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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

The use of degradable polymers is for things that are single use. Plastic bags, straws, etc. nobody is trying to replace your iPad with a compostable version that disolves in humidity.

It's cynical bordering on humor to look at the accumulation of forever trash in our oceans and blood and say "well at least we can build something that may last with all this poison". Nobody does that anyway.

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It's also commonly used in 3D printing, i.e. PLA.

PLA is stable enough in normal circumstances -- you need specific equipment to make it degrade -- but once broken down to microplastics it doesn't last long. Otherwise it's nearly an ideal plastic for printing; brittle, but strong and incredibly easy to print. With some additives you can get rid of the brittleness, though I'm not sure how those would degrade.

I see no reason you couldn't make plastic straws from PLA. Clothing might not last as long, but plastic clothing never lasts that long in any case; I prefer cotton.

A lot of commercially available "biodegradable"/"compostable" plastic is already made out of PLA.

> nobody is trying to replace your iPad with a compostable version that disolves in humidity.

Ssh - you will give the electronics industry ideas :)

Plastic bags, straws, etc

Those are the least likely to degrade into microplastics anyway, unlike clothing fibers and the like, and that is already assuming you believe that microplastics have any actual effects.

nobody is trying to replace your iPad with a compostable version that disolves in humidity.

The article talks about phone cases and clothing.

The phone cases made by RhinoShield are the aftermarket kind that fit over the phone, not the integrated case.

Microplastics are accumulating at pretty high levels all over the food chain, right? The burden of proof should be on the folks who want to run the “let’s all eat this new thing in great quantities” experiment.

No the burden of proof is on people who claim this will reduce the release of microplastics. Most plastic pollution comes from a few countries in Asia and from fishing.

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

What we need to do is assist these few countries with better waste management, that is what by far would have the biggest impact. Not saying we shouldn't do other things too like trying to find new materials for fishing nets or reducing fishing but plastic bags in the west is not a significant source.

That’s a related but different issue, we should figure out if they are safe, help other countries deal with them, and stop producing as many ourselves, at the same time.

We should also lead by example by not just exporting our plastic trash to other countries.

The story of humanity can be summed up as: "what if we changed our environment without understanding it?" with both wonderful and wretched consequences.

The same fires that poison the air we breathe also power life saving medical equipment so that we can keep breathing.

Micro plastics, endocrine disrupters and more have been unleashed. I am sure their effects will prove to be less than positive on both humans and wildlife.

But in trying to snuff out the next great environmental crisis, will we account for the benefits we've derived from the use of these materials when we do our cost-benefit analysis? The effects on innovation?

Did curiosity kill the cat, but save cats?

We have think of it differently now, stuff like lead and asbestos were bad, but localized mostly. We’re running the microplastic experiment on everybody simultaneously.

This comment contradicts itself: if microplastics in clothing are a serious issue, then we should be looking seriously at clothes that degrade without producing microplastics.

(All clothing degrades; presumably you don’t object to wool or accuse wool sweaters of planned obsolescence.)

Or we can just burn the clothes. Almost no clothing in Europe, biodegradable or not, ends up in the ocean.

My understanding is that much of the West’s second-hand and overstock clothes ends up in countries like Ghana, where it does end up in waterways[1]. This has presumably increased over time due to fast fashion, which is a large market in Europe (like in the US).

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/05/y...

Fast fashion is horrible. That article really shows on aspect of it. It has turned a large chunk of a recycling process into dumping.

You really need to cite a source on this subject, measuring the industrial waste is very difficult and any articles state that "we found this but anyway, it's difficult to track efficiently the industry wastes".

Microplastics are emitted from clothing and flushed into the waste water system, and from there to oceans, every time you do laundry. This is considered to be the main source of microplastic pollution, including in the EU unless they managed something revolutionary that I'm not aware of.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43023-x

Absolutely shit tons of fluff comes off off polyester clothes and ends up in the drain.

We could probably design washing machines to filter it better, granted.

So, like ... cotton?

Sure. But the reality is that cotton is expensive and resource intensive compared to other materials; absent a global effort to ban plastic clothes, it seems worthwhile to make those clothes less environmentally damaging.

Cotton also shrinks when wet and has poor thermal properties - polymer blend fabrics perform better in the cold, and are lighter and cheaper than wool. Goretex is wonderful stuff, but its also made of '"forever-plastics" and is known to slowly leach into runoff. Finding a polymer that can be cleanly manufactured for a competitive price with similar properties would be wonderful, as long as theres also a method for it to degrade safely when discarded.

American plastic trash does not end up in the ocean.

Have you spent time in any major American coastal city or one with an ocean bound river. There is so much plastic litter. I'm in Manhattan and I see plastic litter every day. If even some of it doesn't get swept up it's a short trip to the East River, a tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. This isn't a theory these things are gathering into the oceans and in our bodies.

I'm sure Manhattan has more trash than either of us would wish.

But I think looking around Times Square is not the best way to study this scientifically.

The studies that have been done in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch shows that it's majority from China, with Indonesia a strong seconds. US contributes < 1%.

This would be a more convincing post if I could point to sources. I don't have time to dig those up, so this data is from my memory. Take it for what it is...

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