Technofossils: Humanity's eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes | Hacker News Reader

Technofossils: Humanity's eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes

theguardian.com

61 pointspseudolus29 comments

one "ironic" thing is that Styrofoam has longest cycle (1My..~never) but is used for most massive once-only usages like meat packaging..

While looking at the beach day-by-day, 50% of the trash spit by sea is.. wet-wipes.

Edit: ironical -> ironic

Yeah, wet wipes are really bad. High volume styrofoam was used in appliance manufacturing and distribution but in responsible manufacturing chains recently seems to be aggressively replaced by cardboard. The other things you see a lot of in Asia are blow-molded PET (soft drink bottles), instant noodle containers, single use FMCG tear-packs (shampoo, sauces, etc.), sushi take-away soy-sauce fish containers, plastic straws and polymer fishing nets.

Basically the three industries that count are FMCG/food retail, appliances, and fishing.

However, just because you don't see plastic doesn't mean it's not there. A lot of the plastic waste gets burned in Asia and then pollutes waterways and makes its way to the ocean, largely because many countries still lack decent waste infrastructure. I imagine it's similar in Africa and South America.

In non-appliance supply chain, a waste reduction strategy that seems to be increasing is reusable 'chunks' of styrofoam rather than custom molded large pieces. This facilitates reuse assuming the volume-in and volume-out of shipment at a site is similar (it never is).

FYI ironic is an adjective already in English, you don't need to add the '-al' (ironical is not a word). Your English is better than my Slavic :)

About 2006 or so, when I hadn't been homeless anymore, my parents helped me pick out a Swiffer system so perhaps one day I'd clean my own floor or shower

I was lamenting to them how wasteful/expensive were the wet pad refills, and Dad goes, "you think you could rinse some out and reuse them?" Oh... hmm... what a pragmatic idea

You mean Slavical? :)

Seriously, our worst enemy are probably the articles.

i keep learning new things everyday (well, and forgetting others). Thanks :)

That's sad, not ironic

My impression is that plastic bags do not last that long. I have found old (perhaps 20 years old) plastic bags in sunless lofts, and others that had been buried (ie varied conditions) and both were very badly degraded. I cannot imagine that these things will last billions of years.

Mechanically, most plastics are not that durable. Chemically though - once into microscopic sizes.. close to eternal

The future portended here won’t be our leaving mountains of Solo cups and garbage bags, but rather untold generations worth of disrupted hormones, preventable deaths and disease, and ecological destruction on unprecedented scales. Plastic will degrade, but the large chained polymers it’s made of will persist in the environment effectively forever. At least, that’s how I understand this particular apocalyptic scenario.

Some were manufactured to be "oxo-degradable" with specific additives. I suspect that's what you've found.

I have some plastic bags which are definitely at least 30 years old and they're still like new.

Pure polyethylene is very inert and can last many decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plastic_(LDPE)_bowl,_by_G...

One (joking) thing I heard long long ago - no idea where - is nature was vastly creative & made such a rich world, but there was one thing it could create - plastic - and for that it had to create humanity. Has stuck with me for a long time. Like plastic will.

George Carlin standup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w

Maybe SETI should be searching for signs of plastic in the cosmos. Or misinformation. A message with the first million digits of Pi, and one wrong digit would surely be a sign of intelligent life.

Hardly eternal. Give it a billion years and all that will be left is a slightly more carbon rich layer of dust.

naaaah. donchu worry about that particular thing. instead, worry about how to pull through an operation that utilizes machine learning and robotics in complete cleansing of this trash. like, a Spot (Boston, Korea) is roaming along the interstate highway and picks up cans and glass chips and chicken bones, collects and transports it to nearby trash silo and recharger/maintenance station. with Python inside

One thing - do not EVER try to connect the function of roaming for trash with getting energy from that trash. It's asking for Horizon Zero Dawn scenario.

of course, and of course you are right, and brilliantly pointed out that scenario. the point in sustaining the process of roaming under requirements constraints.

Toilets. Pottery outlasts everything else.

Earthenware and unfired pottery degrade extremely quickly once water can get to the actual material. Porcelain can last longer, but it's not nearly as durable in the ground as stone or even metal. I'd expect granite countertops and metal tools to be more commonly found by future archaeologists.

I have metal tools that are almost completely eaten by rust. No way these will last a few thousand years.

Maybe not those specific tools, but I have personal experience with finding metal tools that are thousands of years old as an archaeologist. Earthenware is a relatively uncommon find anywhere that has water because it degrades so quickly. It used to be common to build clay paths by scattering broken earthenware and letting it degrade naturally. Porcelain is more durable chemically, but it's too fragile mechanically to survive intact in large pieces in most cases. I've only ever found it when buried in situ.

The ancients didn't have toilet bowls. I guess this sort of sanitary porcelain is going to last longer than fine 18th century coffee cups.

I would suspect those tools are made out of metals of very different composition though.

What about engine blocks

We’ll have long since melted them down for arms when the Final War comes between humanity and NeuraLink’s jar of formaldehyde preserving the distilled and partially sentient spite of a >400-year old Elon Musk.

I don't think water degrades a toilet. Not following. And, the earliest artifacts ever found - partially fired throwaway pottery at an ancient fire site?

Porcelain is more stable, as mentioned. You'll still have issues if the protective glaze cracks, but it won't completely dissolve on you like earthenware would in the same situation.

I'm not sure I understand what you're referencing with the pottery. The oldest pottery I'm aware of is 18-20k years old and was found in a cave with exceptional preservation conditions. That's fairly old, but not remotely the earliest or indicative of special longevity. We have lithics that entirely predate the evolution of genus Homo (Lomekiwi tools, 3.3M years old) as an example.

The longest lasting evidence of human existence will be satellites in space and deep tunnels.

take something like a battleship, or any of the thousands of shipping cans lost at sea, or complete container ships, etc, that fall into sometimes anoxic enviroments, perhaps in subduction zones of the earths crust, where these massive objects, composed of countless bits, of the most durable materials made, will be incorporated into the earths crust, then to be bent, and folded, and eventualy thrust up into new land, and eroding out into the light after 50 million years.....works for dino bones...will work for other stuff

Reply on news.ycombinator.com