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Comment by njovin | Hacker News Reader

I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics. In the US the closest we've gotten is banning plastic straws and charging for plastic carry bags.

Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective and requiring massive amounts of fossil fuel to move the waste around the globe, often with much of it just getting burned or dumped into the environment anyway. Despite that, the aisles of grocery stores are still packed full of single-use plastic bottles, containers, wrappers, etc.

Are any countries making a legitimate effort to drastically reduce the use of plastics? It seems like we had a pretty good system years ago in requiring people to leave a deposit for bottles when purchasing beer or pop to incentivize return + reuse.

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The problem is plastic particles getting into food. And that comes from things like heating up in plastic, storing things in plastic. Non single use plastics are a major problem.

That's the thing. Plastic is modern lead. It's easily moldable, but causes subtle health problems.

Citation needed.

These comments read like Reddit/TikTok. Lots of frantic fearful hand waving, not a lot of evidence presented.

I don't understand this perspective, the need to wait for mountains of published evidence that something is "bad", or "bad enough" to do something about it. Plastic is toxic, we all know this. It's everywhere, it's in the food and in the water. In reality it's the "Citation needed" reflex that's the reddit-tier reaction to stuff like this, because it pretends that humans can't or shouldn't make decisions unless we all sit around in a peer-review committee to review the "data". Perhaps in some contexts that perspective makes sense, but again, in this one, we all know plastic is bad (for us and the environment).

I don't understand the perspective of criticizing a request for a citation? This is exactly how misinformation spreads.

The parent hand-waved away the substantial differences between various plastics and made bold blanket statements on plastics as a whole that may or may not be true.

There's plenty of material out there to cite with and providing a cite that supported your understanding would help the discussion. Here's a random one:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c01103

> Plastic is toxic, we all know this.

There are thousands of plastics, and a blanket statement like this is simply false. We should be working to figure out which plastics are toxic, and why. You're essentially looking at lead and coming to the conclusion that "Metal is toxic, we all know this."

That’s not a great comparison.

If it was comparable to lead in terms of identifying toxicity, we wouldn’t be having this debate.

So actually plastic is worse than lead in that it’s more insidious, some want to slowly kill things but it’s nearly impossible to tell which. If only it were like lead and upfront about it.

So no, they are not saying “metal is toxic”. That is extending the analogy to another topic: identification

Heating up plastics is thought to release microplastics but I've not seen much solid research on it either.

According to the European Parliament, ~63% of microplastics come from laundering synthetic clothes and car tires [1].

1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...

A recent study found that microwaving food in plastic packaging releases a lot of microplastic into the food:

https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/nebraska-study-...

> Non single use plastics are a major problem.

And they're everywhere. I bought a sweater a couple of years ago. It's made from recycled PET bottles. It felt like a nice thing a couple of years ago. Now I realize that every time I wash it I'm releasing micro plastics into the sewer that might not get filtered out.

Kyrgyzstan passed a law banning many single-use plastics from January 1st, 2027. I hope the ban sticks. It will be challenging to make the economics work.

https://24.kg/english/272281__Production_and_sale_of_plastic...

https://24.kg/english/272323__Kyrgyzstan_to_fine_for_sale_an...

> It seems like we had a pretty good system years ago in requiring people to leave a deposit for bottles when purchasing beer or pop to incentivize return + reuse.

On the other hand, this system incentivised using plastic bottles instead of glass, because of less hassle with returning.

> Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective...

There is one effective way to recycle plastic into energy called "waste incineration".

Japan incinerates trash for energy, and yet they typically require residents to separate plastics from "burnables". Maybe it'd be better (and easier) for everyone if we just started putting everything into the burnable pile.

Another reason for the sorting at least here is that the companies using plastic packaging are the ones responsible for and paying the disposal system. I think the theory is that this will cause them to reduce plastics use and develop improved re-use.

Recyclable packaging tends to make for pretty good fuel.

During last winter's energy crisis, Finnish cities were heated with plastics collected in Italy.

The thing I'm most shocked about is the amount of microplastics used in toothpaste, and cosmetics, and such.

Is there a list of brands that are independently confirmed to not have micro plastics?

You have to have a good alternative first. Paper items sprayed with harmful chemicals is not a good replacement.

https://fortune.com/well/2023/08/24/paper-straws-harmful-for...

No you don't. A ban forces industries to create alternatives. Otherwise they won't bother. You just schedule a phased elimination over time so those alternatives can get developed. That's precisely how the Montreal Protocol banned CFCs and protected the ozone layer:

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

If it was that easy to get an alternative introduced it would have been suggested already and all of these radical "green" governments would have hopped on the train immediately. This idea that we're just killing people with microplastics because we like it is insane.

CFC's coming out of your hairspray is WAY different than removing the plastic keeping your food fresh.

Stop with the black and white thinking. There is NO alternative that is free of some negative consequence. You're already seeing this with EV's. Every single "green" replacement introduces new problems that are often worse than what they've replaced.

Good PBS Frontline show, Plastic Wars, about the recycling industry: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/

Germany and several other EU countries have deposits on plastic bottles. I’m not sure how much that helps with the microplastics issue, though.

It doesn't help with ocean pollution at all, because plastic rubbish from Germany and other EU countries wouldn't end up in the ocean either.

That is unless they sell it to Philippines who promptly dump it into rivers, which is exactly what happens. https://www.dw.com/en/german-plastic-floods-southeast-asia/a...

Today I learned, thank you.

Don't you think the payment incentivises people to return their bottles for reuse versus leaving them lying at parks etc.?

Yes, it might. I think the point the grandparent comment was making was that plastic rubbish in parks most likely will not end up in the oceans.

I think the most common sources are:

* Plastic netting * Plastics from countries without any/lacking waste infrastructure

Well, plastics that end up in the environment will degrade by the elements into microplastics, and rainwater will carry them to the oceans (or salt lakes, but I know none in Germany).

There are differences in statistics between EU countries, they might tell something interesting.

EDIT: "considered to be at risk of missing one or more material-specific targets, with plastic being the most critical material:

Plastics: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Spain" https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...

They have for the PET bottles, yes, but there are still thousands of other packaging types which just get dumped in garbage with unknown destinations. I cannot really imagine a deposit on those (do you want stinky meat packages returned to the shop?) but still we need to find a solution.

Bottle in glass, aluminum or paper. Beers, various soda and juice already use that

The salad head comes in a plastic bag. The pork chop is sealed in plastic. Sausages are coming with plastic labels, single use bags are still everywhere, and let's not forget the hard wrappings of tools or toys. Can we put all all those in waxed paper? And what exactly will that "wax" be?

Don't cans have a plastic lining on the inside so that the liquid doesn't touch the metal? Same goes for paper from what another commenter said about paper straws.

Heck I wouldn't trust paper food packaging because I'm not sure they would use a wax liner instead of some fancy PFAS forever chemical.

Most of it ends up in landfills which are relatively safe IIRC from other microplastic articles?

Leachate analysis says otherwise: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00431...

Well, there goes that :/ Thanks.

> I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics. In the US the closest we've gotten is banning plastic straws and charging for plastic carry bags.

I think it's because those two things can be used to scold consumers and thus inculcate the belief that the final link in the production-consumption chain bears all the blame.

I mean I have seen signs encouraging people to use reusable bags at the checkout line. But is it a problem that literally everything in the store (except mushrooms I guess) is wrapped in plastic? Apparently it is not.

Even most of the mushrooms are wrapped in plastic at the stores I visit :(

Apparently most paper straws just have a thin plastic coating of PFOAs

We should replace both with cookie straws.

I like the way you think.

It's exactly the same as fossil fuels and climate change, plastic is far too convenient for any government to even consider doing anything extremely significant regarding it

> It's exactly the same as fossil fuels and climate change, plastic

Moreover, the main ingredient in making plastics is derived from fossil fuels (specifically crude oil and natural gas).

If we replace plastic packaging with metal or glass containers which weigh more then more fossil fuels will be required for transport.

It’s all about depending the scale you look at. One might expect that where governing is concerned, anticipation of long term down side will be given some weight in the balance.

It appears to be that paper straws have more PFAS than plastic. Seems no matter what we do we are boned.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/08/28/paper-...

I agree there’s far too much single use plastic. For example, it baffles me why non perishable products are still sold in transparent plastic bags. If they go to the store they generally get taken out of the plastic bag and put on display. If they’re sold online I have to waste time opening and discarding of a random plastic bag. Why? What purpose does it serve? If you’re that desperate to wrap it in something why not branded paper or even one of the decomposable clear bags that look like plastic but aren’t. Why is the cable in the box also in a small plastic bag? It’s ridiculous.

> Why is the cable in the box also in a small plastic bag?

The charger I bought this weekend was in a cardboard box. Inside that cardboard box was a plastic shimmy bracket, keeping things in place. The charger had a plastic film adhered to it, but not the whole thing, just like the on the sides kind of. The cable was tied together with a velcro band (plastic from the futor!). On the plugs of the cable were little plastic protector caps. The box itself was wrapped in plastic of course. There was a booklet, not plastic.

The material world we've surrounded ourselves with really is made of plastic, disposable trash.

Mostly to prevent dust and other dirt accumulating before evrything goes into the final packaging.

I believe you. Or, plastic is essentially worthless, so it just gets applied willy-nilly. As if, plastic, _because_ it is cheap and easy to produce, therefore it must be everywhere. Go shopping, here's your free plastic bag, well, hell no, double bagged, because plastic is flimsy and crap quality (you didn't even ask, but force of habit, shrug). Package a thing, wrap it in plastic on the outside and the inside! And maybe, if you put in in a box, put more plastic inside that box. so the thingie is snugly ensconced in russian dolls of plastic. Plastic straws, free, a bunch of them, of course in a little plastic sleeve.

This proliferation of plastic is not rational, certainly not wholesome. It is purely the downstream effect of plastic being cheap to produce, it is primarily a technological phenomenon.

If you were just talking about plastic packaging you have a point. By weight that is a small percentage of plastics though, which is incidentally why it is so cheap.

For other applications plastics are an outright miracle material though. Imagine if all drinks came in glass bottles; all cases and other structural parts were made of metal or wood; all elastic members were made of rubber or treated wood. The added need for shipping alone would probably outweigh the CO2 impact from current plastics production. As it is you get plastics almost for free while refining oil. Not to mention the insane demand there would be for metals, wood and rubber.

Thanks.

> Imagine if all drinks came in glass bottles

I can totally imagine. Glass bottles with deposit. Return them when empty, reclaim deposit. Most plastic bottles are also, I don't know, for crap products (?). Sodas, energy drinks. We could just drink more water.

> plastics are an outright miracle material though

Absolutely. There's certainly "good" applications of plastic. I don't dispute that.

The problem of replacing plastic in food is the cost. If you use glass or steel or aluminum, you need new logistics to reuse them.

Also, glass is heavier, and requires a lot of energy to be made, so it would require a production chain that ships back empty containers.

The best silver bullet solution would be to have local canteen, a bit like in the army or at school, where you just get a subscription with a calendar (not on demand, you plan the meals you'll get), so it reduces waste and costs.

We should just stop eating at home, with individual fridges, ovens, kitchens etc, this is highly inefficient.

Yes, this is collectivization, but it's the best solution for an economy of scale. Individualism was never a good solution, individualism is often very wasteful.

Call me a communist or a socialist, I don't really care.

So you want people to eat only when and where and what the state says you can eat???

The vast majority of people don’t want to choose your wet dream when they have the choice between their own private house versus a local canteen on a schedule. Nobody likes other people so much that they’d choose to be stuck in a school cafeteria environment for their food or their children’s food forever. Life is not perpetual kindergarten where everyone’s together all the time. Life is competition and mutually-beneficial cooperation in some things, and friends are made on the basis of mutual desire. Not forced socialization and collectives. What you are proposing results in mass starvation when the systems of incentives and motivations collapse.

More local farms and more vertical farms and more greenhouses and more victory gardens are the best path. I leave it to families and individuals to choose what options they want and to buy food whenever they want. With more production, all the options will get cheaper as we flood the world with more fresh produce from better and more localized supply chains owing to incoming innovations in vertical and greenhouse farming. Not interested in going back to top-down control structures from the 1900s.

What’s next? Restricting the caloric intake of political pariahs? Restricting the options available at the local canteen to give the best options to the friends of the party and everyone in charge? Lol

> Life is competition and mutually-beneficial cooperation in some things, and friends are made on the basis of mutual desire.

This is a really sad, myopic view of life. Thankfully, it is wrong

It is ironic that you are peddling such fearful narratives given your name

This is how they do it in Germany. Most working Germans I know of eat at the work canteen and have a small bread meal at home in the evening

Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. HN is on a weird one recently

Because the united states valued individualism for a very long time, before and during the cold war, and even now. It's a cultural aspect.

Blame people like Reagan and Milton Friedman for this. It's a highly political problem.

Inequality is already somewhat caused by individualism, but climate change is also caused by climate change. For example, if China wants to reduce its co2 emissions, you only have to convince Chinese leaders, and it's done just by snapping fingers.

In the US, you have to make it profitable, which is doable, but it's more complicated and lobbyists will also be a big barrier to change.

I loathe the chinese leadership, but being a democratic modern industrialized nation doesn't mean you will see decisions that make sense.

Communist China is responsible for nearly 2/3rds of CO2 emissions since 2000. In the US it's been going down for the past decade.

You also have to keep in mind the American entrepreneurial culture or DNA which has born fruit unlike any other system, and is even responsible for the very platform we're using right now. That's all about this idea that any individual can change the world.

I don't see what either of those things have to do with the parent comment. Can you explain further?

What's weird though is that a lot of US tech companies also have canteens and on-site restaurants

Is a canteen the same thing as a cafeteria? Lots of Americans have their lunch at a work cafeteria as well.

A big lunch and a small dinner would probably be a good change for lots of us.

It’s just a weasel wording to say “lots.” How many and where did you get your number from? How many of those are using a designated sitting area to eat food they brought from home?

And if you think something is a good change, make it for yourself and don’t impose it on someone else. Vast majority of people given the choice will pick independence and purchasing/making their own food whenever they want, not being dependent on their work or state cafeteria.

I pulled “lots” out of my ass, based on having been to a couple different campuses. The fuzziness of “lots” accurately represents the level of certainty (low) which is appropriate for chit-chat about the existence of cafeterias. Chill out, nobody is actually going to ban cooking at home.

Just fyi in Germany we aren't forced to eat at the work cafeteria if we don't want to. I'm not sure where you got the idea of forcing people to eat communally from

Yes. Also I kind of agree, but personally, the canteen food here in Germany is usually too calorific for me compared to the food I cook.

Source that this is the norm in Germany? How many Germans do you know who do this and how did you conclude that the sample is indicative of the broader population? How expensive is food in Germany that people have no independence to buy and prepare food?

Parent is getting downvoted because the vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.

I work at a major research institution with a canteen and literally all of the Germans in my research group eat at the canteen. When I walk past it is very full.

Germans have a meal called Abendbrot which means "evening bread".

When COVID hit, Germans struggled to cook food at home, even leading to house fires https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-pandemic-reveals-germans-p...

My wife's startup does not have a canteen, so the Germans order in fast food. She is British like me so she has a small lunch and a big dinner.

> How expensive is food in Germany that people have no independence to buy and prepare food?

It is cheap but the work canteen is also often cheap. People have independence to buy and prepare food, they just don't want to.

> vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.

I don't think this is worthy of a response.

A research university is a pretty select group though. What about the average working family with children? Or retired age adults? Do Germans not have a "slow food" movement where they are encouraged to garden, cook, and compost at home?

Without resorting to abolishing the family kitchen altogether (many years of church morning teas give me the heebie jeebies about foodborne illnesses around community food prep) - there are ways to avoid some plastic packaging. Depending where you are, wholefoods places probably exist and will happily sell you a scoop (metal) of the ingredient you need in a pickle jar (glass). Also a good way to avoid storing bulk amounts of rarely-used ingredients, saves some waste.

This was an idea of the infamous Romanian communist dictator Ceausescu: he wanted to feed the whole of Bucharest in a single giant canteen. Unfortunately he was toppled and killed in 1989 before this idea could come to fruition.

It’s unfortunate that a communist dictator was toppled and killed? Did you ever bother to look into why that happened and all the evils he did?

We shouldn’t be borrowing from a dead communist dictator’s playbook. Clearly it didn’t work out for him and the vast majority of people didn’t want that.

It was irony. It was unfortunate for him, because he couldn't realize his grand vision of communal food distribution: https://www.rferl.org/a/photos-romania-hunger-circuses-bucha...

I didn't think I needed to elaborate that any idea coming from communist dictators (let alone the self-styled Genius of The Carpathians) should not be the basis of our policies.

I suspect the 'unfortunate' in the parent comment was dry irony, not an earnest expression of sadness.

Collectivism need not invoke communism and socialism. I've long lamented how we've lost the local community at the village or even family level.

I.e. we can still follow your idea but at a village or family level. So why buy butter in a plastic tub when your neighbour next door has a cow and butter churning machine? Heck have a big enough multi-generational household compound and you can keep it all in-family!

Doing it at the family level or between neighbors who like each other and agree to share from victory gardens and greenhouses and personal farms is much different than what the parent proposed. Multi-generational family compounds are an awesome idea. This also solves retirement issues for the elderly.

I call you someone who doesn't like to eat good food :D

A good canteen can combine more ingredients in a more sophisticated way than I have time for at home. I'm not making Beef Bourguignon at home, but it's easy for them to make up a big batch. Economies of scale!

That's how you end up fat.

Personally, while being exceedingly libertarian leaning, I would advocate a gradual ban of plastics generally. All plastics are ephemeral and they're not easily recyclable. Humans used glass, wax, paper, wood, and other products before plastics were widely available and our materials sciences have improved dramatically over time. To me, the main problem here is that plastics are just so cheap due to having been in production for so long. With a strong tax incentive, it should be possible to promote other materials. The biggest hurdle in my mind would be an unbelievable increase in the cost of wood...

> I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics.

I'm not- show me the direct harm it is causing on an individual level. We can all agree they are a nuisance but it is hard to show how they are outright harming people. Studies like this are a step towards that proof.

Ideally, governments armed with scientists are capable of making key judgments like this one without “my child’s arm fell off” levels of apparent, individual harm.

Scientists are wrong... a lot.

The harm should be obvious to the layman IMHO in order to be legislated away. Otherwise, it should be left up to personal choice.

This is an absolutely horrible heuristic. Let’s put radioactive toys, toys painted with lead, leaded gasoline, DDT, and thalidomide back on the market. None of these were “obvious to the layman.”

Individual scientists are wrong a lot. Science as a process continues to be the (imperfect) reigning world champ of truth discovery, no matter what contrarianism du jour memes are spreading over the internet.

note how all of those have a horrifying story

Tell the horrifying plastic story (if there is one)

Uhh no. Lead, mercury, radioactivity, thalidomide, and asbestos poisoning are not detectable as “my child put a toy in their mouth and their tongue fell off.”

These were uncovered over the course of years by statistical analysis, prompted by suspicions created by (noisy, often non-human) information about the mechanisms.

Similarly, we have tons of data supporting a bunch of theories of micro plastic harm in the lab. The waiting revelation isn’t going to be “omg all these people are sick and we didn’t know it,” it’s going to be “all these people have been sick and we didn’t know why.”

Which is exactly the form of the sperm quality/fertility theory as well as obesity. We know these compounds cause fertility and metabolism issues in cell cultures and in animal models. We know we are facing civilization-scale problems with obesity and fertility. Drawing the connection between these types of observations is always extremely noisy because there are obviously trillions of variables affecting “does a specific individual become infertile or obese,” or “does a person have an elevated risk of birth defects.”

I’m not necessarily on the side of an immediate and total ban, but this “we’ll see the problems if they exist” attitude is profoundly ignorant and arrogant. The historical examples appear obvious to you because you saw the results of extremely deep study prompted from initially low-quality suspicions.

Does lead exposure have a "horrifying" story? It has measurable effects over years and decades, but very little acute effect.

> The harm should be obvious to the layman IMHO in order to be legislated away. Otherwise, it should be left up to personal choice.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm but if it's not, this is really the peak of anti-intellectualism ideology, i.e., that if a thing is not immediately obvious without studying then we should remain ignorant of it. I don't think that kind of opinion is a good fit for this forum to be honest, which has learning and information sharing as an important goal, so I will have to flag your message, which is an extremely rare thing for me to do (actually this may be my first time ever)

> if a thing is not immediately obvious without studying then we should remain ignorant of it.

I'm not sure if you're willfully ignorant or just saw an opportunity to pass a pejorative and took it.

I didn't say we should "ignore it". I said we shouldn't allow scientists to exclusively decide what should or should not be legal.

No you didn't, you said that if a layman cannot understand it immediately, then we should never use the information in the context of law, i.e. we should just ignore the information, i.e. remain ignorant

OK. Have a nice day. Maybe take a little internet timeout and touch grass.

From the article:

> The mice in the study began to move peculiarly, and to exhibit behaviours reminiscent of dementia in humans

I know this is only _in mice_ but the policy we have of "let industry do what they want and if we find out it's harming humans in 30 years we'll do something about it" has not proven to work out so well in the past (lead, DDT, CFCs, cigarettes).

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