Plastics are poisoning us
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Teflon, PLA, ABS, resins, foams, etc... are all plastics, but they are so unrelated outside their long chains, its terrible to stereotype them all into one category.
You aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon, but rather the manufacturing process. You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine.
Eat something with BPA in it, you are probably going to have a bad time.
Maybe the solution is better labeling. I know its near impossible to have perfect consistency in plastic manufacturing(I worked in foam, mind boggling we consider testing these foams one time, and considered it the same foam for the next 8 years). However, knowing precursors, additives, and potentially process would make a huge difference in our ability to track problems.
EDIT: Someone called out PLA as potentially dangerous. After looking it up, I'm skeptical of the oxygen double bond attached to a carbon attached to an oxygen. The wikipedia article had no health concerns, but that carbon atom seems ripe for reaction. Let me change my answer on PLA to 'I don't know'.
What Microplastics Might Be Doing to Our Intestines https://now.tufts.edu/2023/06/09/what-microplastics-might-be...
Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/nanoplastic-inges...
Microplastics can stick in human airways, new study finds https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/microplastics...
Many BPA-Free Plastics Are Toxic. Some Are Worse Than BPA https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/many-bpa-free-plasti...
Plastic pollution is so bad for animals it now has a disease name — 'plasticosis' https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/research-ocean-plastic-birds...
Microplastics found in every sample of water taken during the Ocean Race https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/micropla...
Secret industry documents reveal that makers of PFAS 'forever chemicals' covered up their health dangers https://phys.org/news/2023-05-secret-industry-documents-reve...
Forever Toxic: The science on health threats from plastic recycling https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/forever-toxic/
Microplastics detected in meat, milk and blood of farm animals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/micropla...
Yet Another Problem With Recycling: It Spews Microplastics https://www.wired.com/story/yet-another-problem-with-recycli...
Tiny Polystyrene Particles Detected in the Brain Just Two Hours After Ingestion https://neurosciencenews.com/polystyrene-brain-23079/
60% of home ‘compostable’ plastic doesn’t fully break down, ending up in our soil https://blog.frontiersin.org/2022/11/03/60-of-home-compostab...
(... thousands others)
That said, it’s generally used as a coating rather than a structural element so there’s less of it in the environment.
PS: Toothpaste which you should mostly spit out generally contains less than 0.5% fluoride compounds such as sodium fluoride NaF or tin fluoride SnF2, the F in both being Florine.
Edit: Sorry, stupid question, was thinking of Fluoride.
Fluoride is the ion, but if you want to get pedantic, you're not adding the ion to toothpaste and drinking water - you're adding another fluorine compound which is dissociating in solution.
Ie, when you salt your food, you're not tossing in Cl- ions directly.
(sorry in advance for all who want to suggest iron skillets. I can't make them work in daily use.)
It's not that I don't believe you. It just doesn't work that way in my pan on my stove with my food at my skill level, at all. I gave up and buy nonstick pans and replace them every other year or so.
This process went fine, but I always had to baby the pan (had to be very careful cleaning it with said chainmail, very careful with what/how I cooked in it) and had to re-do the initial seasoning several times when it got too troublesome.
This process would leave the pan at a dark brown, and for a while I blamed this on not removing rust well enough before seasoning or not babying it well enough for it to build up to a ~normal black coat.
At some point during the early pandemic I tired of this. I decided to do something similar on the stovetop where I could observe/iterate better. Apply a coat, wait for it to stop smoking, and repeat until it was black. (plus a few for good luck; I didn't keep track; this took maybe dozens of rounds?)
I've had a much better time since then. The most ~babying I've done is applying a few fresh coats if I don't use it for a while or water doesn't bead when I rinse it.
I suspect it has to do with electric vs gas and being able to get and maintain a stable temp with gas. But that could just be a poor craftsman blaming his tools.
I bought a nice new range right before I discovered the air-fryer, and it now functions mostly as a device for holding up the air-fryer.
Plus, many people who are learning do not have the privilege of an experienced teacher. Relying on instructions, videos, and trial & error takes more time and energy for most people. I agree with you that it's worth the effort though.
It's similar to how my partner has a stainless steel pan that I avoid using because I have not had the bandwidth to internalize the right ratio of heat, time, and oil to cook things on it without burning/sticking, whereas they have no issue with it. It's a good reminder not to take internalized skill for granted.
The trick to not sticking on steel pan is just preheating it properly. A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick. Just let it get hot enough.
In that case I'm not sure what the exact mechanism was. But I know that after others have used/cleaned a seemingly well-seasoned pan I've had to deal with chips, flakes, and/or rust and had to go back through the whole annoying seasoning process. And of course it's entirely possible that despite carefully following instructions that I've done the seasoning wrong -- chemistry is the only class I ever flunked.
> A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick.
My partner made a similar recommendation. It sounds trivially easy but for whatever reason I have not managed to make it work. Given that cast iron (generally) works fine for me I've had minimal motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of another material, though I would like to give it another shot at some point.
I've talked to multiple experienced and home chefs about this disconnect and they've admitted two things:
1) cooking on a screaming hot pan is possible of course. It's how all professional kitchens work. But it's way harder! You have to pay close attention & the timing for error is very small. Cooking at lower heat on Teflon lets you make more adjustments.
2) After doing everything perfectly, and seasoning perfectly, for the same heat you ABSOLUTELY still need more of some oil or butter on a cast iron or stainless steel then you would for an equivalent Teflon pan. This is non-negotiable.
I say that partially as a joke but also it does sort of sound a bit absurd, in the sense that your cooking techniques are just sort of wrong if you are repeatedly burning food to your non-non-stick pan. You need an oil or fat on your pan to provide a buffer or to bathe the food in liquid.
Again this might be a balancing act of the negative effects of teflon consumption and consuming too much fat via oil.
You can cook a lot of things on a "non stick" telfon pan without an oil or fat.
You can cook far fewer things on a "non stick" cast iron without an oil or fat.
But the cast iron crowd will gaslight the rest of us, and claim that we are just seasoning it wrong but otherwise it is indistinguishable and only superior.
It's like manual transmission.
Now, I do think some of them are coming coated in silicone-based coatings. The consensus I get asking "are these carcinogenic?" is "probably not?"
But the other problem is determining what a particular pan is coated with: I have not seen a single manufacturer label their pan with anything more informative than that it is coated in "magic science stuff".
Also, I only use 'plastic' utensils with the pan. The result, not a single scratch on the pan. The surface looks brand new, I've been using it over a year.
That said, even oxides do break down when heated. Like, that's what smelting is...
Hm...
It's about as strong as most of the molecules on your body.
But I don't think that fluoride moving around is the problem. Looks like the problem is exactly the stability, and some long foreign molecules installing themselves in your body.
Are you saying, then, that this claim [1] is false?
It states that PTFE is safe, whereas PFOA — what Teflon used to contain — was the component that made Teflon unsafe.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/is-teflon-coating-safe
> Now, since PFOA belongs to a large group of chemicals called PFAS, consisting of 4,700 similar substances, it might be tempting to just switch to one of the other PFAS chemicals that hasn’t been restricted yet. But that wouldn´t solve the problem, it would only postpone and perpetuate it. [1]
[1] https://marketplace.chemsec.org/articles/news/2020/04/01/the...
I.e. there's a whole zoo of similar compounds, and all those type specific safety claims are all at room temperature. The whole point of their use is often on heated surfaces, getting near and over the safety limit.
Your link does not contain a reference to PTFE and looking at the meaning of the acronyms should provide evidence fluorethylene is not a sulfonate or an octanoic acid.
The manufacture of PTFE may involve generating these as bio-hazardous byproducts and PTFE could be contaminated or even break down into them, but they are chemically not the same.
I'm not sure about the last claim: it isn't clear that all PFAS are equally bad, so replacing PFOA with a different PFAS might be worthwhile. It seems hard to study, but with Europe banning PFOA, perhaps we'll get some more insight.
Teflon is generally safe, but heating it to above 300 degrees Celsius or 570 degrees Fahrenheit poses a danger to your health.”
Note they didn’t say Teflon was safe at 299C, the risk is chemical breakdown not a phase transition like water which boils at a specific temperature and pressure. When used properly pans shouldn’t get anywhere close to that temperature range but it’s very possible to get to a dangerous temperature if there isn’t food in the pan.
Once you're frying, roasting, and grilling things at this temperature you are increasing cancer risk completely unrelated to any cooking materials involved. That's true of french-fries, bread, steaks and a zillion other things. It's why they're tasty (see Malliard reaction).
I certainly consider cast iron relatively safe, but it's polymerized unsaturated oil is likely to leach acrylamide and associated chemicals. It's just that compared to the food you're eating it's not relevant.
What frying pan when used properly doesn't get near 300 C? A pan surface temp of 200-250 C is nothing strange when frying a steak.
It’s the same gap was walking outside into 25f and 115f Aka below freezing to punch you in the face hot.
And table salt is made out of Sodium and Chlorine, one of which is explosive when mixed with water, and the other is used to gas soldiers in trenches if you're into committing war crimes.
What matters is what effect the particular chemical has when you put it through common household uses, not the effect of its constituent parts.
Anyway, uncommon household uses can also be a safety concern. People still do occasionally get poisoned by mixing ammonia and bleach even despite the repeated warnings.
Talking about the constituent parts is similarly relevant when you’re heating something to significant temperatures. Many reasonably safe substances really shouldn’t be tossed on a bond fire etc. For other things it’s not the substance itself that’s a concern but impurities from the manufacturing process. People often think of past recalls as companies doing something dumb, but I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get this stuff right.
I looked at the formula and that Oxygen double bond attached to a carbon with another oxygen bond... yikes!
I have no idea why this is stable. It appears stable, but you wonder about things like UV light, exposure to some cation, etc...
Well, seems like I have reading to do. (Chem engineer here, I feel like its my responsibility, similar to how programmers read open source code)
If you look into molecular orbital theory, the double bond causes overlap, which makes the bonds unstable. It can more easily jump off and create a new bond. If you want to see an even worse situation, look at Nitrogen triple bonds.
Further, the extra oxygen attached to the carbon makes the bond a bit polar since you have such a heavy electron clump on one side of the carbon.
That said, yeah, PLA is known to not be very stable, and that's part of the reason its biodegradable. It degrades into lactic-acid based large molecules that living beings have no problem on destroying. (But are toxic when you get several grams of it, so beware if you are doing strange chemical experiments with PLA.)
PLA is just going to break down into lactic acid. Big deal.
Breathing smoke and dust from PLA is bad, because breathing any type of smoke or dust is bad. Wildfire smoke is bad, but wood is not a harmful chemical.
We actually do understand the chemistry of plastics. And to a very large extent they are very safe, primarily because they are incredibly stable and non-degradable.
Even the studies of e.g. BPA health issues point to very weak effects. You need to do meta-analysis on tens of thousands of individuals to have statistically significant effects, and even then they are weak and it's not easy to say whether you have successfully eliminated confounding factors.
And "BPA-free" plastics just use BPF instead, with very similar chemistry. The consumer-facing BPA fuss is primarily driven by companies that want to sell products; health agencies are primarily concerned with occupational exposure, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger in terms of dose per body weight. BPA is metabolized in the kidneys to the benign BPA-G and excreted in urine; a dose 250 000 times the EU dose limit is cleared by the body in 24 hours.
PFAS is a similar story. Over long timescales with stupid disregard for basic PPE, like cross country ski waxing trailers where people were breathing C8-dust without masks for a thousand hours per year, there has been clear health concerns identified. So people are saying "there is no safe lower dose limit" and companies are switching to chemicals that haven't been used in the same context so there is little to no data on exposure safety, and saying "this will be safer".
I'm not asking to play 'gotcha' with your comment, but because when I've attempted to do my own research on this, I find it easy to get information on the polymer itself, but the polymer is never used by itself in a product. As far as I can tell, most polymers are not actually useful without a cocktail of additional chemicals added to them to change their physical characteristics. From my research, raw polymers tend to be extremely brittle and frangible, completely unrecognizable when compared to the products we use made from them.
And those additional chemicals are extremely difficult to find information on. Like when they're used, what they are, etc.
I guess my mind is instinctively reaching for the ways FDA attempts to ensure food safety by compelling manufacturers to publish ingredient lists, and by maintaining registries [0] of hopefully-well-understood additives (and banning the rest, in historically dangerous categories like colorants).
Sure from time to time agitators take that information out of context to whip up a scare about one ingredient or another, and sure some of the food that comes in from overseas has after-the-fact labeling that’s a little sus. But at least there’s an expectation that the information must exist and be legible.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/determin...
I disagree, because, that's like me telling you "The word 'Cancer' needs to die." etc.
That would imply you'd be required to tell me the specific cancer you refer to when you say "you aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon" etc.
General terms exist for a reason.
To stay with your example, it would be like discouraging the media from saying "cancer is cured" when they actually might mean "this specific type of lung cancer has a cure". To bring it back to "plastic", the media could focus on saying things like "teflon coating encourages these negative reactions..." as opposed to "plastics are poisoning us" which is way too vague to matter.
And on the case of plastics, that reason is that they are molded by the same processes.
It's about as relevant as talking about "metal contamination" of food when you are measuring mercury.
Can we? Have these been tested? Alone and/or while interacting with other such things in the wild? Or have these chemicals/plastics been introduced because they can be (i.e., no regulation or oversight), not because they are safe and have been proven to be so.
The default of "they're safe" is not the default we should be using.
It's not useful to nitpick over their long chains or oxygen double bonds. That rhetoric contributes nothing but deflective nerdery and confusion to the conversation.
> deflective nerdery
FWIW, the point about carbon bonds was actually a response to nerdery that's already present here, in a forum intended for digging into the nerdy details of various subjects.
Not all "plastics" cause harm (at least, not any more than the skin you shed every day).
I've seen countless disagreements on numerous topics caused by people thinking they both have the same definition of a term and even more instances of confusion because the intuitive implicit definition that came from the example usages they'd seen of a term was a non-representative subset of the things matched by the explicit definition.
Nuance and clarity of language matters, otherwise you'll ban "chemicals" and discover you actually have no sane definition of it and are inflicting a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Many “compostable” paper food and drink containers are lined with a ptfe film, which does get into the food.
Okay sure maybe it’s all leftover pfas reagents, (or maybe some break down but ignore that) it’s impossible for anyone to know that this particular instance of ptfe doesn’t have residual pfas.
No, we are awash in labels already and I am sick of everything having a legal treatise attached to it. Labels just throw the problem back in the laps of consumers, an approach which clearly does not work.
Some labels are good and informative. Some labels are just a way for corporations to blame consumers for what consumers cannot do anything about.
Falsehood: - "Consumers are purchasing toxic products, so that is what we make."
Reality: - "Consumers buy what is available and they can afford."
It's one way industry has scammed the public by convincing them much of the waste generated by low-cost (to the manufacturer) packaging was recyclable.
Is actually better for the planet that you just burn it yourself instead of wasting diesel on transport to nowhere.
And guess which one of these groups has actual influence on government policy? Yup, its the poor who get screwed.
If you let consumers decide, what you end up with is upper class suburban mums eating healthy bananas, while the homeless dude eats bananas that were grown in a superfund site.
Even if you disagree with my particular examples of the above three classes I think you'll be able to come up with something for each of them.
You might not think much about having specific types of labels, but its basically impossible for a chemist to know anything beyond ~8 generic types of plastic in the US.
They have a chemical policy[1] that is moving in the right direction, and labels like Oeko-Tex 100, Oeko-Tex Made in Green, Clean Beauty, BPA Free, Paraben Free and Recycled. The changes they are making as a part of their chemical policy (eliminating PFAS and other concerning chemicals from cleaning and baby items) are benefiting everyone, and consumers who have specific concerns can quickly get more information about what they are buying. Most consumers are increasingly aware of risks, but most do not have the desire or time to look into the manufacturing process for everything they buy.
1. https://corporate.target.com/sustainability-ESG/environment/...
If we banned everything that increases the risk of some sort of bad thing we'd probably end up banning everything (or more realistically, everything we'd do studies on).
Is walking "actually dangerous"? Is cycling? Is driving? Is swimming? Is hang gliding? Different people will give different answers to these questions and I've even kept them all to the domain of transportation!
Once you get to the realm of all chemistry things get very murky. E.g. Is sugar dangerous?
In practice we're evolved creatures full of hacks that work well enough to mostly not die before we've had kids, I would be very surprised if there was a single substance we consume (both intentionally and not) that doesn't damage something.
I think we either need to appreciate that the industrial world is poisoned and take that as the cost of doing business OR stop poisoning ourselves at the cost of substantial technological progress.
As far as polyesters go, the main cause for concern is the endocrine disrupting effect of polyethylene terephthalate[1] and the inability of PET to be broken down completely, leading to microplastic pollution. By contrast, PLA can be broken down by heat or a select number of micro-organisms, and the lactic acid monomer used to produce it is non-toxic. The polymer is formed by a simple condensation reaction to form ester linkages, releasing water. Esters are a very common and generally benign moiety found everywhere in nature, for example in cutin found in plants, forming the rigid exterior of cells exposed to the elements. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate
PLA and other acid co polymers are used in resorbable stitches and polymer medical devices where the biproducts are organic acids and carbon dioxide.
I second the ‘I don’t know’ for actual health effects of PLA but wanted to provide a counter point to comparing PTFE (indestructible C-F bond) to PLA (readily hydrolized C(=O)O- bonds)
Bonus points if you can tell me what each recycling number on plastic means without looking it up (it's the internet, so I have no way to enforce this).
Ester groups are quite innocuous. The most it will do is hydrolyze to oligomers of lactic acid.
Here is what i have been doing for a decade and would receommend
1. Reusing plastic bags (i love cotton bags but not ideal). Fold and keep one or two in your pocket before you leave home
2. Support and use light software so you dont need to upgrade your gadgets (12y laptop i use)
3. Prepare and eat home cooked meal (its 360d in my life). Good for your health and the environment
4. Plant Trees. i plant one every month on average
5. Collect rain water and/or use less water
4. Prefer walking over any other transporation
5. Dont fucking care about trends.
6. Sleep 8hrs. less waking hours means less consumation.. lol
7. Prefer quality over quantity everytime.
8. Carry a water bottle (copper ideal).
9. fuck sugary drinks.
Why is copper better than stainless steel?
(For some hints, see the sketches of the Dwarven Kama Sutra found in JRR Token’s estate)
You can usually tell if the water in your bottle is going bad / filled w bacteria..
If this is not possible, take in mind that your immune system can take care about bacteria. In 99% of the cases after a learning period, local bacteria will stop being a problem. Unless your live in areas with very unsafe water sources or particularly dangerous organisms this shouldn't be a main factor in the choice.
> If you have been drinking water that has been constantly stored in copper bottle or vessel, chances are high that you might be at the risk of copper toxicity. It can cause severe nausea, dizziness, abdominal pain and can result in liver and kidney failure.
No thank you. I get the struggle to not use plastics, I try to avoid it myself too (especially buying water in plastic bottles in shops is something I never do), but alternatives are subpar, either very heavy, fragile and overall impractical for outdoor sports (ie glass), or some other issues. What happened to stainless steel? Heavy but at least should be inert and nearly indestructible, no? I mean those without some crap BPA lining inside, like thermos but single walled.
Not sure about that -- With modern pollution rain water is not likely to be safe to drink (depends on your location)
> 9. fuck sugary drinks
Massive yes! Amazing for your own health too.
There are lots of "grey water" uses that don't require drinkable water, like watering plants, flushing toilets.
Yes. I've heard/read grey mentioned many times in permaculture articles.
I like the fact that permaculture takes a systems or holistic approach.
Another nice, small but useful example of permaculture design is the concept of guilds, when it comes to planting crops around a house.
They plant by category, in concentric bands called guilds, with the guild nearest to the house having most commonly used plants such as herbs, then vegetables, then grains, then fruit trees, etc.
So you have to walk less to tend to or harvest them.
Edit: I may have used the term "guild" incorrectly.
The Wikipedia article on permaculture uses it differently, under the section "Guilds".
Guilds are about companion planting - they're combination of plants that form a small ecosystem where they provide benefit to each other. E.g. comfrey is often used around fruit trees to break up subsoil (it has very long taproots, to 10 feet or so), and as a prolific mulch producer (cut it back every couple months, and chop and drop the leaves in place). Nitrogen fixing plants are common, as a way of providing nutrients. Etc.
Water availability is also very different from country to country, region to region, and even town to town. How your water usage affects the environment depends on so many things.
Air pollution does change abruptly, but on most places it tends to not do that frequently.
Also washing, showering can be done with rainwater if you are really a minimalist.
Professional car wash places are required (depending on location) to collect and dispose of their waste water in a safe way. When you wash the car in the driveway, the waste water will either go into the ground or the storm drains, neither of which will ensure that the waster is cleaned before reentering the environment.
If the rain is falling on your car it will have the same issue, no?
So not really "free" at all, and rather expensive enough that nobody does it...
You can also skip that entirely with a composting toilet. Again depending on your local laws, gray water can often be drained directly outside, potentially through a leech field if required. Plenty of areas allow this for specific uses like washing machines, the only reason it can't be done with standard toilets is because of the solid waste.
Do you have land on your own, or is there some public land where you can plant trees?
Which is why I asked, what OP actually did.
I know folks who have planted trees on public land and on land owned by corporations, which seems cool but also kinda stressful.
It's toxic…
Copper pots are not copper on the inside because of this reason.
A bit less minimalistic: ride your (non e-) bike, scooter, skateboard, kayak, sled, basically anything non motorized. Use best tire quality so you don’t change then often.
A bite more minimalistic: prefer walking barefoot anytime you can. Shoes are tire that wear out.
King of related: still looking for shoe/soles that last. My grand mother used to wear wood clogs, not sure where to find some that fits me.
How are you going to transport heavy goods without some kind of motorized or motor-assist vehicle? Unless you want to keep horses or donkeys.
Ebikes are a godsend. Without one I'd have to get things delivered by van.
This is the problem with environmentalism-as-actually-practiced -- the conversation starts with plastic pollution, you look away for five seconds, and suddenly there are a bunch of ascetics one-upping each other in the "LARP as a third-world peasant" game. There is no social defense mechanism against it. Normal people look at this and think "no thanks". It's all about focus on minimizing downside and (implicitly) self-flagellation for the sin of living in a rich country; there is no focus on things with upside potential, like "how do we increase the supply of clean energy so we can have cheap material abundance".
I don't want to live in squalor. I want to enjoy a hot shower of crystal clear desalinated water, heated by electricity made in the searing heart of a nuclear reactor, and it all costs a fraction of a penny to run.
It’s not about copying thinks third world but about health, resource management and public space enjoyability.
There's guides for making huaraches with tire rubber.
And there's also barefoot sandals that claim to last a life time (but cost like 100 bucks).
The most environmentally friendly would be used shoes if possible, even if they don't last that long.
I have a pair of ENIX Sandals I bought 6 years ago that I wear when it's really hot. They're also great.
1. Buy less stuff
2. Buy secondhand stuff
3. Ride a bicycle
4. Eat less meat, more local produce
3. 4. 5. 4. are barely positive if positive at all (considering environment, some are definitely healthy)
For most, it would require living in a smaller space, in a more urban area and is probably the most people can do to reduce that impact on the environment.
The energy spend that comes from living in detached single family home that multiplies all the distances mass has to travel back and forth from that home (and subsequent homes) dwarfs everything else.
But, for example, preferring walking to more energy efficient cycling means you need more calories => eat more => affect environment more.
Very often living healthy is at odds with being environment friendly. I do not say you should live unhealthy but lets not confuse those two things.
I guess a more accurate descriptor is “non car dependent living”.
And that’s just one event.
Being politically active and pushing for a carbon tax would do far more than any amount of individual lifestyle choices.
Would this not incentivize offshoring even more and artificially lengthening supply chains to "hide" emissions?
Sure, for walkable destinations. Having a bike is more efficient (calories per mile) and hugely increases the practical range. Commuting, even grocery shopping, and being social is hugely more practical on a bike then walking.
…and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Wilson’s disease is surprisingly common at 1 in 30,000.
You should reevaluate what you consider common. Schizophrenia, a condition you probably rarely witness in every day life, is around 1 in 100. You don't interact with 30,000 people even over the course of a year.
silica -> iron -> aluminum -> copper
With a logarithmic scale unit between each step or so. We ingest and tolerate much more aluminum than copper in our daily journey and we could drink water with much more iron oxide dissolved on it than aluminum oxide without suffering permanent problems
Fortunately, it is pretty much impossible to come in contact with pure titanium, because whenever it is exposed to air it becomes immediately covered with titanium dioxide.
The ratio between electric charge and radius of the titanium ions is such that titanium dioxide is one of the least soluble oxides. It is practically inert in water or blood.
This inertness of the titanium dioxide ensures that titanium is one of the safest materials for making implants that will have to stay forever in a human body or for making objects that will be in contact with food.
While glass remains the best food-contact material, titanium is a decent choice for applications where glass might break, e.g. spoons.
On that scale, titanium would be placed between silicon and iron. It should be kept in mind that the position on that scale actually refers to the behavior of the oxides, not of the pure elements, because all the elements mentioned are oxidized quickly in air and they are oxidized even faster in a living body.
Titanium dioxide is more inert than silicon dioxide, so less of it can become dissolved, but once the two oxides are dissolved, the silicon dioxide is safer, because most living cells have mechanisms to deal with it.
They both have issues, but the latter is still worse than the former.
Most homes have copper water pipes. That's probably more important to test as corrosion in water bottles should be easy to spot. There are test kits one can buy to test their water at home.
Especially when they come in plastic bottles and not glass ones.
I dont think cooking at home necessarily produces less plastics. Most (in Norway) veggies, meats, some spices, sauces, etc come in plasticcontainers.
This is good since it preserves the produce, so it has a longer shelf life. but the drawback is plastic.
Not being a fan of sugary drinks is fine, but as long as people buy water coffee, etc in pastic it is not a clear win for the environment. It is a win for a persons health.
10. Eat plants.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free an area as big as Africa for wildlife/reforesting) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Eat more plant-based foods https://www.un.org/en/actnow/food
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-...
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/1/8/5610806
Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car.
12. Less or no children.
All of the above, combined.
IMHO the best way to limit our negative impacts is
- stop exploiting other countries (there are almost no poor countries, only overexploited ones)
- urbanization ( https://i.redd.it/fl28yusb1r5b1.jpg )
- abandoning fossil fuels (so far we're not making a dent https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-growth-di... )
- stopping animal agriculture (destruction of the environment, biodiversity, pollution, overfishing ...)
Here is the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland, playing right into the hands of those authoritarian monsters.
> Good luck trying to convince Russia or China
Whataboutism. Best way to avoid doing anything.
> the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland
That's incredibly foolish.
There are two possible answers to climate change: avoidance and preparation. Avoidance means that the world reduces its CO₂-footprint to zero or less to limit global warming or even to revert it. Preparation means that, if global warming cannot be avoided, states prepare for the changes in weather, sea level, agriculture, etc.
Avoidance can only work if all nations worldwide do participate to reduce their CO₂-footprint. If some big nations do nothing, or even worse, if non-consumption of fossil fuels by western nations causes a price drop and a shift of fossil fuel consumption to the rest (instead of an overall reduction), avoidance by the west is pointless and a waste of resources. All the world has to participate for avoidance to be successful.
On the other hand, preparation mostly works on a more local level. Nations with coastlines invest to protect those, nations threatened by water shortages invest in countermeasures such as maybe desalination or storages, etc. Even if the rest of the world doesn't care, preparation will mostly work for the local community.
Both avoidance and preparation need a lot of resources. But allocation to avoidance is only sensible if every nation agrees to it, otherwise those resources are wasted and far better spent on preparation.
- keep packing more fellow on your homeland, our children with them. Don’t change anything but wish them good luck, the Science and Industry will solve everything as it always did anyway, right ? Guess what, it won’t make the two giants stop being authoritarian.
- not doing (much) more children in your homeland so no descents will suffer from the density. The “authoritarians monsters” will probably profit of that.
Do you really value democracy and freedom (I value it a lot, me too) so much that you continue gambling with descents’s home habitability?
It’s not about giving up but about recognizing that adding more soldiers won’t stop the war.
I want people to think big. Instead of carrying a water bottle and use paper bags focus on how you can help a whole country like India or China or even a whole continent like Africa.
Set goal of stopping Coca-Cola from dumping their plastic waste in Afrika. This would include much more effort than just carrying a water bottle or sleeping 8h.
…Said the Easter Island native
…Said the XX century boomers
Would you elaborate on your thought? Why questioning the demography is “enemy of mankind”? Is there other subjects/sciences we should avoid completely to be friends with mankind?
as do their human companions. I mean if you're going to Modest Proposal pets, why stop there?
And here's #13: turn off your phone, your laptop, your desktop computer. Read a book if you want edification. Go talk to someone in person if you want to express your opinion.
Don't try to blame the first group for the sins of the second.
I’ve spent a lot of money on numerous steel and plastic water bottles. They all break and good luck recycling them. Most likely they end up in landfill.
PET bottles use less raw resources, are cheap, lightweight, extremely durable, and when they reach end of life they’re easier to “recycle” (downcycle is probably more accurate).
Modern PET bottles shouldn’t leach into your water. You can at minimum use them until the expiry date on the bottle. If you’re concerned about leaching, don’t take my word and do your own research.
You _ may_ be able to take steel to a resource recovery centre. However if the travel uses oil or electricity that comes from coal, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being worse for the environment than a PET bottle.
With regards to leaching, the FDA has declared PET bottles safe for repeated use.
There's almost nothing worse than forever plastics at this point in time. They're everywhere, they're toxic, and we don't know how to fix it.
Steel is recycled as often as it's economically feasible to do. It's not hand selected by consumers because there's already a whole process for dealing with metals in general that's been in place for a hundred years. Which is ideal really, the less I have to select by hand the better.
Here it's scavengers stripping it out of refuse (and everything that's not bolted to the ground, really). In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
The FDA is also cool with BPA, pfas, teflon, etc. Don't rely too much on it. PET is safe, ish. As i wrote: use it, avoid buying new. It does leach microplastic but those are everywhere so it's "safe", and by that I mean it's unavoidable "background pollution" these days, as there's microplastic even inside produce.
True, but they're also good carbon sinks.
That’s not my point and I think you’re deliberately misinterpreting it.
> In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
This sounds like wishful thinking. Do you have any evidence to support this claim? “Don’t worry, just trash it and it’ll probably get sorted in Mexico” doesn’t inspire confidence.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-iron-steel...
PET is at 30%
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
Is your particular bottle going to be part of the 20%? IDK... but it's more likely by definition that the PET one is going to be part of the 70%, and is also more damaging in every possible way.
Except when dropping it on your foot.
PET is a horror show in the failure scenario.
https://www.wasser-aktuell.com/products/1-0l-trekkatanka%E2%...
small dents, but no no issues with lid or seal
There’s replacement parts on their website to get worn out pieces which is convenient.
Apparently I’m depressed too then, as I value my sleep.
without anyone changing their behavior, a massive collapse is guaranteed
with only a portion of people changing, eventually the world all switches over
even besides all that living healthy is to avoid disease, pain, low function, feeling like crap etc
The entire chain of things you listed are riddled with plastic. Tools in the manufacturing and shipping processes, to build the roads, insulation, millions of miles worth of pipes for fuel, insulation, water, all the packaging for the food and products, packaging for shipping the products, metric tons of single-use disposable things, large and small, used in all kinds of industry, in our air, food, water. Fucking everywhere.
Oh but thank God I planted a tree and reused a little plastic shopping bag. That'll really hedge against the hell wrought by the plastic-industrial leviathan that's coiled around every part of our lives.
In a rock band, you have a guitarist and a drummer and a singer and a bass player. Not everyone does the same thing. We all need to contribute in different ways at different times.
Plastics are indeed everywhere and have made some aspects of daily life better while making other aspects worse. Neither of the extremes of overemphasizing personal virtue and nihilism are useful.
I would look into the mass production of these plastics and try to change some things there.
(there are two 4. on the grandparent post)
A lot of the classic list of feel good things do little or come with giant asterisks and this is a good example.
Potable water shortages are a very serious problem... that affects particular areas at particular times.
A little town on a tributary of the amazon in the rainy season can use as much water as they want to water their lawns or bath in and it will cause no issues, while a drought striken area must preserve all their water.
We need to ban all materials that persist with poisonous degradation products. Most bottles should then transition back to glass or to enamel-lined (not BPA) cans. Glass persists for thousands of years but isn't much different from rock. There's no need to worry about glass pollution because fragments quickly weather.
the argument that glass is better in terms of decomposition when littered stands, but does not tell the whole story. (not unlike guns are good for self defense but the externalities paint a totally different picture)
If you don't have functioning eyes, I apologize, and imagine being blind and barefoot is a tricky combination.
all i wanted to say is that glass bottles are no silver bullet because they also have negative consequences.
Stainless steel containers are less likely to produce this scenario when dropped. (-:
Although…they may need some MagicEraser equivalent or a suitable soak to remove latent flavours and odors. /-:
I don't think this for a second.
I think the only way it will stop if equivalent biodegradable materials can be made to replace single use plastic.
There's always a reason to say you can't do it, but I do what I can and if it's important to you you can too. It's a change in habit and lifestyle, that's all. Live lighter and don't rely on comfort like you'll die without it.
While for some people it's a comfort issue there are lots of people that will literally die without cooling during heatwaves.
Besides that, you can't expect people to be productive (especially in jobs where you're supposed to make use of your brain) when they are slowly cooked in a hot office.
But everyone lived without air conditioning for all of human history until about a hundred years ago. The number of people who will die without it is much less than you'd think, and there are ways to keep cool without it that people used when they build houses, public buildings etc before air conditioning.
If it costs me $20k to get the solar panels + battery set up and they're good for ~15-20 years, its not really a $2/mo power bill. Amortizing the $20k over 20 years that's still just under $84/mo for the hardware. If it only lasts me 15 years its ~$111/mo.
And that's assuming I had all the cash on hand at the time to install the system and didn't need to take out a loan. If I had to finance half of that ($10k), at 6% APR over that 20 years that's $71/mo for just the financed half and adding that $10k amortized is another $41.66 for a total of ~$112/mo.
But hey my power bill is only $2/mo!
The batteries are so expensive that they pretty much throw cost savings out the window, but it’s very nice having the added resilience to power outages, as well as knowing we can run the A/C and charge the car (especially at night) without causing our local utility to burn more coal.
I’m not under any delusions that my solar panels are going to save the world, but at the same time I think it’s important that we all do what we can while we expend our efforts in other ways too (voting, petitioning local governments and utilities to allow and incentivize more solar, etc.) that will have a much bigger effect if successful. I also like setting an example for the people around me. Since adding solar, we’ve had several neighbors and family members ask about it, and two so far have added solar themselves. I of course don’t know, but I like to think I may have at least nudged them in the right direction when they decided to add solar to their own houses.
I use no solar or anything like that, but I do intend to, if I want to continue living light like this I would be able to do it all on modest solar.
It doesn't hurt that I live near the ocean, and in a pretty small space (albeit not well insulated at all; I prefer to spend my time outdoors so the space is for sleeping and showering and cooking and what not) so summers are not as extreme and winters too, but it does get hot/cold enough that I need something for the extreme parts of the year.
How do you do that? I can't get mine under 20EUR/month. Do you never cook at home?
Please share these handful of lifestyle changes.
We are wasting hundreds of millions of tons per year, we eat it, drink it, we have been doing that for decades and we are still discussing statistical signifiance.
Sure, not completely harmless, but few things are. And considering the tremendous value plastics have brought to society, I'd say the downsides are comparatively small. What worries me more than human poisoning the article is about is the effect of microplastics on marine life, as it is less studied than people and there is some evidence that the physical (more than chemical) properties of plastic particle might be damaging.
It doesn't mean there isn't something to be done. Proper waste management is the obvious one, and I don't mean anything fancy, I mean "do not empty you trash in nature" thing that is unfortunately much too common, especially in developing countries. Properly managed landfills would probably solve 90% of the plastics problems. Reducing disposable plastic is, I think, generally a good thing, but not before making sure the alternative is not worse, and of course making sure that "disposable plastic", is not "throw it in nature plastic". We should also research better plastics: make sure the durable ones are actually durable, and that the disposable ones degrade properly, also consider the petrochemical industry that backs it up and maybe switch to more sustainable sources.
> The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic are pretty straightforward; they include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract. Animals that fill their guts with plastics eventually starve to death. The risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens. In addition to their main ingredients, plastics may contain any number of additives. Many of these—for example, polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, which confer water resistance—are also suspected carcinogens. Many of the others have never been adequately tested.
Honestly it’s not surprising that scientists are worried about the harmful effects of plastics to human health because the introduction of many substances non-native to the human body brings about some kind of long-term illness as a negative reaction. Just because you can’t detect it with your senses and within a short time frame doesn’t mean that a phenomenon is not happening.
People could really do more with questioning their opinions more than just jumping straight into availing of their freedom of speech.
My argument is essentially that while it is perfectly normal and expected that researchers study the health risks associated with plastics, and that it is just as expected that we address the issues we discover, we have to make sure the solution is not worse than the problem. And since plastics are what I believe to be relatively harmless for the massive and careless use we make of them, I think it is an important consideration.
Also, what are you saying that there’s no evidence? Even if it’s not in the article (which is an opinion piece, not a scientific journal), then you should have had the diligence to look up the claims before taking a stance? Plenty of objective sources cited in their Wikipedia articles alone:
In Asia especially it's crazy how plastic is often used - you go to a 7/11 to buy a cold drink, they put it in TWO flimsy plastic bags which you throw in the first trash can you come across. So the thing has a useful lifetime of under a minute. They also give you a plastic straw, wrapped in plastic which goes in the trash a few minutes later.
All that stuff is produced in a dirty process and will linger in the environment for way too long.
And what's the effect? We've been doing this for decades?
There's this belief that if something has an effect, it'll just show up magically on the news after the minimum amount of time, without taking into account all the hurdles people have to go through to research. Even if you didn't have powerful companies with interests against the research being published, it would be complicated.
If plastics are indeed poisoning us, the hazard ratio seems to be small enough that it would require significant research to quantify.
Compare to, say, the lung cancer skyrocket that happened in the 70s-90s from the 30-year smoking habits developed in the 40s-60s.
With plastics, either the lag time for effects is really long, the effects themselves are so spread out that any meaningful bump for a single one is hard to identify, or we are reducing other causes of the same issues in lock step.
Lead was used for millenia. Romans drank from lead goblets. It sweetened the wine.
And we didn’t know the full story of lead until 20 years after it was banned from gasoline, and the violent crime rates started to drop.
It was a public debate issue at the time, trying to solve trash problems. I don’t know where they are at with the problem now.
Not at this rate. And we're probably still many years away from peak microplastics in our food and water.
Yes Perhaps it’s not plastic itself but what plastic enables.
But it's not that we need plastics that urgently. Synthetic fibers in clothes, which generate microplastics household dust, could be largely replaced with cotton. Plastic food packaging could be replaced with a modern variant of cellophane. Car tires (which also generate major amounts of dust) could perhaps also be made to a higher percentage of biodegradable material.
Of course all these alternatives aren't free, but maybe they are worth it.
Only if there is an alternative, which doesn't exist at the moment. And no, plastics are way less dangerous than lead point or asbestos, its main problem is its sheer quantity.
And what are we supposed to do against this, raise in arms?
In my country we have two big parties but they are in cahoots (practically have the same progressive opinions on everything) so we can't even vote to have these authoritarian policies removed. There obviously are other parties but it would take something big, or reaching a tipping point, to break this cycle. It's not as easy as "no one cares". Many of us care but are powerless.
What did they replace takeout containers with? Where I live, they replaced them with "paper" containers that are lined with teflon...
But are a big net loss for any reason you can have to the ban.
If you make an awareness campaign, people will replace a lot of it with glass, metal, or plastic that actually gets reused. But they keep using a lot of single-use things. If you out-right ban them, people go directly to what can out-right replace them, and it's always those things.
So what is the food from the supermarket packaged in? I assume mostly in single use plastics.
Paper bags at the supermarket, food came in glass or butcher paper, that kind of thing. We got along fine.
And also, the clothes industry is massive and went from an already cheap source like cotton, to plastic.
Consider the forces here that push plastics - influensers, marketers and huge brands. It's hard to find consumers or manufacturers willing to pay several times more for the better alternative..
EDIT:
In the end, it's up to consumers. Personally, I'm using glass, it's infinitely re-usable. I use hemp clothes, it lasts many times longer and I don't own a car, I bike everywhere.
We already have this. It's called trash can. How would letting the producers handle this instead would change anything? The plastic was still produced and will end up in a landfill or the ocean.
I see no reason the same couldn't be true of most packaging, in addition to things like TV's. If you built it, you ought to be uniquely positioned to recycle it.
In addition to trying to get consumers to change their habits we should also be fining/billing manufacturers when their stuff end up as litter or in a landfill. If they don't like it, they can redesign their processes to avoid it.
If recycling is not an option, burning would at least solve the problem of microplastics, if a complete burn of these materials can be achieved. Controlled storage in a landfill would be another option, until there are better solutions to handle this type of trash.
My point was that there are some policy options to approach this problem and "all is lost" neither a constructive, nor factually correct point of view.
It’s going to take generations for it to be fixed, and it probably won’t happen until humans and other animals get much much sicker.
We can just go back to the material we used to use for shoes: leather. If there isn't enough cow skin for shoes for 8 billion people, we can just vastly increase the amount of cow farming we do. Oh wait...
My last pair of quality leather shoes held up nicely for about three years and it's now relegated to construction and garden work. My current pair is spotless after two years. The soles on these are synthetic, but they degrade about as quickly as the tops. Not sure where you draw your experience from, they don't match with mine.
EDITED TO ADD: Of course quality shoes can be refurbished with new soles, so even if a leather sole would only last a couple of years, you could simply get a new sole slapped on.
>Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be.
True, but there's tradeoffs here. For hiking boots, for instance, some people swear by "sturdy" hand-made leather boots, but the problem with these is they're much heavier than modern boots made with synthetic materials. For a lot of hiking, you don't want heavy weights on your feet, and the shorter-life tradeoff is worth the performance improvement. I'm sure the same goes for most other sports. Just look at the shoes that professional athletes wear: they're probably plastic-based, and it's not because of cost, it's because it's better to have something that's as lightweight as possible and performs as well as possible, even if that means throwing them away after one competition.
I've hiked quite a bit in various types of boots and yes, It's nice to have lighter shoes, but for most people most of the time a kg more or less won't make the damndest bit of difference. Only a fraction of all hikers are attempting trails under circumstances that require top-notch performance gear.
Anyway, I do agree about using synthetic material for the soles, and leather construction doesn't necessarily have to be super-heavy.
I'm not really worried about "the earth." The planet and nature will continue to exist and even if we fuck up the ecosystem we are dependent on and billions will die as a consequence, "nature" will simply continue to exist. Pretty insects and rainforests don't have an intrinsic value to me but I care about them deeply as the basis for human existence and prosperity.
Also: on the one hand you believe in a worldwide conspiracy to suppress "the truth" but on the other hand you argue that climate change (the addressing of which is a threat to entrenched business interests) is not real because if it were, it would have been solved by now? I mean, do you realize how wacky you sound?
Microplastic pollution in the Himalayas
I have travelled a fair bit and I think the days of describing the Himalayas as remote | pristine are long past.
The area suffers from blow in micro plastics to be sure .. but as your linked article notes:
Additionally, Himalayan region draws many domestic and international tourists throughout the year, resulting in generation of massive and unmanageable volume of plastics wastes and finally ending up in the open landscapes covering forests, river streams and valley. Fragmentation of these plastic wastes can lead to microplastic formation and accumulation in the Himalayas.
Southern Ocean coasts and beaches are far more remote in terms of fewer feet on the ground, they, of course, have volumes of washed up micro plastics.
https://www.curtin.edu.au/news/media-release/the-worlds-most...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-08/new-research-disturbi...
The house is really air tight but moisture can get out through the walls easily without causing rot. There are thermal bridges. Window frames are from oak. We have a bit of plastics-based insulation around the foundation and the roof is covered with an oil-based-rubber, but that's about it except for smaller items like cable insulations, switches, etc.
We did some of the interior stuff DIY but the major parts of the construction were done by various contractors.
Also, UK or Canada? Noticed the spelling difference.
We chose wood fibre because we wanted the house's CO2 footprint to be as low as possible. We are slightly above passive house levels in terms of ongoing energy use (mostly because the house has an inefficient shape = not a cube) and we produce more kw/h from solar power each year than we use despite having a relatively inefficient electricity-based heating system. But we also wanted to reduce the CO2 emitted during construction and cement/concrete is really bad in that regard.
The wood fibre insulation has a fraction of the embodied energy/CO2 emissions of concrete and fossil fuel based insulation and it is fully compostable. I could theoretically also be reused if the house is demolished at some point, as it doesn't deteriorate if it stays dry (or is allowed to dry quickly after getting wet), though I think that would be unlikely to happen. Also, wood fibre is an excellent insulator against heat, which is nice given that our summers can get quite hot.
The wood-only construction also eliminates all thermal bridges, as wood is itself an insulator and the required fasteners are small diameter and do not reach through the entire wall.
Professional contractors have professional equipment for this type of construction, though and can put it together really quickly. The basic framing of the house was constructed over a couple of months or so off site (with mostly two guys being involved, I think), transported in pieces to the build site and put together over the span of five days, including the roof construction. The insulation and OSB were added over the span of a few weeks.
No it's not. Please don't spread sinister pro industry falsities like this. Nothing has ever changed because of some symbolic drops in the ocean.
Regulation and collective action is the only thing that has ever worked, all personal lifestyle choices are romanticizations about personal effects that the industry loves because it has pushed responsibility to consumers, like much of the astroturfed recycling movement that is theatre hiding actual policy making.
If people want to do anything that makes any kind of actual difference they should get into anything that's anti the big industry lobbies or collective action and see through the jungle of astroturfing and "lifestyle signaling" greenwashing noise.
I'm hoping more of a technological revolution, like this: https://twitter.com/thebetterindia/status/167302084037433344...
Algae is abundant, easy to grow and completely compostable - the problem - again, is capitalism holding it hostage.
...to vote for politicians who will regulate this shit.
Pushing the responsibility to consumers is just BigCorp's messaging to externalize the responsibility.
This is the exact wrong conclusion to draw. The only way we've ever solved issues like this (CFCs, lead paint, leaded gas, etc.) is on the supply side through regulation. Yes, it's challenging and there are forces resisting these efforts, but it's certainly possible and has been done before.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/pfas-compostable-food-packag...
Now we get some "eco" "compostable" ones. To my untrained eye, aside from the different color, they look and feel exactly the same. They even have a drawing on them that I interpret as "we kill turtles". Not sure how these can be considered "green". I'm also curious how healthy it is to drink a hot beverage out of them.
Not to mention the fact a lot of these “eco” things need special equipment to process which isn’t available everywhere
Found this with some quick googling: https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1541-4337.12...
Seems like the risk comes from additives to PLA? Seems exhausting to try and stay informed.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
That is very surprising given that PLA can't support heat.
Does the cup get out of the machine in a complete different shape? Because if it's PLA, it should.
Why am I not surprised.
They are also many times thicker than the cotton bags you can buy in stores, so they might very well need another couple generations before they are carbon neutral!
I'm trying to imagine how DoorDash would even work without single-use plastics? Maybe we'd have standardized reusable containers with deposits on them that could be returned to a central location for $1-2 refunds per container, where they'd get sanitized and re-distributed via restaurant supply companies.
0: https://concreteplayground.com/sydney/design-style/returnr-a...
Edited to remove a second link that I failed to double-check before posting.
But that's most of the population doing away with them and most of the population (by my in Australia networked experience) being pretty happy with that.
I'm not aware of any public health campaign either overt or guerilla to convince the public that they're bad healthwise .. your link is to the UK's Daily Mail which is well known for making big drama for click bait and loving to stir up contraversy.
The article linked, reduced to it's core, is reporting on the findings of Associate Professor Dr Mark Green from some years past:
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/individuals/dr-mark-green
which all looks very sound .. but it hasn't (yet ?) turned into any wide spread official public campaign to warn people away from microwaving food in plastic containers.
The Daily Heil [1] loves to manufacture faux outrage and hysteria.
As for the link, small potatoes, many get taken in by overly bombastic Daily Mail | Sky News headlines and copy - there's usually always some kernel of truth in them, but a lot has to scraped away to get there.
https://chemtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/PFAS-UK-food-packag...
A rule of thumb seems to be that oil drop test : PFAS make fibers grease-repelling.
Of course it could also just be from a very thin (and much less toxic I assume ?) layer of polyethylene that those non-recyclable "paper" cups seem to use ?
CC Climate change
OD Ozone depletion
HTc Human toxicity, cancer effects
HTnc Human toxicity, non-cancer effects
POF Photochemical ozone formation
IR Ionizing radiation
PM Particulate matter
TA Terrestrial acidification
TE Terrestrial eutrophication
ME Marine eutrophication
FE Freshwater eutrophication
ET Ecosystem toxicity
RDfos Resource depletion, fossil
RD Resource depletion, abiotic
Water Water resource depletion
They also come to the conclusion that it's always better to incinerate paper bags (at end of life) rather than recycling them, which is interesting? If you intend to recycle your paper bag, you need to reuse it 73 times before you do so, because recycling paper is bad (recycling the plastic bag: also bad!). Again, in terms of "total impact"; I think in terms of climate change they say recycling either is good.
And I'm not sure if the paper bags they looked at were themselves made from recycled paper, which they usually are in stores here and which presumably changes the calculation (in either direction). It's odd because they look at like 5 or 6 LDPE variations, including breaking them down as recycled/non-recycled, but I can't find any mention of the paper being recycled or not. Again, 144 pages, maybe I've overlooked it. They do distinguish bleached and non-bleached paper.
Last but not least, they assume you need two paper bags for each LDPE (reference) bag (not enough weight capacity). The same is, hilariously, true for the organic cotton bag (but not the non-organic one!), not because of weight but because of volume constraints. So if they had chosen a slightly smaller -- or larger! -- shopping trip, lots of numbers would go up or down by a factor of two.
I'm not saying the report is bad or anything -- I'm not qualified to say either way --, turns out lifecycle analyses are complicated and full of judgement calls which inevitably get compressed to single statements like the one in the fine article.
Here's the report: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
That reminds me of how much better to-go containers are in some other countries! I was blown away by the quality of to-go containers when I ordered delivery in Beijing, the containers could easily have been used more than once.
I actually would be interested in seeing what a world with zero disposable packaging would look like. Imagine if everything you bought at the grocery store used packaging that you had to return afterward. Think peanut butter put in jars that get returned and cleaned.
Related, I remember when Costco ketchup came in giant gallon sized aluminum cans.
For example, looking at only GHG emissions, you'd have to use a ceramic mug 500 times (without breaking it!) before the GHG emissions of creating the mug was less than the GHG emissions of creating 500 styrofoam cups. That's because a styrofoam cup is 99% air and merely contains 4.4 grams of plastic (about 4mL of volume before it's foamed up and pumped full of gas). Whereas a ceramic mug weighs 200-400 grams. Just kilning the 400g of the mug to dry the clay uses a lot of energy / creates a lot of GHG emissions, compared to processing 4 grams of plastic.
However, GHG emission is just one part of styrofoams environmental impact. The ceramic mug can be crushed up and essentially become part of clay again. The styrofoam just ... never decomposes. The styrofoam contains (and literally is itself) an endocrine disruptor -- so even as it does "decompose" it pollutes the environment with itself and other chemical additives in the polymer. The styrofoam is likely to contaminate your food as well, especially when restaurants put hot food in it and it melts small holes in the styrofoam box, or when kids chew on the styrofoam cups. But then, ceramic mugs may have various harmful metals in them or toxic chemicals/metals in its paint and glaze.
Basically, it's very, very important for us to start doing full hazard and lifecycle analyses of the materials we use at large scales. Overall, I think we're currently greatly underestimating the hazards of most of the newer modern materials. I also think the energy requirements to switch back to traditional materials would be untenable -- and still require ubiquitous quality control to minimize harmful heavy metals / etc in the raw materials.
But I think anyone who says "well it's just too hard then, forge ahead!" is terribly misguided or callous. And most people who say "we need to go back to metal/paper/wood/glass for everything!" needs to be fully prepared to describe to listeners/readers how that would affect daily habits -- you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups. I don't think everyone who pontificates on this is a hypocrite -- many of them do advocate for reducing consumption above all else. It's just a very hard sell.
But we don't have any roadmap at all for taking these contaminants out of the environment once they disperse throughout it.
Of the many things we need to change, this is NOT a hard sell, I have been doing it for several years now, and for the past few years I have even gotten a discount... there's a caveat though : it's a plastic cup (unlike their paper cups with what I assume is an extremely thin plastic layer), and I now realize that I haven't really done the kind of math they did there, neither did I double-check my university where I got it about just how harmful this cup was supposed to be.
Still, some countries (like Germany ?) successfully resisted the phasing out of the (unbroken) glass bottle deposit system, that plastic bottle sellers are trying to get rid of.
Tens of thousands of people already do this, if not more.
The relevant section is 6.3. The cited number is relative to a LDPE carrier bag (page 25 has pictures of what that is). When considering only climate impact, cotton bags are better after 52 times reusing them.
Note that those numbers, as I understand it, assume that the reference LDPE bag is reused as a garbage bag (EOL3), which is optimal but probably not what usually happens? But EOL3 only differs by a factor of about two (page 59) from the other two EOL options, incineration and recycling; I think landfill is not an EOL they looked at because it's not done in Denmark, nor did they consider the impact if the plastic bag is not properly disposed of, ie. it ends up in the environment.
Most people here now use these all the time.
The problem with these sort of equivocations is that they conveniently side-step the categorical argument. One something like; do not surround yourself with trash.
realshadow has rule 7, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503179, "quality over quantity". That is a value argument, not an efficiency argument. Only arguing from efficiency is essentially internalizing the logic of the machine. If everything is evaluated whether it minimized/maximizes one metric or another, quality of life will, inevitably, decline. In this case, surrounded by plastic trash, ingesting, drinking plastic trash.
Plastic bags must die. Why? Because they are trash. That's the value system I would love to see in this world.
Exactly this, I wish I could upvote you a thousand times.
If we stick with the plastic vs cotton bag example, we are considering two factors: some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n. If n=1, would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality? Isn't it also mostly trash in this case? What is trash? I'd argue it's a product that we cannot or do not squeeze any additional utility out of. How about n=10? n=20?
Actually, I would agree with that for sure. The real world is grey, and multiple things are true at once. I'm certainly guilty of leaning to the other extreme here.
> some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n
I believe I understand, and I appreciate the overall push back.
But starkly put, and to be a little flippant ..
> would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality?
.. absolutely yes. Certainly in this case. The reuse number is incredibly (incredibly) flexible. In no world n=1 will be a given. The only reason we have reuse of one for a bag, is out of habit, simply put. Habits change all the time. A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value. It may have a lot of other uses. Do we even need a bag? 80% of time, the store clerk gives you a bag out of muscle memory, not because you can't hold a couple of items in your hands or stuff in your pockets. The utility of a plastic bag might even be closer to 0 than 1.
> It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?
I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
I agree that on average, a cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. Some cotton bags absolutely will only be used once, however. Sometimes it's even predictable that a cotton bag will only be used once. Ideally, we would get people to use whatever product is best suited for the situation at hand on a quality-environmental impact pareto front. There is no catch all that's going to be the best solution in every situation. We shouldn't give out plastic bags like their going out of style, but I'm also not sure we should eliminate them completely.
> I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
Yes, I was trying to say that quality is hard to measure by calling it an ill-defined metric. You are still trying to maximise it, even if you cannot measure it. I get that, I'm with you most of the way, but I just don't think you can only look at quality. We could be creating the most high quality neighbourhood at the cost of increasing entropy outside of it. Nothing comes for free.
Now about 30 years later, the Germans are eager to sort their trash but the recycling quote is still laughably low. Less than 20% of sorted trash gets recycled for usage in plastic (and instead just burned, reusing the thermal energy) and people still have ridiculous habits (e.g. wrapping Bananas with plastic bags).
What we see is: It's all damn industry lies, one part of politicians susceptible for industry lobbying, the other part of politicians antagonized for "limiting consumer freedom", a lot of green-/whitewashing campaigns and consumers who refuse to change their habits.
Do you see a pattern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Electronic_Waste_Re...
Personal initiatives are just romanticization and a philosophy that shifts the problem from the producer to the consumer (who has no choice).
Metal is an alternative to many things. Plastic is only for containers and things with a long cycle of use. It has its advantages. It is more resistant to impact than metal (falls, bumps) and retains its shape.
Glass is not an alternative at all, it is not comfortable, it breaks, leaves fragments that you will not find on the ground or in your body. It is not resistant to falls, shocks, frequent temperature changes (just pour hot into a cold cup, or vice versa). And it's not pleasant to the touch, with limited use where it really is the best choice.
But this is not a problem in itself, we need to localize food production more so that it doesn't have to be stored for a long time and therefore use a lot of packaging. We need it to travel quickly from the producer to the store to the consumer, without plastic packaging as much as possible.
Over the past 4 years, I have been horrified to see that the amount of plastic waste I generate has increased dramatically, without changing my consumption and habits.
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Back when I wrote it, I suspected the industry intentionally worked with government to distract the public, and now in this article it is confirmed:
Under public pressure, a company like Coca-Cola or Nestlé pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. When the pressure eases, it quietly abandons its pledge. Meanwhile, it lobbies against any kind of legislation that would restrict the sale of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wallis quotes Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, who once said, “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”
Even Greenpeace now admits the obvious: recycling doesn’t work https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-second-thought-just-...
Europe’s circular economy is leaking https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2023/europes-circular-e...
How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change https://www.salon.com/2023/05/13/how-big-oil-is-manipulating...
Chemical industry used big tobacco’s tactics to conceal evidence of PFAS risks https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/pfas-3m-...
Companies Knew the Dangers of PFAS 'Forever Chemicals'—and Kept Them Secret https://time.com/6284266/pfas-forever-chemicals-manufacturer...
WHO's Proposed Limits on PFAS in Drinking Water Far Too Weak: Experts https://www.commondreams.org/news/who-pfas-drinking-water-pr...
Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly driven by fossil fuel interests and allies https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/rightwing-wa...
Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
Documenting the Hidden History of Chemical and Pesticide Hazards in the United States https://www.poisonpapers.org/
Will far future organisms call this the plasticene?
Supermarkets, which were just coming into vogue, either didn't offer shopping bags or if they did they were made of paper.
Large items came in cardboard boxes and heavy items came in timber crates, fruit came packed in low grade wooden boxes which were later great for storing things in. Heavy machinery was often crated in large wooden containers.
Toys were made of either wood or metal plate or diecast. ...But rarely of plastic. Plastic LEGO wasn't available, instead we kids played with wonderful Meccano made of steel!
By comparison, plastics were few and far between and confined to a certain class of objects such as ballpoint pens, drawing set squares (often celluloid), radio cabinets (Bakelite), but TV sets cabinets were still fabricated from wood (3-ply and or Masonite) although the dials and knobs were plastic.
Despite the current whingeing, the introduction of certain plastics was a great benefit, for example, from the mid 1950s onwards when PVC replaced perishable vulcanized rubber as electrical insulation in household wiring, electrical fires became much less common. That was a great advance forward.
All this happened not that long ago. Things started to go really pear-shaped around the mid 1960s early '70s and by the 1980s it seemed that just about everything came in shrink-wrapped polyethylene or such.
Now I can no longer buy, say a galvanized bucket, instead I have to buy crappy plastic ones that do not last—not long ago I bought three at the supermarket and the handle fell off one even before I got it home. Large plastic bins I use to put things in are made of polyethylene or similar and after the plasticizer bleeds out they becomes brittle and crack then fall to bits—it really is a damn pain this stuff just doesn't last.
Plastics have their place. One of the great problems is that they are being abused in the ways we use them, back to those storage containers for a moment: if made of a good high grade durable plastic that's also thick enough not to break in normal use they'd last a lifetime after which they could be disposed of properly, instead they are deliberately designed to fail after little or no use. We've now reached the stage where these containers sold for domestic use are not fit for purpose.
I'm of the opinion we need to tax the shit of plastic when it's used in items that either don't have an appropriate lifespan (i.e. not made sufficiently durable), and or where suitable alternative material exist—for instance wood, metal and glass for bottles etc.
The argument that, say, glass is dangerous and plastic is safer doesn't hold water. Even in my lifetime I've seen a society that ran on glass and it ran OK! In cases where plastic has to be the preferred option then simply tax the shit out if it. People will either make do with cheaper glass or they'll pay a premium for plastic. Plastic drink bottles could have deposits on them so high that no one would ever think of disposing them other than to return them for the deposit.
The only real problem in bringing plastics under control is opposition from greedy corporations that have nothing other than profit in mind. The first thing we citizens must to do is to limit their ability to lobby government on such matters.
These are good uses for plastic—especially if bottles have an effective deposit on them. (Even if you own a refillable bottle and consider it a permanent fixture, it too will ultimately be returned for the deposit at the end of its useful life).
It's not a matter of banning plastics, it's all about implementing clever regulations that protect the environment. Trouble is corporate and vested interests will fight us every inch of the way to stop them from being introduced.
On the matter of alternatives to plastic (and glass), this is difficult if we want to get rid of plastics altogether as presently there's not much to choose from for liquids other than aluminum or steel cans but they're also a good choice being easily recyclable (and the deposit system works well with them too).
Drink containers, whilst a big problem, can easily be solved with the deposit system. A much harder issue is the inappropriate use of plastics and that mainly takes two forms, (a), using cheap or the wrong type of plastic in applications where it breaks and thus is disposed of inappropriately, and (b), its use in packaging. Most packaging can be made from other non-plastic materials (cardboard, etc.) which are very satisfactory and environmentally friendly (as was done in the past).
Other creatures include Snake, whale, crocodile, giraffe, cow, dog, crab, sea lion.
Twitter thread with images: https://twitter.com/aadhi_reach/status/1264109645125189632?t...
For example, I have a Breville Precision coffeemaker. How much plastic is getting leached into my daily cup of coffee? Should I go back to manual pourovers? What is the real hazard I'm risking? How does this compare to other behaviors I may have?
Are there other behaviors that I can moderate for high bang/buck ratio?
N95 and surgical masks are made from an energy intensive process that spin microplastics into a woven structure. When wearing these masks, you're subjected to a small amount of inhaled microplastics.
Normally this isn't a problem, since people used to wear these masks just for medical procedures, or for certain construction jobs that emit high amounts of particles, but at my office now I see people wearing these things for 8+ hours a day! And at the end of the day, hundreds upon hundreds of these masks are just thrown in the landfill (or in SF, just on the street).
This is the worst case of misuse/overuse of plastics by far, and nobody seems to talk about it. Please, if you insist on continuing to wear a mask, switch to a reusable one.
No match for domain "BETTACYCLE.COM".
I hope to be breathing tomorrow. Therefore I care about what we put in the air today.
I hope to be eating next year. Therefore I care about what we put in the soil this year.
I hope to be drinking next decade. Therefore I care about what goes into the groundwater this decade.
What I eat, drink, and breathe becomes my body. If those things are garbage (or worse, poison), my health will suffer.
[Edit: And to answer the actual thrust of your question, because the corporations aren't going to.]
Corporations may "own" that stuff (I disagree, but let that pass). But my body is mine, and corporations aren't going to take care of it for me.
This planet has seen cataclysms, mass extinctions and destruction on planetary scale, it'll be fine. Not us.
Of course, as George Carlin used to say, the planet is fine: it's us that are fucked. We'll see how bad the effects of plastics on the long term really are, but if anyone suffers, it'll be us, not the planet or life on it in the long term.
I have a lot of unpopular opinions about plastic. I personally think it's not that big of a deal. Benzine compounds are naaty, but they're in your drinking water. I don't like them. But most plastic is organic compounds since it comes from oil. There are already microbes metabolizing it in the wild, and it's a rich energy source that most organisms aren't using, you can expect that adapted niche to be filled very quickly by those organisms. Additionally, I think there's too much of an aversion to burning it. Whether its for disposal or for fuel via depolymerization, I think we need to be burning more plastic. If you're worried about CO2 bear in mind, this stuff is in the environment and will decompose eventually. Overall I'm not that concerned about it, besides some things like PFAS and benzine compounds.
And all that said, I'd bet money I dispose of significantly less plastic than the average European. First is water bottles. I don't do water bottles. I use those 5 gallon jugs and a hand pump dispenser on amazon, it works like a super soaker or a garden sprayer. That alone has me ahead of most Americans. Beyond that I prefer paper bags, and glass over plastic containers. It's just lifestyle decisions, I hardly care but I do it, it's not even effort at this point, it's just different habits. If you care and can't be bothered and I don't care and do it, do you really care? Avoiding single use plastic in your household is not really all that hard, things you can't avoid like linings in cans and what not aren't the problem, grocery bags and water bottles are the big ones, and you can do other things like never buy teflon, which I also do.
It being an organic compound doesn't mean it's safe or something we should ignore. Asbestos is an organic compound with wildly useful properties.
> Additionally, I think there's too much of an aversion to burning it.
At home, its a terrible idea - it's super duper toxic a d leave a horrific nasty waste to dispose of. In a commercial setting maybe, but I'm not convinced it's going to be handled correctly without serious regulation.
> And all that said, I'd bet money I dispose of significantly less plastic than the average European. First is water bottles. I don't do water bottles. I use those 5 gallon jugs and a hand pump dispenser on amazon, it works like a super soaker or a garden sprayer. That alone has me ahead of most Americans.
Eh, are you comparing to Europeans or Americans? I don't have stats handy but tap water is potable and suitable for a large number of uses. No need for any plastic.
> Avoiding single use plastic in your household is not really all that hard, things you can't avoid like linings in cans and what not aren't the problem, grocery bags and water bottles are the big ones, and you can do other things like never buy teflon, which I also do.
You can't just decide the plastics that you use aren't the problem. Avoiding single use plastics might not be hard for you, I live within shopping distance of 3 supermarkets all of whom package most of their fruit and veg in single use plastics. That's my number one source of plastics, and there's nothing I can do about it.
[0] https://defineinstruments.com/blog/epas-list-of-volatile-org...
In rural places a lot of people burn their trash in pits. Just don't stand over it while it's burning and you'll be fine. Id argue this is significantly less bad than it piling up in the ocean.
I'm comparing to Europeans and Americans. I don't drink tap water, I refill 5 gallon jugs.
We probably also don't want a microbe that is so effective at eating plastic, seeing how much we rely on it. At the first sight of a truly plastic eating microbe, manufacturers will start making plastic immune to organic degradation and the cycle starts again.
Same with burning, you can't say it'd end up as CO2 anyway as one is an immediate effect and the other theoretical and very long term. I do agree that "energy recovery" as it is often called is better than landfill disposal but it is the lesser of evils. It's not always clear that not using plastic is a net benefit as its use might be reducing other environmental effects. In which case I agree that using minimal plastic and then using it for power generation is an option.