Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sorry people, but you can't stop it:

1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/04/11/how-much-plastic-d...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/micropla...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/winds-ca...

Because humanity and capitalism's incentives are just wrong. Bottling companies like Coca Cola and Snapple have long switched to plastic bottles, and externalized the cost to the environment.

My recommendation would be to tax negative externalities and redistribute all of it as a UBI to the people of the country. Simple and effective, but apparently the governments have been moving way too slowly.

What's worse is that the governments perpetuate a lie to the public, making them think they can individually make a difference. In the case of plastic the lie was "recycling", when in fact the plastics were simply shipped to China, who dumped them in landfills and rivers.

But the government tells the individual that they can't have a plastic straw or bag. It's all there to distract the individuals from banding together and demanding the costs be imposed on the corporations which put out metric tons every day. I write more about this phenomenon here: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

And it's not just the bottling companies. It's all the packaging. It's the clothes using synthetic fabrics like polyester, which generate microplastics flushed in every wash. And so on. Convenience is when you'd rather have a one-time-use spoon shipped from China, than wash and re-use a spoon. Your ancestors re-filled containers.

If we made it more costly for these companies, they'd long ago have researched biodegradable alternatives.

I've read that the majority of microplastics come from tire wear (national geographic quoted 28% of the total), and because there's no good alternative to wheel tires, it's unlikely we'll see a decrease of pollution here. So even if we found an alternative to bottles, plastic bags, clothing, etc, it still won't make a dent in pollution unless we convince the world to use a form of public transit that doesn't make use of plastic tires.

We could reduce human consumption of the particles if we only consumed lab-grown meat & hydroponically grown vegetables where the water is ultra-filtered before use.

> because there's no good alternative to wheel tires, it's unlikely we'll see a decrease of pollution here

Well, we could stop pretending that God gave cars dominion over the earth and build livable cities.

I also learned in a Not Just Bikes video that the US tire lobby prevents regulation on quieter car tires. I bet there are ways to make tires that shed fewer microplastics - it's just that we don't do it.

> there's no good alternative to wheel tires

Steel wheels on steel tracks work pretty well, actually. Admittedly brake dust is still a problem for classic locomotive-pulled trains.

28% is not majority. Plus the hard part shouldn't prevent us from doing the easy part with much higher ROI.

I did some more research, and it looks like tires are the 2nd largest part of the pie in terms of single origin. The largest is textiles which are 35%.

One of my favorite quotes is:

"A problem is a challenge with a least one workable solution. A dilemma is challenge with multiple choices, all equally bad."

If we eliminated all PFAS chemicals today, society would collapse. What's the point of eliminating PFAS chemicals to improve life expectancy if the very act of doing so would cause a famine?

What products use PFAS whose absence would cause society to collapse? If you look at the major sources of PFAS by 3M, it's not like these were essential products. Here's a random list from wisconsin.gov:

Cleaning products. Water-resistant fabrics, such as rain jackets, umbrellas and tents. Grease-resistant paper. Nonstick cookware. Personal care products, like shampoo, dental floss, nail polish, and eye makeup. Stain-resistant coatings used on carpets, upholstery, and other fabrics.

There are probably no products for individual consumers that contain large amounts of PFAS and that are indispensable.

Small amounts of hard to replace PFAS may be contained in devices such as antenna connectors for devices with WiFi (which cannot cause pollution unless destroyed in an inappropriate way).

Nevertheless PFAS are absolutely irreplaceable in various chemical equipment used in chemical analyses and in various fabrication processes, for instance in the fabrication of all semiconductor devices (because no other substances have comparable corrosion resistance). PFAS would also be very difficult to replace in a few other applications, e.g. vacuum seals and insulators for high-frequency applications (as no other materials have a similar combination of low dielectric constant and low losses).

In all such industrial applications the risks of pollution are much smaller than in mass-market applications. However, it is likely that after PFAS will hopefully no longer be used for mass-market applications their price for professional applications might increase a lot, causing some price increases in other products, e.g. electronic devices.

I think the biggest material impact for any curb on plastics would largely be felt in medicine. Disposability is huge in preventing infection. Also, many medical implants rely on the combination of elasticity and strength found in plastics.

Maybe focus on all the non-essential shit people buy every day then first.

Yes. Disposable plastic packaging should be banned.

Medical use of plactic is a minuscule minority of plastic use. The vast majority of disposable, single-use plastic is not actually necessary. I'd be shocked if less than 90% of single-use disposable plastic was from food containers. Hell, I'd be pretty surprised if it were less than 99%.

By "biggest material impact", I didn't mean the sector that uses the most material. I meant it was the sector that would experience the biggest impact in a real material way, which would be hard to mitigate.

Obbiosl computing would be radically altered as well but I'm not actually sure how much that would matter. Other than during the 90s, there just simply isn't much evidence for all this extra computing having a significant effect on growth.

Just because you don't personally encounter it, doesn't mean it's non-essential.

Viton is essential in modern engines. Basically anywhere you are in contact with gasoline, you need fluoroelastomer.

The entire chemicals industry - everything from medicine to energy to commodity chemicals - would collapse overnight if you took away teflon, viton, and PVDF. That's not hyperbole, it's used everywhere and there are no drop in alternatives. Silicone can fit the bill for some purposes, but it has nowhere the compatibility and longevity of viton. We have no real non-fluoronated alternative to teflon.

PFAS is used in the coolant for semiconductor production.

Anything containing "rubber."

Doesn't rubber come from rubber trees? What does that have to do with PFAS?

Teflon is not rubber, as far as I know PTFE are petro- flourochemicals

Very little "rubber" is actual natural latex rubber. Balloons, certain hose, and some gloves are natural latex, as are about 40% of the material in tires. The rest is synthetic elastomer. EPDM and Buna-N/nitrile are probably the most common.

Teflon is not rubber, but viton is fluorinated elastomer, and it's used everywhere as well.

Phasing out PFAS over a 5-10 year period or imposing a steady-increasing tax on its usage (to the point that eventually it became an apocalyptically high tax) would drive supply chains to adapt and move to alternatives. Paper, wood, metal, glass, etc. are materials that have worked fine for hundreds of years.

Oh no, less waterproofing, what will we ever do? Guess we should keep this cancer material around.

Oh no, we lose some classes of medications, guess we should just poison the Earth and generations to come because losing lipitor and prozac is just unacceptable.

> IF we eliminated all PFAS chemicals today, society would collapse.

I think this is a failure of imagination. The modern world, largely as we appreciate it today, existed in 1940 in Europe and the U.S. That is well before the widespread deployment of plastics. It was a world in which everyone, including the very rich did with a little less but still, a fairly high quality of life.

The only question that separates then from today, is whether we can scale that kind of material to the much larger global middle class.

In 1940, (with the exception of primitive point-contact radar diodes) there was no production of semiconductor devices.

Without PFAS there would be no production of modern electronic devices, so no computers and no mobile phones.

Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.

> Without PFAS there would be no production of modern electronic devices, so no computers and no mobile phones.

Uh, yup. That in no way contradicts what I said.

> Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.

Yeah, I'm not arguing for a ban. I'm arguing that from a historical perspective, civilization in no way hinges on plastics. They are ubiquitous so an abrupt end of plastics would obviously be very disruptive. But there was a pretty decent life to be had before they became so and I imagine we could figure out how to do that again.

Synthetic chemistry in the 40s was like alchemy compared to the processes today. There are myriad chemical techniques and reactions that exist today, that didn't exist in the 40s, and you flat out can't do without fluoropolymers, because the reagents used are way too aggressive on virtually everything else.

I didn't say a damn thing about the state of chemistry in the 1940s. My point was that it's silly to claim the absence of PFAS or plastics would cause societal collapse when we have a ready image of our civilization without plastics.

Metal, wood, resins, etc were just far more ubiquitous, doing many of the jobs plastics do now. Lots of things were a bit more expensive because of this. But none the less, people lived pretty decent lives.

> But the government tells the individual that they can't have a plastic straw or bag

Policies exist to improve the situation, they just need to be fought for (against the bottling companies):

> According to the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), the average nationwide recycling rate for beverage containers is around 35%. By contrast, Oregon’s beverage container redemption rate is regularly in the 80-90% range

https://obrc.com/results/how-bottle-bills-compare/

Plastic in a landfill is actually fine, even if wasteful, as long as the landfill is properly built.

Plastic in landfill has the quality of being oil that won't be burned.

> My recommendation would be to tax negative externalities and redistribute all of it as a UBI to the people of the country. Simple and effective

Wouldn't you want to resolve the externalities with those funds instead of spending it, likely increasing consumer consumption and making the problem worse?

> If we made it more costly for these companies

Why wouldn't the costs flow to consumers? Firms recently seem to be able to set prices at what the market will bear.

Because we'd be indirectly subsidizing any competitor who puts out biodegradeable solutions, without directly picking winners and losers, just making it more costly to produce non-biodegradeable stuff. The alternatives can come out of the same department (e.g. of DuPont chemicals) and they wouldn't be hit with the same tax, so they'd be more competitive over time. The money is redistributed to the working class because otherwise you get this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

How do you accurately price externalities without resolving them? If you spend a billion a year cleaning up plastic it's pretty simple math to spread that out over the cost of plastic products. On the other hand if you don't actually do anything to resolve it you are just guessing on what that costs and could be way over or under.

This seems like "I want UBI" with a flimsy environmental justification.

You don’t need to accurately price them. You just gradually keep increasing the price year over year until the companies spin up R&D departments to switch to biodegradable sustainable alternatives, or their competitors do.

You have to hit those corps in their pocketbook and affect their bottom line before they act. It’s the only thing they understand.

As far as cleanup - forget it. We may be able to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but we won’t be able to remove microplastics around the world. It is urgent we stop creating MORE though. That means also mandating drainage systems that filter and trap these particles before they escape. We already mandate that for many forms of grease!

That's not really taxing externalities. Biodegradable solutions likely have externalities of their own at scale. In less words this solution is "tax corporations that make plastic a lot and distribute the funds to the citizens leaving the mess behind for future generations". It isn't as noble when put that way.

It you on the other hand took those funds and used them for environmental clean up, recycling programs, etc I'd be on board. Consumers should pay for the disposal of what they consumed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com