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Comment by tfourb | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how the "it's to late to do anything about it" is supposed to contribute to this debate. It's also factually wrong. The production of new plastics could be drastically reduced through regulation of both the production itself and its use cases. Most food and drink containers could be made from non-plastic materials. I've built a house that uses maybe 5% of the plastic that is common in construction where I live. You could pull out the cables, window seals, roof cover and switches and basically leave the rest of the house to compost. The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics. There are a thousand ways to drastically improve this problem, fatalism only contributes to it.

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> The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics.

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 couldn't speak for other brands, but Brother will give you a free shipping label so you can send your empty toner cartridge back to them. It's not charity, they want it back because they can reuse most of it in ways that a melt-and-remold style recycling scheme can't.

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.

I think we should be subsidizing plastics that end up in landfill. It's the best place for it, as it's both safely contained and impractical to take out again, making it a reliable form of carbon sequestration.

That sounds like a fine idea to me, so long as the product was designed to end up there rather than it being the catch-all solution for anything whose maker didn't think ahead.

Why not pay people per kg to return plastics. We have a scheme in Germany where you get something like 30 cents per glass bottle that you return. Even people who don't care about this small sum leave their beer bottles in a convenient place for others to pick up as a result. Mandating a non-trivial payment per kg of plastics would create the incentives for people to not only throw stuff in the bin if they find it convenient, but also for others to collect plastic trash that nobody else feels responsible for.

Collect it for what? Glass is somewhat easily recyclable, most plastics are not. Even if it's collected with utmost care, it will be taken to a landfill, or "sent to China for recycling" (spilled in the ocean) or burned in a power plant - none of which is that great. Conversely, if it's thrown in the regular trash, it will probably end up in a landfill, which is probably right now the best solution for it.

This topic is about plastics getting into the environment in an uncontrolled manner being a huge problem. The first step to do something about this would be to make sure that you collect as much of the plastic currently in circulation as possible. Offering a financial reward for collection would be one way to achieve that.

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.

Most people have microplastics in their body, and even babies in the womb are being exposed (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...). The most remote, otherwise pristine environments have microplastics due to atmospheric transport (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36868287/). It is too late.

I suppose it was too late to ban lead from gasoline because everyone alive at the time had already been exposed.

I think the person meant it is too late to avoid consequences, but not too late to take action.

Correct. Eliminating plastic pollution will be a benefit not to us, but to our children's children. The same with reducing carbon emissions.

Even if it is "too late" for this generation or the next generation or the next 5 generations that is not a reason to simply don't care and continue to make the problem worse. That is the kind of attitude that kept us from doing anything against climate change when it still was cheap to do so (just 15 years ago). I really wish people would start seeing these problems as a positive challenge that can help transform society for the better instead of just another opportunity to spread fatalism.

climate change can’t be prevented, it’s a natural oscillating cycle on a grand scale, but not making plastic is totally on us, though perhaps we will all freeze or boil long before drowning the ecosystem in plastic, there is some real bitter irony in being hopeful that nature can take us out before we do even more harm, if it can’t then I guess Earth will have proven itself not so resilient, but I suspect on a long enough timeline the Earth will absorb it all deep into the white hot swirling depths for refinement, climate change may end up being a big part of the solution

Man made (hint hint) climate change was first described more than 50 years ago and while the window of cheap opportunity arguably has closed by now, it could easily have been addressed without too much cost up until about the year 2000 or so and somewhat cheaply until about 2010. Most countries are now making concerted efforts to address it but now it costs a huge amount of money and we will experience some severe consequences nonetheless. Still better than doing nothing, which could render huge swathes of the globe uninhabitable for humans.

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.

if there really was such a clear and obvious and dire threat that could have been mitigated it likely would have been, but this theory has been repeatedly debunked by climate scientists, it’s just that many of us only hear one side of the story because our media (hint hint) has been captured by political interests that want convenient black/white fear mongering they can use to manipulate the flow of money and regulation to help them direct power and wealth toward their allies, interests, investments, etc

So you got climate science denial, a global media conspiracy, and shadowy political/business interests directing the fate of the world. Very original. I've worked in media. If there ever was a profession incapable of being part of a successful conspiracy with a world-wide coordinated agenda its journalists.

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?

> The most remote, otherwise pristine environments

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.

The staging areas for an Everest ascent, for example, look like an open field rubbish dump with literal tonnes of waste that has been walked in and then abandoned.

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...

https://www.ccwa.org.au/microfibres

And of course if it doesn't help people who are currently alive only our children we should never do it and it's too late to bother?

Plastic replacement isn’t like leaded gasoline or ozone-depleting substances where you had just a few applications to design alternatives for. It’s in fucking everything. Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously.

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.

All the more we should start ASAP then. It’s too late to have zero adverse consequences but you’ve got to be a defeatist (who ironically is engaging in debate) to choose to do nothing.

>Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously.

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...

Leather shoe soles have worse grip than plastic ones. Switching will increase the number of deaths and serious injuries from people slipping and falling on hard surfaces. Leather soles also wear out much faster.

Are you kidding me? Even if that were true there are probably 500 ways of making leather soles equally grippy to plastic soles that would either eliminate or drastically reduce the use of these materials. There are also other biodegradable alternatives to plastic that could be used. Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be. These are cheap excuses that are quite transparent in the attempt to justify simply changing nothing.

If there some reasonable way to make leather soles grippy, it would have been done ages ago I think. Instead, back in the old days, leather shoes that needed grip were probably made with rubber soles.

>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.

The "good old way" of making leather soles grippy is nails, just to give one example. Even using synthetic materials instead of hobnails would reduce plastic consumption quite a bit for these use cases.

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.

I guess you're a slow or easy hiker or something, because most people can immediately tell the difference between boots with a 1kg per-boot difference between them. I'm not even some kind of super-serious hiker, but I'm not going to choose boots that weigh double. Even walking around town that much weight would be annoying and tiring.

Anyway, I do agree about using synthetic material for the soles, and leather construction doesn't necessarily have to be super-heavy.

99% of people are „slow and easy“ hikers so I’m in good company (though I have hiked a couple of alpine long distance trails). We buy synthetic shoes because they are cheap, look flashy and are marketed on Instagram. I’m not saying that people don’t notice the difference, I’m saying it wouldn’t make a difference to their general quality of life if the affordable (or only) option would be a shoe made out of 95%-100% biodigradable materials. I don’t really care about the 0.1% of people who go to outer space or climb Mount Everest or the 1% who do competitive trail running. Let them wear all the “high performance” great they want/need. But the default option (due to price and convenience) for the rest of us should be something that does not pollute the environment for the next 1,000 years.

I'm talking about synthetic elastomer soles specifically, not the tops and sides of shoes. They last for decades and have excellent grip. There's no way to make leather soles anywhere close to as good.

That may be the case, but the last few pairs of "normal" shoes I bought had to be discarded after a year or so, not sure if the sole was still ok, but it didn't matter: they were done and because of their construction you couldn't fix them.

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.

I’m curious to hear about what you did with the house (I’m thinking about building/renovating a house in a few years). Did you go DIY or hire a contractor? What were some of your replacements for plastics?

A note on the contractor question: The basic construction of the house is quite simple (post and beam not too dissimilar to the German "Fachwerk") and given the right tools and location could be done completely DIY. Check out this YouTube channel for traditional wood framing techniques: https://www.youtube.com/@KrisHarbour Our contractors used a more modern design approach and metal fasteners but it is basically the same basic construction.

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.

By the way, I never thanked you for the replies. This stuff is really great, thank you!

We basically built an all-wooden house: Timber posts and beams (not the flimsy sticks that are used commonly in construction in the US but solid 8" posts), interlocking OSB-boards on the inside for air tightness (this can also be achieved with other wood-based techniques, my house has an air tightness comparable to passive house construction), wood fibre insulation material (15+ inches on all sides and the roof), clay plastering on the inside (great for thermal mass).

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.

Interesting, what made you go for wood fiber insulation versus something like ICF?

Also, UK or Canada? Noticed the spelling difference.

Germany, actually ;-)

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.

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