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Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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