a bread loaf that you want to proof out of the top of the container).
I think that's it though. In general, I agree that single-use plastics (or "re-use for a while and eventually throw out") are unnecessary but if something can be used indefinitely (I've had my cambros for something like 5 years at this point and they still look new) then I don't see it as an unnecessary plastic.
Heavily impregnated with BPA. I would avoid putting anything warmer than room temp in there (yes I know they're in widespread use in restaurants)
>I can't imagine plastic wrap being replaced without some special lid (proofing a bread loaf that you want to proof out of the top of the container).
Cheese cloth tied around the lid with plenty of slack in the cloth in the middle
For very long ferments (cold proofing sourdough for example) it’s also liable to dry out.
All other situations it works fine for in my experience.
Cambro will happily sell you polypropylene bins, too. They even stack with the polycarbonate ones.
Sadly, silicon freezer bags have yet to work as well as plastic ones. Give them time.
Relying on natural barriers to keep things from breaking down does limit shelf life, but its not a foreign concept to shoppers or grocery stores.
Like replacing plastics with glas - I mean, you can do that, but glas isn't exactly an environmentally friendly material. Glas making uses a lot of fossil gas, the technology to make glas with renewable electricity does not exist at scale (it's been tried more than a decade ago and was a big failure), and it has emissions that cannot be easily avoided due to the use of carbonates.
Recycled glass saves about 40% of the original energy.
The trend of interconnected markets has pushed many families and companies to use more and more of their time getting cash instead of being productive in the home or local community.
If you didn't come from a generation that had glass bottles everywhere you just don't know how bad it was. Even to this day there are still issues with beer bottles broken on beaches and stuff, but typically drinking alcohol is much more highly regulated then drinking soda from a glass bottle.
Say no to glass.
Electrical insulation is a pretty big use case. Both rubber and paper breaks down in some really unfortunate ways, ceramics are great but aren't really viable if you want to make a cable or wire. Laquer isn't really up for the job either.
Not a class-II vapor retarder. Can't build a comfortable and energy-efficient home without air barrier vapor retarders. (You can build an uncomfortable one, or one which uses far more energy).
> tooth brushes (what's wrong with wood/bamboo ?)
They all still use nylon brushes.
> food wrappers
You must be unfamiliar with warehouse conditions if you're willing to eat unprotected food like that.
No time to elaborate, but from what I've read about it, hempcrete houses were built in different environments, even on seashores, as the hemp will petrify and turn the lime back into stone, but keeping the good properties. I've yet to hear about problems with water vapor or about one where it's uncomfortable to live in. Hempcrete has superb insulation properties, it may easily be the best material for home construction.
https://insidergrowth.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-he...
https://greathemp.net/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-hempcr...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/science/hemp-homes-cannab...
> they all still use nylon brushes
Or boar hair ... and that's obviously not good either. Don't know what the best material is. But with using just the nylon brushes, and replacing the rest with wood, we'd save apx. 98% of the material.
> You must be unfamiliar with warehouse conditions
I'm not. But if you eat plant based only, that's maybe less worry than if we were talking about meat/cheese, I assume.
There were no individually packed deli/cheese cuts when I was young. The shops instead had a counter with a shop person preparing orders, packing them into waxed paper. I've seen some counters recently, so it's still practiced somewhere. And people buy it and live, even without plastic.
So long as plastics are not being burned, at least their carbon is not going into the atmosphere.
They told us they're inert. Then we've learned about bpa, pfas and microplastics.
They told us they're recyclable. Now we now that's not really the truth.
They tell us it's for saving CO2. Now we have the stuff in our seas, on beaches, microplastics in rain and wind, there is no place on earth free of it (not even the most remote areas).
The only reason why it's used is money ... to make & wrap stuff we don't need, and we (shall) pay for it with our health and poisoned environment.
Give me the glass, and reuse it and or recycle it. Energy is (soon will be) free.
> So long as plastics are not being burned, at least their carbon is not going into the atmosphere.
Keep it in the ground, then.
Granted, at some point the human race will need to act more holistically about their resource usage, but I think that will take a very long time and probably not until it has become a much more painful problem.
Can we say, for sure, that this is true? My grandma just died a few years ago. I couldn't tell you exactly when the plastic revolution happened, but I would say it was significantly long after she became an adult. I'm not sure we are at the point of knowing yet whether my plastic generation outlives my grandma's non-plastic generation, statistically speaking.
I would imagine every time you scrape off the lint from your dryer's lint trap you inhale orders of magnitude more microplastics than these food/drink examples and and swallow more too from nasal drip.
Is this intuition off?
How many people think their clothing is plastic? They probably think it’s “some textile” and that’s all the thought they ever give it. How many people consider the plastic in their dishwasher or laundry pods, or in packaging? They’re all unconscious decisions that people make because they are using what corporations give them.
Also, related, reusable stuff is great and disposable stuff sucks. I always joke about wondering what the sales pitch was for disposable razors: “have you ever wished you had to replace your entire razor every time the blade dulled?” Not only is it wasteful but it simply makes no sense in many cases.
Even when aware it can be a challenge to find replacements. I bought https://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-pile-lined-trucker-ja... a year ago and while I put reasonable effort into finding an alternative that didn't use "pile" or "sherpa wool" (fake wool), it was hard to find any at all. The very few results I did find were a totally different style. Ordinary shirts seem to be a fair bit easier but I would love suggestions for high quality jackets made of natural materials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgg0zpckGRU
A lot of the saved weight in cars is probably plastic, but the metal parts of the care pretty obviously make up the majority of the weight.
Engine, transmission, axles, suspension, frame/unibody, frequently body panels are steel, etc.
I think as soon as you recommend to reduce someone’s quality of life you can forget about it. I agree with a lot of the other recommendations, but telling someone to stay home sounds a lot like dismissal. However, anything where behavior can be changed without changing QoL should be done.
I really enjoy soft drinks (terrible ik) and will never buy plastic bottles or cans instead of glass bottles. I really don't think I'm crazy or alone in thinking glass-bottled tastes better. My local convenience store sells Jarritos but not the glass-bottled Mexican coke and as a direct consequence I only buy the Jarritos, otherwise I'd mix it up a bit.
I assume glass is also better environmentally but I do wonder how much of the benefit is offset by taking more energy to produce (I assume) and to ship.
iirc you would have to use a textile bag several hundred times to have a lower impact that plastic bags, maybe reusing plastic bags is a better option. Or polyester idk.
same for cotton, water use and carbon dioxide emissions are huge and debatably polyester clothes are better environmentally (it's hard to compare as there is no conversion rate between plastic waste/microplastic pollution and carbon dioxide) emissions)
> "But the agency won’t turn over these records or reveal information about the waste-based fuels, even their names and chemical structures. Without those basic details, it’s nearly impossible to determine which of the thousands of consent orders on the EPA website apply to this program. In keeping this information secret, the EPA cited a legal provision that allows companies to claim as confidential any information that would give their competitors an advantage in the marketplace."
There's no explanation of this other than regulatory capture. Might want to look into how many people from the EPA Chevron has been hiring as consultants etc., or how much money Chevron has been giving to politicians who approve EPA heads, the hiring practices of EPA heads, and so on.
I'd guess much of the problem is that they only partially breakdown the plastics into the desired long-chain hydrocarbons that make up the jet fuel, so there's likely a big pile of partially-broked down plastics that they then have to dispose of, which is a likely source of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and so on, plus dioxin which is particularly problematic as a hormone mimic and disruptor of basic cellular processes (see Agent Orange, Vietnam):
"Dioxin formation during combustion of nonchloride plastic, polystyrene and its product" (2005)
If you read down to the last paragraph, the EPA's Inspector General has an open investigation into this division of the EPA, on precisely those allegations ("whistleblowers’ allegations of corruption and industry influence").
They link to this investigative series from the Intercept,
https://theintercept.com/series/epa-exposed/ ("Whistleblowers speak out about the Environmental Protection Agency’s practice of routinely approving dangerous chemicals", 2021-)
> That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals.
Thank god someone pointed out your title error else it would have looked like biofuels, like renewable sources, were a danger to human health.
To actually evaluate these, one relevant factor is what waste we are talking about. If the source is plastics then of course the more accurate term would be "fossil fuels", because that's what plastics is usually made from.
The only possible way this can be true is if Chevron pays everyone in the effected area $100,000 so they can move out.
Now there's at least some small chance that the "see, green stuff kills you too" response may cause enough fuss for the US to do what most other developed nations would do as a matter of course in terms of protecting their citizens from pollution.
Sounds like the environmentalists will soon advertise their campaigns with "Get cancer to save the climate!".
How do the problems of that that stack up compared to disposal of any other industrial infrastructure?
Where your argument falls down, however, is that you're making it sound like a choice between the toxic chemical pollution from "clean" energy and the greenhouse gas pollution from coal, gas and oil. It's not. Burning fossil fuels releases a huge amount of toxic chemicals as well. People are getting lung cancer and asthma from living in polluted cities. And the death toll from coal power is astronomical.
We need to get our greenhouse gas emissions under control, and we need to do it in a way which doesn't destroy other aspects of the environment. And any environmentalist will agree to that statement (even if some individuals are misguided as to how to get there).
I don't look at them as separate. All these (non-nuclear) 'alternative' or 'green' or 'clean' energies do is adjust the proportions of fossil fuels at various points in the logistics chain to procure them. They don't really reduce its usage; at best they just concentrate it closer to the areas of direct procurement.
For example with electric cars, they simply move the consumption of 'dirty' energy to increase at coal plants and procuring the materials for manufacturing.
Something very rarely considered in the political dialogues surrounding energy is the logistics and security issues. Solar panels are essentially totally dependent on China for example. That issue should be solved before it is taken seriously as an alternative. https://archive.is/6Mg5V
The only source of energy that reduces pollution the most dramatically with the most controllable costs to the environment is nuclear.
I think they might have linked to the wrong paper, that one doesn't cover pyrolisis and none of the economics cost are even 2x using new fossil fuels.
Diagram: https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acssuschemeng.2c05497/asset...
So long as we're going to be making plastics, it seemed that pyrolysis and/or incineration made sense to destroy the plastic waste. Then reduce the amount of plastics at the start of the pipeline.
(Obviously it's more efficient to make fuel directly from oil, but that's not the point. Narrowly from an energy perspective, the comparison to make is (a) make plastic from oil, separately make jet fuel from oil, burn the jet fuel, and send plastic to the landfill, vs (b) make plastic from oil, use it, then turn it into jet fuel and then burn that. Obviously you don't make plastic as only an inefficient intermediate step in jet fuel production.)
But if the pyrolysis process is going to release potent carcinogens up the smokestack, then that changes everything.
The article is a little bit bad, in that it doesn't clearly explain whether the fuel itself is carcinogenic, or if it's a byproduct of the pyrolysis process that is. It also doesn't explain what those chemicals are (I assume they are hydrocarbons, cousins of benzene), or why they are not burned in the process that powers the pyrolysis. Is the combustion too dirty, not high-temperature enough? Are volatile gasses leaking through some insufficiently-selective distillation process? Are products just recklessly being vented to atmosphere?
There are plenty of examples of corporations doing horrible things to make a buck, and the corporate/PR/lawyer-speak from Chevron does nothing to allay my fears. But I assume there are also chemists involved who do give a shit and are not setting out to poison people nearby. We've heard from the whistleblower. We've heard from the lawyer/PR flaks. I'd like to hear from some chemists.
You can bet your asses that Chevron is lobbying the hell out of Congress. And, thanks to "Citizens United", we'll never know how much.
If you follow the linked PDF, the publicly disclosed descriptor is "Distillates, hydrotreated light P-21-0158". That's for the one with the insane toxicology ("The cancer risk estimate for inhalation of stack air for P-21-0158 was 2.5E-01").
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23607053/sl-sanitized...
Calling bullshit on that second sentence.
https://www.voanews.com/a/science-health_us-among-top-contri...
"The U.S. generated a staggering 42 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2016 — more than any other country in the world, according to the analysis.
Up to 2.2 million metric tons of this waste ended up in the ocean."
So, 5.2%. Is that "much" of the stated 94% that isn't recycled?
Plastic directly released to the ocean in the US (as opposed to US plastic shipped overseas, then released to the ocean) is estimated at < 0.01 kg/capita (2019). That looks low, maybe too low; it's three orders of magnitude below that other estimate.
I agree with you that the wording is not necessarily the best but it is not facetious to think that plastic created in the United States'could'end up in the ocean.
You are correct that 94% of it does not end up in ocean, but the % is still too high.