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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

    probably fairly easy to deal with.

[citation needed]

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My suggestion, which isn't rocket science:

Ban plastic food containers for any type of long-term storage or anything that gets heated up (and different plastics have different microplastic shedding profiles, so ban the worst first) and also ban PFAS in anything that gets close to food. It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed. Phase it in so that industries have time to adapt.

That’s hardly the only source. And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more

Does it matter though? By banning plastics, we would increase awareness and move one step closer to solve this.

> That’s hardly the only source.

Sure, everything is multi factor. Saying things are complex is a way to ensure there is no action taken ever.

> And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more

Sure, but the sooner we act, once we know for sure this is a significant contributor, the sooner we stop making the problem worse.

I want my children to be able to have children, don't you?

I think that with the advances in refrigeration, materials, logistics, we can safely go back to having bulk food for a lot of our needs. Also reusable glass containers instead of plastic bottles (e.g. for milk, oil, etc.)

Considering the alternatives are metal and glass, I'd assume that the cost difference would be exponential, especially if the most common alternative is banned and transport will be much heavier.

Banning DDT was also incredibly inconvenient for farmers as DDT worked amazingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

Human ingenuity knows no bounds and it will be a market opportunity for new entrants and innovators.

IIRC, cost-benefit analysis (even in terms of health and other human indicators) suggests we probably should have kept at least some uses of DDT, as a lot of people have died of malaria because we didn't.

I wonder if that factors in the health and ecological effects of atrazine, neonicotinoids, glyphosate, and other substances. Many of their effects are the same as the effects of the other substances being discussed ITT.

You can add wax-coated cardstock (milk containers) and wax-coated bags (breakfast cereals) and just plain cardboard (quick oats).

Well then there are two straightforward questions:

- are the overall costs of plastics (namely pollution and its environmental and health effects) higher than the costs of banning plastics? Seems like a clear yes.

- what are the redistributive effects? Seems like: consumers are net winners (lower health effects, some or all financial costs of switching away from plastics are passed down to consumers through higher prices); some firms are losers (mainly those who produced plastics or used a lot of them) and some are winners (newcomers, producers of no plastics solutions, transporters).

Glass isn't really that expensive. It was cheap enough to be commonly used 100 years and it is only cheaper and easier to produce and transport today than it was then.

It's almost as if it was the adoption of the microwave oven that signaled the roller coaster was beginning to race downhill.

God, I wish I could go back to non-plastic packaging. Natural peanut butter I can still find in glass, as I can for my jelly. But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.

> But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.

One idea is to stop consuming these, given they are not food and are not nutritious in the first place.

Your body (and mind) will thank you.

This is probably mostly the right answer to the obesity problem. Most condiments and packaged "food" is garbage food. If argue that a majority of products in a typical grocery store don't need to be there.

Things like the microwave lowered the friction point for making food and snacks so I'm sure it is part of it. I honestly think people forget how much more friction was involved to have a bite to eat even just 20 years ago, and even more so 40 years ago.

Plastic food packaging is crazy to me, but also lowers the cost of food because of transportation. I would love to see a situation where you buy food in glass bottles and take thise cleaned glass bottles back to the store for resuse, for example. On plastic, on strategy for healthy eating is to be as strict as you can about buying food packaged in plastic. This is getting harder, but it forces you to get the majority of your food from the produce and butcher. Of course, one lived in places (like DC) where such a strategy might seem less possible.

I don't know about ketchup, but mayonnaise turned out to be far easier to make at home than I anticipated.

Mine always turns out runny and fails to congeal. Any tips?

What's wrong with microwave ovens? I find mine very handy and I never ever put plastic in it.

You might not but more microwave meals come in plastic trays, as do most other microwave foods. I use mine mainly to reheat leftovers, which are in glass of ceramic but that doesn't appear to be the majority use case judging from what I see at the houses of friends and family. Plastic and the microwave seem to be madly in love with each other.

Plastic food containers aren't even close to being the largest source of microplastics.

Synthetic fibres in clothing (like that cotton-poly blend shirt you're most likely wearing) and motor vehicle tyres are some of the bigger sources. These both also release particles directly into the atmosphere allowing them to get absolutely everywhere, unlike plastic in landfills that probably has a harder time escaping into the wider environment.

> Plastic food containers aren't even close to being the largest source of microplastics.

Can you give me some citations? I know that microwaving plastic containers is about the worst thing you can do with regards to microplastics, because it releases tons of them right into your food:

https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwa...

Both that headline and article are cringeworthy. You can’t extrapolate a bunch of flawed experiments like that to anything real.

This is a hot area of research but that means it’s a hotbed of flawed and sensationalist research. Dunking embryonic cells in a bath of ridiculous concentrations of nanoplastic chemicals and watching them die is cute and a tired, stupid trick. If you put any of your cells in your favorite drinking water they’re going to lyse. It doesn’t prove shit.

For synthetic fibres : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4426466/

For tyre particulate : https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/101707/9/Tyr...

i would love a citation related to the polyblend tshirt. I absolutely love them but if its poisoning me more significantly than microwaving food in plastic containers, i will gladly return to hemp

Here : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4426466/

Ooof. back to hemp it is. edit: thank you, sincerely, for this.

I think bhouston is talking more about poisoniing one’s own body with microplastics, whereas you’re talking about polluting the environment.

I'd guess he knows that. But we do live in the environment, and if they go into the environment they go into the food chain, no?

The boat has been towed out of the environment!

> It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed

I hate to be that guy, but it's easy to say costs increase is a lesser problem when you are not in the lower end of the economic spectrum. What would happen to people who barely survive today? Corporations won't decrease their profit, gained by using cheap plastic, for the greater good.

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