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Comment by travisb | Hacker News Reader

There is no low hanging fruit when it comes to reducing plastic production or consumption. Plastic is just too awesome -- which is why we use it instead of whatever we used before plastics.

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.

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> I'm not aware of any major use of plastic where going backwards in time is on-net more environmentally friendly.

My guess would be fishing nets. These are the main source of plastic pollution in the ocean.

Even doesn't pass the smell test, especially if one considers the data for cotton shopping bags versus plastic.

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.

Yes, but there’s a false equivalence here: Pollution-type-A isn’t equally catastrophic as pollution-type-B.

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.

Maybe you're too young to remember the days of paper bags, hemp shopping bags, shoes and shirts. "more environmentally friendly"? Most alternatives are more environmentally friendly in a long run than plastic.

Production of paper comes with many asterisks regarding environment friendliness [0]. It sure can be done, but it's not simple and the majority of the industry isn't "clean".

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

A big advantage of paper is that when people inevitably litter, it doesn't break down into microplastics.

On the other side we're killing whole forest ecosystems under the pretense trees can be replanted, plus the monoculture effects.

It's complicated.

Does any paper at this point come from old growth? I'd figure its new growth treefarms that produce paper. At which point, you can't exactly flip a light switch and expect a complex forest ecosystem that took a millenia to establish to restore itself on human timescales. And thats only if the existing landowners wanted to just say "we are content to not make any money ever again with this land"

There's a few parts to it:

- 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.

Seems like the manufacturing centers need to be sited on rivers with rights to pull from and with access to sufficient available power, and a way to distribute this product. Are all forests in such condition? Probably not. I've seen some of these forests, they are often in the middle of nowhere connected by dirt roads built by the logging companies. This is marginal land, sometimes leased by the US forest service. Prime land near rivers and power sources isn't going to be squandered when you can get a permit to farm on marginal land or buy it for cheap if its a private holding, just like how you don't see grazing near feedlots. Grazing needs more land, can be done on marginal land, and you can just ship cattle to feedlots elsewhere near meatpacking plants. As a result we graze cattle in places where you sometimes can't even drag a plow, and have feedlots near chicago where cattle can be processed in vast quantity and then distributed.

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.

Paper can be made from reeds and cereal straws. However harvesting reeds will destroy bird habitat and straws are also used to feed livestock during winter.

There are alternatives to trees for making paper, though I admit I don’t know the costs or quality.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever_in_Japan

It’s not though unless it’s reused a great deal. Making paper is intense and requires a LOT of water and chemicals.

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.”

What’s missing an accurately priced tax for the externalities of products specific to the products.

Nothing like passing costs to the consumer who is already squeezed to the brink.

There is no other way.

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.

You subsidize the production of the better thing. Once you have (within reason) a better or equivalent product at the same or lower price at the consumer point-of-sale than the alternative you want to replace go ahead and ban the old thing.

It doesn't work for everything but it's the exact playbook we followed for LED lightbulbs.

Good point. At least some times, there is other way, called “invent something better”. When it works, it can reduce price and reduce environmental damage both at the same time.

Trying to chase at least a tiny bit of “technically correct”: during subsidisation period, consumers are the ones paying for it with their taxes.

Costco doesn't use special boxes either. Grocery store uses the exact same case boxes as you would get at a costco checkout, they probably just aren't generating so damn many around the clock because the quantities sold are much smaller, leaving you with fewer extra boxes to have customers deal with on their own.

No idea about the US, but I've seen European grocery stores heavily use Euro containers [1]. Empty ones are taken away in the same truck that brings new goods, so there's no extra cost in transportation either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container

When I go to aldis I always grab a fruit box. Keeps my food bill smaller to because I can only carry so much.

And non-plastic bags last forever. The oldest grocery bag that I can accurately date is from before at least 2008 and I haven't had a single one wear out yet, so no idea how long they'll end up lasting. I don't know about hemp bags though, since I have a mix of cotton and linen bags myself.

> I'm not aware of any major use of plastic where going backwards in time is on-net more environmentally friendly.

Literally all of them. They reduce plastic pollution to 0. CO2 pollution is not the driving factor behind plastic reduction.

Only focusing on plastic bring us to a Goodhart's law situation where we get worse overall effect in exchange of a hollow "0 plastic" marketing claim.

That's one situation where I think "doing something" for the sake of it is the worse option.

> 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.

It's not (and is never) a question of being pro-plastic, or pro-paper, or pro any material really. You can't reduce the discussion about how to balance our civilization and the rest of the planet to a "plastic or not" question.

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.

> "0 plastic" is a marketing claim because it doesn't guarantee it puts us actually in a better place.

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.

Is plastic pollution the only factor that matters in being environmentally friendly, to the point where you can dismiss all others out of hand?

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