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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Because it would drive prices of basic household goods up 400% and make low and middle income families vastly poorer.

I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.

I try to avoid reheating things in plastic containers. It's about the only thing I can think of I can do as a consumer to reduce the risk of chemicals leeching into the food.

> would drive prices of basic household goods up 400%

Glass is nominally more expensive and works. Our go-to food storage is mason jars. $12/dozen, probably cheaper by volume than the plastic crap on the shelves at Target or Walmart.

A bottle of wine by mass is ballpark 50% glass and 50% wine. A one liter glass jar of olives around 300 grams of glass.

So it's not merely packaging cost but also about convenience of shipping it around.

That said we still manage to ship both of those all over the world despite the unfavorable mass and relative sensitivity of their packaging.

The jar of olives however have plastic liner in the jar lid, so you're not escaping plastics anyway. The solution as I see it is to use the right plastics in the right way and ensure proper disposal of the waste.

Wine and olives also cost more than milk and eggs. You can package milk in glass bottle 5 percent of the weight of the product made at thousands of degrees from burning fossil fuels or you can package it in an inert HDPE container, that is processed at several hundred degrees and weighs say 0.5% of the product contained within. lighter packaging means less fuel burned to ship it. Lower processing temperatures means less fuel burned to make it. Ethylene polymerized into plastic for milk jugs doesn't end up in the air as CO2. Plastic feed stocks directly compete with fuel feed stocks. The less fuel we need to burn to ship things the more carbon is kept out of the atmosphere and the more carbon made into plastic that is stable when buried for thousands of years the less ends up in the air. You can make a lighter foam egg carton for less cost, that better protects the eggs than a paper one. Paper is no more a natural material than plastic. The manufacturing process releases hydrogen sulfide, contaminates water and when the paper rots the toxic dyes in ink printed on it is unbound and free to leach into the environment. Paper cups are coated with persistent waxed and plastics that migrate once the cup that supported them is gone. White paper products are bleached and brown paper is produced with harmful chemicals including even flame retardants at times. What is cheapest, lightest and most stable is usually also the most environmentally friendly thing.

Maybe go for the low-hanging fruit first, so to speak. When I was a free range kid back in the late 70’s, long before CA Redemption Value was conceived, all soft drinks were in deposit bottles. Thick, heavy reusable bottles. You’d pay a dime for the bottle and yeah you brought it back. The truck would go back to the warehouse with a load of empties. The retailer sorted them by brand and flavor. The bottling plant washed them and refilled them. Way more ecological than our current “pretend to recycle” regime we have in the U.S.

I think furniture and carpet would get it worse than most stuff. The alternatives to plastic (largely glass) in other cases are more like 20-50% more expensive, but furniture? Carpet? Solid wood and wool, leather—god, I dunno what you’d even use for cushion fill that’d last anywhere near as long. Those are closer to 400% the price of synthetic stuff. Or more.

Pine. Oak. Jute. Bamboo.

FYI, bamboo is usually actually:

1. Some actual bamboo that has been processed to remove starches and sugars

2. Mixed with incredible amounts of chemical glues (some of which include BPA)

Most bamboo products are at least as suspicious to me as plastic.

All the bamboo flooring products are engineered (in other words). Oak is great for flooring, but it's impractically heavy for the furniture.

> I dunno what you’d even use for cushion fill that’d last anywhere near as long. Those are closer to 400% the price of synthetic stuff. Or more.

AFAIU natural latex is an alternative to the ubiquitous polyurethane foam, and lasts longer. Quite pricey though.

> I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.

The devil is that food that comes pre-packed under vacuum or inert atmosphere in plastics lasts much, much longer than food that gets stored in anything else - including tin cans by the way, they're all lined with plastics because acidic food would otherwise literally eat away the can.

There are "bulk" stores that have no packaging and you fill up what you need into reusable containers that you either buy or bring yourself. They generally have common bulk items like flour but also lots of options for typical grocery store fare. The prices at those stores generally aren't 400% of what they are at a regular grocery store, and if they are higher I'm sure a large part is that this is a niche kind of store rather than how everyone gets their groceries.

That's obviously not the whole supply chain, and I'm sure many goods still arrive at that kind of store in plastic, but these tend to be run by the types that avoid plastic anyway so whatever they can get in reusable packaging I'm sure they are getting wrapped in something other than plastic. Anyway, if plastic is going to be used, the exposure from a single 100lbs bag of something that you refill into a container is probably vastly lower than from 100 individually wrapped 1lbs bags

That kind of thing only works in a high trust society. Given the choice, I'm not going to buy food from bulk bins where some stranger could have contaminated them, whether by malice or incompetence.

Jars can be refilled. I think things would actually get cheaper.

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