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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

My take.

The current sense of a plastic waste crisis is that a certain fraction of plastic gets chucked outside and will find its way to the ocean where it will be mechanically broken down in harmful ‘microplastic’ and ‘nanoplastic’ particles. No form of recycling will work if people don’t use the bin.

If, in the other hand, people throw the plastic in the trash bin it will be buried and spend a long time (100-10,000 years?) underground and will at least somewhat decompose. Any environmental threat is kicked far into the future.

The trouble with chemical recycling is that it produces the kind of chemicals that come out of an oil refinery/petrochemical complex (which are used to make plastics) and those are all worth about 50 cents a pound.

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>No form of recycling will work if people don’t use the bin.

blaming consumers for the industry waste that's being released from their factories into the public environment is diluting responsibility. If the governments were not subjects of the big multinational petrochemical corporations, they should charge a deposit for every gram of plastic that customers acquire, similar to the German Pfand for plastic bottles and cans (0,25 euro cent).

If a plastic contains 33 grams of plastic as described in their QR code or instruction manual, charge the customer a deposit of 3,3 dollars for each product and pay the customer 3,3 dollars for bringing back that amount of plastic. The environment would be pristine

Plastic is cheap because the future generations are paying the price of pollution

Almost all of the waste plastic comes from the offering of cheap wrappings by cheap companies (i.e. super conglomerates) used by cheap people who simply do not care. Make it expensive and all these people will complain you are impinging on their freedoms.

The oil industries will complain The single use plastic purveyers will complain and the lazy consumers will complain, yet exactly like Germany, it must be done.

Some people think it's cool to burn money, while others purchase unneeded AI farms.

We, companies who make, companies who sell, and consumers who use as well as permissive governments all dilute responsibility, and a vast majority of plastics I pickup are simply the tops of plastic food containers.

How many are sealing reusable containers? Zero. how many straws? Thousands.

Make plastic straws the gold standard for recycling. worst offenders? The top fast food venders in food deserts. Cheap companies serving cheap lazy customers.

The poster is absolutely right.

You forgot about the health and safety regulators

ok, but visit a beach in a country where the people put the plastic in a bin, and then visit a beach in a country where the people don’t put the plastic in a bin.

Yea the graphic/map with source of plastic pollution per river delta is pretty eye opening.

Which I suspect is why it's not better known or distributed.

This one? https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mass-of-river-plastic-fl...

I don't know enough to distinguish that this isn't just a graphic of population x flow rate.

That's similar to the one I've seen.

It uses some averages and rates to backfill totals, but isn't just pop x flow.

It has a coefficient for 'waste mismanagement' which seems to dominate the eqn of how much ends up in the rivers vs landfills or otherwise secured.

Do you have a link with more tangible details?

I was under the impression that ocean plastic was comprised largely from discarded/lost material from ocean going industries followed by tyre dust.

A quick google didn't reveal much more than organizations think science is done by SEO.

Found a lot of incomparable data being compared. Measurements by mass, measurements by particle. Varying definitions of what constitutes a microplastic. from >2cm to >0.1mm

I found claims for top 10 rivers ranging from 95% to 18% of the river plastic. In general a lot of percentages, and few absolute numbers. In general it makes me despair for finding actual data. I'd like to be able to at least check that they calculated the percentage correctly mathematically. Preferably I could also know what as a proportion of what was being calculated so I could have some confidence that they were at least the same class of thing.

Several US states have this program for glass and cans and yet both glass and cans are still found on the side of the road.

"Are still found" implies we can only accept perfection. Back in the real world, bottle bills double rates of recycling (33% to 70%).

Keep America Beautiful, a packaging industry greenwashing group, developed the industry's modern response to policy. They're against bottle bills too, despite the fact that they're an extremely cost-effective anti-litter policy.

Back when the 5¢ deposit was introduced it was equivalent to more than 25¢ today, so today's policy is limited by a failure to update with the times. In Michigan (which has a still-pretty-measly 10¢ deposit) they see recycling rates of 97%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_...

not debating in either direction, but wouldn’t it be arguable that bottle bills are merely associated with increased recycling, since probably they are voted in by constituencies who are already more likely to recycle?

The hypothesis is easy to test by looking at historical recycling rates. If they track public opinion then it's confirmed, but if there's a sharp increase when bottle bills pass then it's mostly the (predictable) price signaling effect.

I find the doubt that prices work a bit surprising, since generally HN audiences tend to be above average in market literacy otherwise.

https://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/benefits-of-bottle-bill...

> blaming consumers

Why not blame consumers which would dispose their garbage wherever they want instead of a bin? I would rather criminalize this. It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin yet they insist on throwing it on the ground.

You should know you're repeating verbatim a propaganda line developed by the packaging industry to avoid (at the time impending) regulation, similar to the plastic industry's "recycling makes it all okay" and fossil & tobacco's "scientists disagree."

https://web.archive.org/web/20050401181834/http://www.altern...

Throwing plastic on the ground instead of in a bin is already illegal, and often carries $1000 fines if you are caught. And putting it in a bin already is just kicking the can down the road. I say we blame the corporations who are making materials that are nearly impossible to effectively recycle, don't biodegrade within several human lifespans, and break down into something that may very well be poisonous to us and our ecosystems.

Blaming consumers for this is like blaming them for lead in gasoline.

> Throwing plastic on the ground instead of in a bin is already illegal, and often carries $1000 fines if you are caught.

Is this ever enforced anywhere outside Singapore? I don't think anybody cares.

In state parks, but I haven't seen it really enforced in most of the US. The point is that litter isn't the primary problem with plastic. Most of the issues with it have nothing to do with the littering of random citizens, to the point that it's not even worth bringing up in a conversation about plastic.

But do you think a citizen who doesn't care about throwing their bottles across the road, will care to vote for a recycling initiative? Education has to start somewhere.

I've lived on an impoverished tropical island which was covered by a thick layer of plastic and cans. Somebody explained to me: "these folks have been throwing away their waste mindlessly for generations, the problem now is that all this pollution does not degrade"

>It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin

you're not solving the plastic pollution problem, you are only sending your waste to pollute Thailand.

The solution to the mass-death that a plasticised environment is causing is not to blame the victims, but to analyse the root of the problem: entrepreneurs and factory owners who abuse plastic because it's cheap

> you're not solving the plastic pollution problem, you are only sending your waste to pollute Thailand.

Every time I walk a road in Thailand, also anywhere else, I pick up every piece of trash I stumble upon to throw it into the first bin I encounter. Thanks G-d I haven't been to the places where there is too much garbage and no bins.

I know that Thailand allegedly stopped buying western plastic waste but I’m too stingy to drop a GPS tracking device in my plastic container to see where it’s headed to.

If you believe that (it's the fault of the industry) a common answer is to put a cap on plastic production, just like we put a cap on ozone destroying CFCs. First you prevent growth in the industry (it's easier to tell the industry not to build more factories than it is to tell them not to use the ones they built) and then you phase out.

Burying plastics results in leaching phthalates, estrogen mimics and assorted other crap into the ground, and groundwater, in the near term, not the far future.

Using less of it and standardazing on what kinds of plastic can be used + burn the waste seems the only reasonable solution to me.

Not saying it is perfect, but modern landfills are sealed on the bottom.

> Modern landfills are completely sealed to reduce contamination of the nearby groundwater. First, the ground is lined with clay. A thin layer of flexible plastic is placed on top of the clay layer. That allows the collection of leachate, the liquid that passes through the landfill and may draw out toxins from the trash. The leachate is collected though a drainage system that passes this contaminated water through pipes to a pool where it can be treated to remove the toxins before being released back into the environment.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/landfills/...

How much of the decline in testosterone among young men may be attributed to the plastics?

https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...

It's strange that the article makes no mention of the absolute abundance of pornography/porn addiction? I thought it was a fairly well established link.

It's not well established at all. I don't think a single study has conclusively and causatively linked pornography use to lower testosterone levels.

Nobody is telling you to bury them in your backyard, modern landfills take all this and much more into account.

Now of course an average 3rd world country doesn't have any of that, but if you would actually travel there you would see plastics everywhere, in the sea, on random land, in the mountains, in the rivers etc. While still leaking what you wrote but way more directly.

> The trouble with chemical recycling is that it produces the kind of chemicals that come out of an oil refinery/petrochemical complex (which are used to make plastics) and those are all worth about 50 cents a pound.

Let's flip that around -- the benefit of chemical recycling is that no new petro resources need to be fed into refineries etc to produce these -lenes (which themselves are major industrial feeds).

If this process were to be scaled up, certain plastic trash would become valuable, which would divert them from waste streams (similar to how eg. aluminum cans are treated).

I can see major objections coming from those who sell petro resources, but otherwise, how is this not a good thing?

Yeah. Recycling is a long and problematic chain, and no magical miracle chemistry chain-link could change that.

OTOH, there's a lot of plastic that is discarded at larger scales (vs. Chris & Pat drop their empty bottles into bins), and a really good chemistry might make recycling a far better choice in those scenarios. And much of the world does not have well-run (especially long-term) landfills to put trash in. And there's a morale effect, too - if we quite reasonably can recycle some common types of plastics, that injects a bit of hopeful news into the generally miserable plastics recycling situation.

Yea, plastic in a landfill is basically the perfect form for 'carbon capture'. For those that think that carbon needs capture.

But acting like plastic isn't 100% bad goes against the narrative, and happens to align with those who don't think carbon needs capture. Just throw it away.

The BPA and other additives will leak into water. PVC will break into VC and that will leak and cause cancer. And so on. Plastic is bad, especially single-use plastic.

BPA might have its negatives, but it at least locked itself and all the other chemicals into the product.

Making it into a boogeyman has ironically caused the remaining chemicals to be more leechable, as the substituted hardeners don't work as well, yet likely have similar negatives as the BPA replaced.

It's the unlearned lessons from asbestos all over again.

I wonder if the your argument holds true for organic food as well.

The farmers have to fight off the same pests and weeds, just with “natural” compounds instead of strong, tailor-made artificial ones.

But surely the natural spray and the artificial spray has to have either the same active ingredient, or ingredients that are chemically very similar? And if it doesn’t work as well, the farmer will surely end up using even more of “natural” compounds than he would’ve if he just went with RoundUp?

The alternative to Roundup is labor. Mulch, weeding, interplanting, and others. Similar for many pesticides: instead of spraying chemicals, you use different planting techniques, including more diversity in your fields.

That was the original definition of "organic" farming. It's not the food that's organic; it's the farmer.

That has since become captured by agribusiness, who wrote the rules to exclude the kinds of small farms that practiced organic farming before it became a buzzword.

I’d like my carrots to cost less than $100/lb thanks

It is more expensive, but it's twice as much, not orders of magnitude. And given that we now consume twice as many calories as we need, we can eat vastly better on the same budget without destroying the environment.

It's unreasonable to expect 100% of our food supply to come that way. But we can do a lot better than we do, and actually looking at the numbers instead of guessing makes that clear.

It is not a simple story

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/07/09/organic-vs-con...

The most important advantage traditional agriculture has is that it uses less land and frees up space for nature.

It’s a good thing that’s an exaggerated and disingenuous notion, then.

A natural defoliant? Would be what, rubbing alcohol? I think they have to pull the weeds or lay a ground cover

Though you are right about the pollution, plastic isn’t all bad.

It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.

If every single-use plastic container/wrapper had to be replaced by some kind of paper or waxed paper doing the same job, we’d need dramatically more of that material than plastic (barring clever inventions).

That comes with its own side-effects. More dead trees if it’s paper vs plastic, more metal mining if it’s metal vs plastic, more weight being shipped around, in many cases more energy being used to produce the alternative packaging in the first place. And all that to have packaging that’s functionally worse than plastic.

> It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.

That does not matter if it's poisoning us. And if we end up in a situation where energy is cheap (thanks to PV or whatever), it might be much better to use less efficient less poisonous materials, like glass or ceramics (and so on).

My dad grew up in a world without plastic. Packaging of food and goods was orders or magnitude less than now. Most of it is completely unnecessary.

There's definitely more plastic than we need. I've seen individual bananas sold in styrofoam.

But I think that's a tiny % of plastic waste and the vast majority comes from the production processes.

Factories wrap things up heavily before sending their items along to the next step in the value chain.

Farmers sometimes lay down plastic sheets on the ground.

I hate it as much as anyone but removing any of it will have knock-on effects.

It's better to wrap that pallet in an extra pound of plastic rather than it getting damaged and having to re-produce the whole 1000-2000lb amount of goods.

It might be better to lay down the sheet and use less pesticide & water, or be able to grow crops closer to the point of use.

I used to toss bananas in my cart without any plastic bag around them. Nature packages them already!

Now if I want organic apples or something, I may be forced to choose a pre-bagged selection of far too many; take it or leave it.

It was also a time when grocers kept a lot of goods in bulk, and customers were given portioned quantities wrapped in paper, or in paper bags. The additional labor costs were the reason this practice was ultimately replaced, largely by single-use plastics. Of course, capitalism and market forces mean that this is more efficient and profitable (even though they do not take into account externalities and future deficits caused by the damage these products inflict. I would suggest that the costs were more inline with reality, and in a time when folks are already too isolated, I would pay a premium to frequent an establishment that still offered that sort of full-service, more sustainable practice.

> PVC will break into VC

No it will not, stop pushing junk science. Vinyl Chloride is a chlorinated double-bond. PVC is made by opening the double bond to form connected monomer units (i.e. polymers).

PVC doesn't "degrade" back into a higher energy state compound.

Even if you left it you in the sun where UV might re-double bond it, the molecule itself is incredibly reactive - it's environmental lifetime is basically zero under those conditions since it'll oxidize and break down in air in a few days at most, and photochemical reactions are amongst the slowest and most inefficient.

Buried PVC doesn't even have the energy to do that.

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