A global plastic treaty will only work if it caps production, modeling shows
phys.org
phys.org
The premium "not from concentrate" orange juices contain additives not required to be listed on the packaging.
Great value "natural flavor" chocolate syrup contains vanilin (artificial vanilla). So I guess the natural part only applies to the chocolate and not other flavors used.
Many "100% alpaca" socks contain other fibers too (elastics, etc).
The list goes on...
Edit: why disagree? You can even see stuff like "100% cotton with Scotchgard" or the sublimation process used on clothes. Want to share any evidence to the contrary or tell me why it's wrong?
No: Cotton is chemically treated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrinkle-resistant_fabric
Perhaps you are thinking of "However, almost all the wrinkle resistant garments are made with poly/cotton blends fabrics."
A quick review of Wikipedia indicates dimethylol ethylene urea (DMEU) is used to crosslink the cellulose polymers itself.
Cotton is already a polymer (albeit a bio-degradable one). DMEU is not a polymer/plastic in its own right.
As far as I was able to see, permanent press is biodegradable.
Humans on the other hand might have tougher time during each next century.
I would add that it is also not true that life will bounce back; Earth is 4.5 billion years old, the vast majority of which time it was inhabited by no more than microbes; and we have 1 billion years left before the sun boils the oceans. Humans are the first technological civilization the Earth has seen, and will likely be the last - there isn't time for another go-around.
Addendum: I googled "akshually the planet will be fine" and the top result was this[0] HN thread. Even has the "one amoeba" line. Is anyone working on some sort of platform that can crosslink parallel discussions so we don't have to have the same discussions over and over ad nauseam forever?
Textiles are non negligible, but packaging is almost certainly a better target for inexpensive impact. Tons of stuff doesn't need plastic wrapping.
If that's what you're concerned about, a focus on textiles is warranted.
I'm not aware of any major use of plastic where going backwards in time is on-net more environmentally friendly. Most reports discussing plastic replacements make unreasonable reuse and durability assumptions. Often they ignore or downplay consequences of switching like increased transportation pollution or pollution from assumed recycling.
Literally all of them. They reduce plastic pollution to 0. CO2 pollution is not the driving factor behind plastic reduction.
That's one situation where I think "doing something" for the sake of it is the worse option.
Only with the following assumptions:
- "0 plastic" is a hollow marketing claim and not a real thing (what do you even mean by that?)
- the overall effect on Earth's biosphere is worse with no plastic than with plastic
Neither of those is obvious so it's counterproductive (and suspicious) to be pro-plastic here.
Plastic use is a tradeoff, removing plastic has side effects that need to be addressed. "0 plastic" is a marketing claim because it doesn't guarantee it puts us actually in a better place.
To take a simple example: let's say tomorrow we replace all the plastic in cars with metal. Would the manufacturing required to get that metal in place, and the additional energy needed as the cars get significantly heavier counter balance the amount of plastic that won't be released in nature ? I'd wager that no, that would be a stupid idea, even if it reduces plastic.
And there's an infinite number of other stupid ideas to reduce plastic. That's why "0 plastic" is meaningless, what matters is if there's an actual improvement, including keeping using plastic where we don't have better alternatives.
It's only a marketing claim if it's used in marketing. It can also be a statement of fact... Plastic pollution and CO2 pollution are separate phenomena and we could theoretically achieve 0 plastic and that could be a genuine victory for the problem of plastic pollution.
Anyway I realize my initial statement came off strong. I want to be clear I'm not saying zero-plastic is the goal we should actually be pursuing. But "Net environmental effect" is so complicated as to maybe not even be measurable. Are we talking about extinction rate? Biodiversity? Cancer rate of wild animals? Ecosystem collapse?
Additionally - as many ways as there are to evaluate our effects on the biosphere, there are ways to address the problems. Plastic reduction doesn't have to mean 1:1 replacement; that would be shortsighted. Holistic societal changes are necessary, and I think we're actually both agreeing on that. E.g. don't replace plastic car parts with metal - get more cars off the road.
Hemp is only used a low scale so I don't think we have enough data on what would happen if tomorrow we decided to replace all the plastic bags with hemp bags and how we'd produce that. It's not guaranteed to be better until then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_paper
It's complicated.
- new growth is monoculture, and we're having health issues coming with it (Japan is trying to do something about its pollen problem, but not until two decades from now). It's also more fragile areas, including geologically.
- new growth also means the process that took centuries to build forests is not starting either.
- if the plan is to produce more paper (replace current plastic use with paper use) we can't just keep the current tree farms. It will be expanded and eat up on the legacy forest, as it needs the right niche to efficiently grow.
On the last point, if we were really good at farming new trees, we'd have tree fields not far from manufacturing centers. That's not the case, we're still relying on favorable places where forests used to grow, which doesn't bode well for further mass production in the future.
I will agree that monoculture is no good and neither is taking over virgin forest, but this isn't exactly the only industry on this planet that behaves like this either. Rather than trade paper for plastic we can instead consider how we protect virgin areas from any sort of development. Monoculture is also a risk for industry in the form of crop loss from disease, so I wouldn't be surprised if this begins to change in the future and we see more polycultures farmed, not just in trees either. So if there is a plastic ban favoring domestic paper products instead, as well as sufficient protections in place for existing virgin forest, you can probably expect the value of a tree farm to go up to the point where people who might be using their land for one thing being more inclined to farm trees on this land.
We should really look for more lower hanging common sense solutions.
Let me give you one… the boxes that are used to transport food to a grocery store are all crushed and go back into the recycling system as bundles. Why aren’t we sending boxes that can be used in place of paper and plastic bags? It would immediately offset a lot of purchases that require bags.
Costco does it. Sam’s Club sometimes too. But manufacturers don’t make boxes designed for the purpose of a second use before recycling, and the vast majority of stores don’t offer it.
That would take a waste stream and give it a second use before being recycled.
Simple, common sense solutions like this one are all around us but we keep looking for a “solution” rather than an “improvement.”
Whatever you do to producer, it will affect consumer.
Increase cost of production? Cost of product increases.
Decrease production output? Cost of product increases. (Assuming demand did not change)
Forbid a product? Consumer looks, for next best alternative which is pricier (if it was cheaper, it would have been the first pick).
Regulate prices? Output is reduced. To fill in the gap, consumers look for next best alternative, which is pricier (if it was cheaper, it would have been the first pick)
The only alternative is for consumer to stop desiring the product somehow. E.g by changing of definition of “good” via education, morals or religion.
It doesn't work for everything but it's the exact playbook we followed for LED lightbulbs.
Trying to chase at least a tiny bit of “technically correct”: during subsidisation period, consumers are the ones paying for it with their taxes.
My guess would be fishing nets. These are the main source of plastic pollution in the ocean.
Per unit length of netting with the equivalent strength, cotton/hemp netting will weigh more, require more frequent replacement, require horrible preservatives which will leach into the marine environment, require more fossil fuels to till and fertilize the cotton, consume more freshwater in production, result in more top soil loss due to mono-cropping, need more pesticides, etc.
Direct plastic pollution in the ocean would be reduced yes, but at the cost of higher pollution and environmental degradation elsewhere.
Humans nor nature have a way of dealing with the myriad of plastics and the way it degrades (or doesn’t).
“Horrible preservatives” sounds like injecting FUD. Hemp also doesn’t require fertile soil, so the fertilization overhead is also less.
While there are use-cases where plastic is indispensible, it’s outweighed by the completely asinine usecases.
The acute problem is not plastic production, although that's an issue. But the industry invented the myth of plastic recycling, and due to wrong incentives, the plastic is shipped to poor countries where it comes into the environment.
The easiest way to deal with plastics is to collect it and burn it.
The price of something usually reflects the energy needed to produce it. But it does not take account the externalized cost on the society and environment.
On the other hand, there are areas where other materials like cotton are only a bit more expensive but do not have such a negative effect on the environment. In those areas, like textiles, a ban on synthetic material is probably a good thing.
The problem with the environmental impact of plastics is not the production, it's where it ends up. So the question is how to incentivize keeping a closed system where plastics ends up being burned.
Minimizing the use of plastics requires a complete change of how the economy works. It would require a society of citizens, not consumers who throw away things that are still fine and there are certain areas where plastics can not be replaced by other stuff.
Forcing a cap on plastic production means hurting the emerging markets most but also the wealth in western countries.
All the environmental degradation is in the developing world, where they… do not value the environment in the same way. We didn’t either when we were developing. It took a while.
But western advanced economies dispose of their trash well. It’s not even close to the top of our list in terms of what we could do for the environment. Seems to capture our collective imagination tremendously though. Maybe because of guilt for consumer culture, maybe because making a meaningful impact would hurt too much.
It's just not visible immediately. But you can actually easily collect hundreds of kilograms of plastics next to a 1-2km long part of a road on the countryside.
If there’s a plan for remediating tire shavings over the course of tires wearing down in any of these threads I must have missed it. Please correct me?
As far as the rest it’s just not true. Landfills in the west are fine. Nothing is perfect but they’re not impactful at all ecologically. (Developing world not so. Lack of robust waste management contributes massively in the developing world.)
It's the west who's shipping the plastic waste to Asia where it ends up destroying the environment and the health of people.
And that is fine. We would have to fix a whole RAFT of serious serious problems before landfills are anybody’s radar. We will never see it our lifetime and I hazard that we may never see the day.
Other countries have tighter land requirements and they might be more forward thinking, but the idea that plastic packaging is impacting the environment is just not supported by data.
As long as you’re not throwing it in the river, plastics waste just doesn’t matter much.
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
But yes, I do expect significant progress on this in the next few years!
That's a total fiction. There is plastic trash in my yard right now which came from somewhere else. I don't even know where it came from; my entire neighborhood and the park downstream are littered with plastic trash almost year-round.
Steel and glass won't give you cancer, wool won't destroy your hormonal system, &c.
Nothing short of that will unseat plastics.
There are exactly zero incentives for any nation to drastically limit plastic production. As with CO2 these policies will be implemented by many Western nations, while the many, densely populated countries, relying on cheap goods will take no serious actions. Plastic is just too useful.
(Kind of reminds me of my fascination of shows on Discovery channel praising spider silk or carbon nanotubes for their super strength)
Encouraging a competitive and parallel economy of repair and reuse would be awesome.
And for those use-cases, I personally have zero problems with plastics. But beverage bottles? Packaging? Shopping bags? Not so thrilled.
Why TF are we supposed to limit plastic use in developed countries, often located deep inland, where our plastic has many orders of magnitude smaller chance of polluting the oceans, etc?
You have heard wrong. Then again:
"More than 1000 rivers account for 80% of global riverine plastic emissions into the ocean" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803 Has some nice maps of waste versus country: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803#F4
"Around 90% of all river-borne plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
Not necessarily contradictory, but an indication of disagreement.
And maybe it would encourage more out of the box solutions, like this one: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/researchers-make-a-p...
Even in PET recycling - which is the most effective "recycling" process that exists - PET bottles only contain an average of 17% recycled PET and the rest is brand-new PET. PET bottles are only recycled one or two times.
Most of the "recycled" PET actually goes into other production, like films and textiles, because it's too impure. When plastic gets "recycled", it actually gets down-cycled into products that are no longer recyclable.
So what happens in the end is that the toxic plastics gets concentrated into products where the law does permit these toxins to be present.
Only organic waste and paper allows true recycling.
https://www.oceancare.org/stories_and_news/europas-schweiz-p...
The plant has been just operating for a couple weeks and there exists no independent reports of what they produce. Lots of government money is flowing into this, creating incentives for corporations to keep trying. The industry may be able to force this through the sheer amount of government subsidies at one point, but this does not make it economical or ecological.
“Regular recycling is difficult enough, but chemical recycling causes even more problems,” Goldsberry said.
During her tenure covering the plastics industry, she said she encountered many advanced recycling project announcements that went silent after a year or so. “If they were making new plastics from co-mingled plastic waste through advanced chemical recycling, they would really be promoting it.
She said burning plastics for fuel is a more efficient and easier solution to the global plastic waste problem."
https://www.plasticstoday.com/advanced-recycling/is-chemical...
We will even let them keep their profits from all the years of getting away with it. How generous!
This probably wont affect the average HN, but all of our food and medicine is using plastics for a reason. It is cheap, sterile and safe. If you're poor and the price of shippings/storing your food becomes significant more expensive then you'll even more screwed. Again, probably wont affect you or me, but these things always have bad unintended consequences.
There are significant intended consequences that implementing something like this would have. I order for this to be negative, the unintended consequences would need to be larger, and I think it's hard to see that happening.
Reading the article between the lines though, it seems like global coordination is required, and the biggest challenge is getting the top 5 producers in line (China not being mentioned by name/exact number feels evasive by the authors).
And while you can probably find a "bad unintended consequence" for everything if you try hard enough, it's usually the case that these bad effects are far smaller than the thing we set out to achieve.
That’s most definitely not the reality. South east asian cities are littered with takeout containers and bottles.
Exceptions abound, I'm sure, but it is a necessity not a luxury.
And where do the worst disasters happen? The countries where the infrastructure is not good enough.
So if you were in charge of this, you might have just killed a few million people from cholera.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cholera
I can't stress this enough, but there are so many unintended consequences.
Paper packaging, metal packaging, glass packaging, bulk packaging, improved infrastructure, filters, etc. I'm sure there are other reasonable options beyond single use plastic bottles.
If you're earning $2 a day, then paying $.2 more for bottled water in paper is probably going to be detrimental for you. Around 1 billion people live in extreme poverty.
So yes, there's alternatives for you and me, but not for a billion people.
A glass bottle has a unit cost increase of approximately a penny per bottle (per CleanMetrics). But the bottle itself can be reused and recycled.
Also, this assumes it's not in our best interest to subsidize this penny per bottle cost for our own health. Plastic trash ends up in our hydrocycle no matter where it is used.
Also, reusable plastic aren't the problem either. A large, centrally fillable 5 gallon container is not likely to be used once and discarded.
Are you really asserting that individual 12-40oz single use bottles of water are the best system we can imagine and what a million people use for daily water?
During communism we used to recycle all food and drink glass containers, but one would only get a few glass shapes and a few jar shapes. They only took back the containers clean and without labels. Most of the work was washing off the paper labels and bone glue. Kids were earning ice cream money doing the cleaning and recycling.
Metal and glass are reusable many, many more times than plastic and are sterilizable with heat. Both metal and glass are recyclable or inert in the environment. If a bottle ends up in the ocean it eventually becomes sand again.
None of the above require oil to be produced.
I'm not saying plastic has no upsides, I'm saying other options exist that specifically address the downsides of plastic. With materials we are always making trade offs.
And to think all this time we'd been worried about the safe drinking water and didn't realise that without enough plastic bottles it's all a waste of time.
From what I've seen living in India, people in extreme poverty don't buy bottled water. They boil or filter tap water at home.
Middle-class and up people buy bottled water in restaurants or while traveling. I don't know anyone who drinks bottled water (aka Bisleri, the kleenex of bottled water in India) at home. Everyone has RO filters.
I have only seen people in North America buying bottled water for everyday, at-home consumption. I think it is very wasteful.
[1] Bonus if it also tastes good!
If you are extremely poor, what do you eat from? What do you store things in? What do you wear? The answer is obviously plastic.
If that's an invalid basis for comparison between plastic bottles and aluminum cans, I'm probably not the only person who'd like to know more.
I think one argument against glass is the transportation cost (dollars or carbon, take your pick) on a grams of packaging to grams of product basis. Plus the added volume of both the glass and the packaging required to keep breakage manageable, which is volume that isn't being devoted to product either. A case of wine is 6^H (edit: can't math) 9 liters of wine, whereas a 24 pack of beer in 350ml cans is 8.5 liters is less overall volume and mass.
It seems insane to me that you can get a glass bottle of wine from another hemisphere for a single-digit or low double digit number of dollars. Just melting the sand to make the glass seems like it should cost a couple bucks.
I can see how shipping could be more especially if it needs a cardboard case. Perhaps shipping would be negligible if we had more localized production and less long distance shipping. Rail shipping would likely have a negligible shipping cost difference. Even something like increasing the use of concentrated syrups and fresh made sodas could be a benefit for packing reduction and shipping costs.
I mean... is it a climate emergency or not? Do we really need to haul tons of sugary water up and down the highway? Not to mention the plastic.
There is alternative btw: soda stream and syrups. Apparently a 440ml bottle of syrup makes up to 9 litres of pepsi.
You'd be doing literally everybody (except soda company shareholders) a favor.