Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose
sdstate.edu
sdstate.edu
(This is another reason why the idea that's been floated that "AI" or the near-mythical "AGI" will "solve the world's problems" is fallacy -- unless of course by "solve" it means "make a few companies extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else".)
Having said that, deep sustainability initiatives like this require some forward thinking, and i dont see the public buying into preserving their own future when the reaction to climate protesters is eye rolling and the west and east keep throwing the hot potato of blame to each other rather than trying ti solve the problem.
Ideally, the government would introduce regulations to incentivize this for entities for whome the value proposition would, in the short term, be negative. But i dont know if they'll get their act together to do that. So you might be right
I’m grateful the work is being done because it’s essential but no longer have faith in these things being solved in 5, 10, or 20 years.
you've realized that the problems are not impossible, and it's just a matter of getting people to think about them in the right way.
that's easy. Humans have been getting other humans to think the ways they want since the written word. Nothing is more practiced as a discipline, except perhaps prostitution.
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
As well as all the single use bags (paper and plastic) I bought, I also have jute bags that I got years ago and are still holding up. I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
What I would like to see is some kind of deposit system with stronger bags (like my jute bags). Then when I actually remember I can bring them back to the store for someone else to use.
Plastic for the most part is basically garbage, there are so many types that it’s hard to recycle it. PET and HDPE can be recycled fairly easily if they’re sorted, the rest aren’t really worth it (polypropylene, low density polyethylene, PVC).
The only thing that is almost always economically worth recycling is metal, which is separated from the paper/glass/plastic if you have single stream recycling. Plastic should be burned in a cement kiln or buried in a modern landfill, unless it’s well sorted HDPE or PET.
Then take a bunch in the other 25%. You can just leave them in the car.
Grab a bundle right now, or whenever you’re at home and remember, and put them next to your keys, your wallet, or hang them on the handle of your door.
> I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Sure, use whatever you like. Just don’t let perfect be in the way of good.
> Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Then go back to your car! It will be mildly annoying the first two times, and the third time it won’t happen. I mentioned exactly that in my comment.
> Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
Then start bringing more. This isn’t hard. Leave the extras in your car.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned.
None of your mentioned obstacles is insurmountable. On the contrary, they are all exceedingly trivial to overcome with the tiniest amount of will to do so.
I put our reusable ones on the floor in the entrance to the garage and then that reminds me to put them back in the trunk whenever I go to the car for whatever reason. Then I always have them while out.
I've sometimes left them in the car but just excuse myself at the checkout and go fetch them while the groceries are being rung up.
If you go this route, keep onions and garlic separate. They last longer if they stay dry.
Cardboard not so much, but where I live one can just take how many boxes one can haul off various shops and they will just thank you.
It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.
For sure. But reusing the plastic bag you already have is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new cloth bag, yet many people never even think of using the same plastic bag twice. Even if some food juice spills inside, you can quickly rinse it off, hang it, and it’s good as new.
In my original reply I was trying to convey that you can be the laziest, most forgetful person, and still have an easy solution.
Additionally, don’t just take them when you know you’ll need them, do it before. Next time you need to leave your house to go somewhere, grab some and put them in your car. Done. Go put some right now next to your wallet or keys or literally on the handle of your house’s door.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned. You can’t forget to bring what’s already inside the store.
The exception is small loose produce like snap peas.
Wash it (as you should anyways) and you'll be fine ...
If you live in an area with entitled people and spineless corporate rules that don't allow stores to confront people over pets, that's instantly worse than everything else combined. Pets like to lie on the floor, someone's dog has peed on the floor, 5 different random people have petted hugged or picked up that dog and 3 others since they left the house. One of those people is probably a cashier who then handles every item you've bought. And then someone inhaled pet hair and sneezed.
Anyway, if water won't wash the food clean, then one may as well not shop at the grocery store.
You can also read the studies that show mechanical action (brushing, rubbing) under running water effectively reduces the bacteria count https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X2...
It’ll never be sterile, but it doesn’t need to be for a healthy human. Probably shouldn’t be either.
Nowhere close to 10k, but nontrivial. And, this gets reduced and sometimes outright negated if you reuse the bag. Doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate if plastic shopping bags are the beat choice though.
I don't think replacing them with store bought doggy poo and cat litter bags is better. It's not a reduction and theres no reuse. If you find yourself discarding them outright, then find an alternative I guess.
Though what is often forgotten is the insane amounts of plastic used in farming. Occlusion fabric for weeds, polytunnel skins, silage wrap, etc
150g is only equal to about 1-5 of the reusable bags in CA grocery stores, depending on the store.
Emissions isn't the main problem with plastics.
But yes, we should also cut down on driving cars, or drive EVs, or take public transport.
I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.
No, I don’t. I do remember a push to recycle paper which was a net win for everyone.
> Or saturated fats?
Great counterpoint. Remind me of the benefits of having microplastics in your testes. Which part of that had scientists questioning historical data?
On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)
As the amount of plastics in the brain increases who knows what it'll do to us.
Bananas are often wrapped individually for sale. You buy a box of biscuits and they're often individually wrapped in plastic etc.
https://www.target.com/p/lotus-original-reusable-produce-bag...
Wasting produce is much worse for the environment than wasting a bag. After all if you don't litter the bag, throwing it out is pretty harmless.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/2824/fresh...
Either way good on you
You put the bag on the scale, it then sets this amount to 0.0
You put the product on the scale, (say 500g of apples), It shows 500g.
You remove the bag, it takes off 4g, you add the bag it puts on 4g.
There is no need to write down the result.
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
That really should be prosecuted for false advertising. Just because I can physically flush Orbeez down the toilet doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingeo
I think there's also "biodegradable" plastic which has cornstarch in it which allows bacteria to degrade it, but that's not the same thing?
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
You can have local manufacturing processes so that it doesn't have to get stuck in a truck in Texas for a month.
And there'll still be uses for the long lived plastics. You don't have to use one plastic for everything - like we don't today.
Building a box that can last for centuries when you're only going to use it for 25 minutes and toss it is pretty wild if you think about it.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene
and even
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene
are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that. One reason we quit burning trash in many places is the presence of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
[1] Plenty of others contain oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate or nitrogen such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon
In any case incinerators can handle the chlorine - it's so reactive that it's actually very easy to filter.
> You can't really "burn up" heavy metals
There are no heavy metals in plastic, and very little in consumer waste as a whole.
> are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that
But those 3 you listed are the vast majority of the thrown out plastics.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?
A large amount of plastic recycling is burned, but always in secret, because when people find out they freak out, because they mistakenly think that making some new plastic out of it is somehow better.
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
Combined with the high sugars in the fruit and this cellulose things, overall an extremely useful plant.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera#Fighting_the_%22phy...
The headline is practically a demonic summoning ritual for the naturalistic fallacy. The article is talking about cellulose. We've had cellulose forever. Cellulose is dirt cheap. We are a post-cellulose-scarcity civilization. Extracting it from grapevines ought to be mocked as our century's version of bringing coal to Newcastle.
There's a reason we don't use cellulose packaging for everything and it has nothing to do with grapes.
Hint: moisture exists in the world. Biodegrading in 17 days usually means that it breaks down a lot sooner in conditions we care about.
> Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.
What useful research could we have funded instead?
You never heard of Cellophane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
You know why we've lost so much early cinema history to fire and moisture?
Because silent-film-era film is made of cellulose. It burns. Rapidly. Photography pioneers knew that. They used cellulose anyway because it's flexible and transparent. Right technological decision at the time.
We've known about cellulose properties for literally over a century. There's nothing new here.
> What useful research could we have funded instead?
This research seems useful enough to me.
We have markets and prices. If cellulose became scarce enough that the cheapest source for it became agricultural waste, we wouldn't need the government to fund research into an extraction process. Industry would be all over it on its own.
State funding for research is there to solve the problem of industry incentives being aligned against foundational, long term research. What we're looking at here isn't anything like that. It's just one more organic extraction process, another entry in a long tradition of such things.
I think it’s a valid point.
But anything involving grapeviles is just ecomasturbation.
Actually, no, it's worse, because it robs attention and funding from real problems. Plastic pollution isn't predominately plastic bags or (plastic straws for that matter) that seem important because the sort of person who writes articles on a laptop for online publication encounters them daily and doesn't see the stream of untreated industrial waste mostly from the big rivers in Asia.
IMHO, the best investment in mitigation of plastic pollution would be automatic cleanup mechanisms, especially for microplastics in the ocean.
The whole plastic straw thing is nuts. The old waxed paper straws were fine. The new “paper” straws are coated in PFAS and way worse for your health and the environment than most alternatives.
This article reminds me of that. Cellulose isn’t a new technology, but, like wax paper straws, it’s apparently forgotten arcane knowledge.
I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example, my box of tea bags used to come wrapped in plastic, and now it suddenly doesn't, and I'm wondering why it ever needed plastic. But there's still so much stuff that comes wrapped in plastic, and often multiple layers of it.
Just ban it. There are excellent alternatives.
There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging.
So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).
Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.
It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.
It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here.
The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain".
The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive.
Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable.
The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.
See prior comment about road to hell being paved with good intentions.
My family returned six cases of 15 bottles each to Costco, then found that the other brands at local stores were the same way. A couple of months later the bottles went back to normal. I still wonder if they switched back due to customer rejection of the new plastic, or if they found the new plastic was in some way leeching contaminants.
At some point there are so many bricks in the road, it's direction is so clear, that the intentions are not longer good. At best they are ignorant, but too often they are self serving malice sailing under the flag of ignorance.
So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.
The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.
Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.
They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.
Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.
Incidentally, given that I'm _not_ old enough to remember a time before supermarkets had plastic bags, either the invention of attaching handles to paper bags took a very long time to migrate to my corner of California, or this comment makes no sense
I haven't seen those in decades unfortunately. It was a great way to reuse those boxes.
Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.
Of course wrapping everything non-organic is a no go as well, it would be terrible for the environment. And I'm afraid stopping the production of non-organic stuff ain't happening anytime soon.
I believe the real solution if possible until they fix this is to go to a market or an organic store where nothing is in plastic, at least for fruits and vegetables.
How is this calculated? I know that growing a cucumber has an environmental cost but so does producing plastic, delivering it and then using machines to shrink-wrap every cucumber.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
The push was from plastic manufacturers.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/birth-ban-histor...
But I can't take the brown paper bag thing seriously! They are a UX nightmare in my workflows. Carry one bag per trip in multiple trips (Instead of ~4 I can do with reusable or plastic). Or try the handled ones which tear off end up with groceries all over. Reusable bags are nice though.
What you see in a lot of places that have people heavily relying on things like delivery services, is people using the reusable bags like they would use single-use bags - so now you have spent even more resources on a bag that's still being used as single-use. Oops.
Because plastic is cheaper. As I understand it it's often got a negative cost to it, the companies are paid to take it and use it.
The feed stock is basically worth nothing, it's the labor and energy investment that you add to it at every step that adds the value.
Most of the plastic involved in getting food from farm to home isn't the carrier bag or even the food wrappers. It's the massive amount of plastic that pallets of goods are wrapped in for shipping, which happens several times throughout the supply chain.
We should focus on the latter, instead of the former. Pretty much all we're doing is virtue signalling and maybe hoping that it'll make a tiny difference.
Heck, even a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency of trucks delivering to grocery stores would probably do more than these plastic bag shennanigans.
Then, when I'm in town I see building projects where the entire building is wrapped in plastic sheeting: eight story buildings wrapped like a parcel in plastic. Even the ground-level hoarding that used to plywood boards is now typically covered in plastic sheeting printed with branding.
And the roadworks: what used to be reusable metal signs and barriers have recently switched to plastic signs and plastic barriers. I get these get battered and broken quickly but at least the steel ones would typically get melted down and reused at their end-of-life. I imagine the plastic ones just end up in landfill or incinerated.
It does kinda make my home recycling efforts seems futile when commercial enterprises are moving in the opposite direction towards more plastic.
Not all pollution is fungible.
Greenhouse gas emissions and the microplastic epidemic are two related, but separate issues.
There is no amount of fuel efficiency that would stop a plastic bag from blowing into a stream or tree and shedding microplastics as it breaks down.
I hope you're right. Here in Norway, the sensible people did what you describe. A large minority has, on the other hand, turned the lack of plastic bags (and straws, which I'm sure they barely even used once in a blue moon before) into a battlefield of the culture wars. And far right politicans of course cater to them. They manage to capture discourse talking about "environmentalism gone wild" and "EU overreach". It's terribly annoying and they manage to waste everyone's time and derail important debates with this nonsense.
My conspiracy theory is corporate propaganda changed it because reduce and reuse decreases demand, while recycle potentially only lowers production cost
Maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, but most people don't even realize there is a tradeoff being made...
When I get to the car I unload into the bags. I'm sure it's not a thing for everyone, but I feel like I'm cutting out a fair bit of shuffling.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags...
I just put my fruits and vegetables directly on the conveyor belt.
Thats easily solved though by simple buying some reusable fruit/veggie net. Essentially the same as what you would use for socks or underwear in the laundry.
Having a stainless steel compost container helps with this, as it’s easier to clean and doesn’t retain odors like the plastic bins.
I recommend this approach in general.
If those parameters meet the requirements for a material that you need to use then cool. Use it. I don't see any attributes in this article, which is fine but "stronger than ..." is a bit weak.
The biodegradeable thing is probably going to be key if this stuff can hold hot liquids without poisoning the imbiber or can make plackey bags without falling to bits within seconds.
> These films exhibit a transparency of 83.70–84.30% mm−1 and a tensile strength of 15.42–18.20 MPa. They biodegrade within 17 days in soil at 24% moisture content. These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications. Our research approach of repurposing agricultural byproducts to create high-value products helps reduce plastic waste, conserve the environment, and provide economic benefits to farmers.
on the lower end of plastics but might be fine for this application: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/3-Tensile-strength-and-i...
seems comparable to LDPE which i think the common bags are made from.
Another option would be to buy canned beverages rather than fountain drinks.
Most countries have to import plastic along with their oil. Surely the economics of this gets worse every time oil or shipping prices rise. And more so if you account the cost of waste disposal.
There are economic incentives to scaling up these biodegradable alternatives. Are they not big enough to result in a push?
That is a lot of grapevines, grapevines grow slowly, and growing grapes is the best way to use grapevines.
We read about technologies like this because science grad students have to do something, grad schools have low standards for useful work, and universities employ a lot of press release writers.
So Id wager it's the brutal road from proof of concept to scaled production.
Do the same with bamboo, HFCS waste, or something similar in availability? Now you're talking!
Supermarkets charge for plastic bags. Paper bags for fruit and veg work well. They also provide quality reusable bags that cost a small amount (£1 or so), and people actually reuse them.
Oh I got it: corruption!
Nobody wants plastic that breaks because this will lead to more trash.
Relevant fallacy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do. There are plenty of developing nations where consumption and pollution run rampant and unchecked and unregulated which do tons more damage than me throwing 1 glass jar into a semi well managed landfill.
I mean theres just so many facets to this - does recycle work, does collective action work, or are corporations the real devils here doing much more bad than the collective at large?
i feel that the only way to change anything is through government level policy (which also feels futile), but individual actions do little without policy+propoganda to disseminate the right message and change collective behavior.
Imagine people saying they didn't want to adopt mobile phones because developing nations didn't have traditional telephones yet.
This applies to both green tech and to green regulations. They'll look to the EU and China for that as the US is going this one alone again. China recycles 30% of its plastic compared with 12% in the US. Presumably they look at it as an engineering problem to solve and not a fake culture war to protect the oil industry.
Slightly older data here but the trend and the major outlier of the US visible here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-recyc...
On the other hand, growing poor behind Iron Curtain, thinking about not recycling glass jars was crazy.
The thing is wealthy societies just buy things. We were not only washing those jars but re-filling as well with what we have produced.
And I think same goes when one is 'eco-conscious'. Recycle sure, but buy less.
The entire purpose of their existence is to provide products to customers that want them.
The miraculous thing is people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling products to the people that want them.
If ot weren't for all those drug dealers, we wouldn't have any addicts.
Corporations actively use addiction and psychological manipulation. They're not just passively filling consumer wants.
Your drug dealer analogy actually proves the opposite: we hold dealers responsible precisely because we recognize supply drives addiction. That's exactly why we have laws against dealing rather than just treating addiction as purely a demand-side problem. By your analogy, drug dealing should be legal because it gives the people what they want.
Are you suggesting people have a plastic bag addiction? What exactly are the plastic bag manufacturers doing that is unethical? Let's use real examples instead of vague accusations. I'm not going to start with your assumptions that corporations are all evil and are definitely doing bad stuff so you're going to need to cite examples about this specific case.
> By your analogy, drug dealing should be legal because it gives the people what they want.
How much of the harm of drugs comes from the illegality of the market? What of the drugs that are legal, why aren't they so harmful? There's a great case study about the effects of black markets when the US banned alcohol, caused a massive surge in organized crime, then reversed the ban and solved the problem they created.
Drugs cause harm. So do cars, so do plastic bags, so do knives, so do guns, etc. Harm to users/consumers sometimes a good reason, sometimes not, to make things illegal.
The American Progressive Bag Alliance (representing Novolex, Hilex Poly, Superbag, and Advance Polybag) has:
- Spent $6+ million fighting California's bag ban through misleading ballot measures https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2016/08/17/plastic-b...
- Funded studies claiming reusable bags harbor dangerous bacteria (while omitting that washing eliminates this) https://archive.is/p7Qza
- Sued cities implementing bag bans, forcing expensive legal defenses https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/20/plastic-bags-have-l...
to make money.
Customers wanting or not the product is only one of the path to that. Aligning with competitors to avoid profit reducing change to the market is one way to optimize for money while giving the middle finger to customers.
> people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling
Eschewing the responsibility of companies with money flow the size of a small nation, crazy marketing budgets, plenty access to lobbying and political power at an international level is way worse in my book.
Have you heard about lobbies and the billion of dollars companies spend in advertising targeting everyone from the moment their mom shits them out in the world?
Are people born wanting an iPhone 98 Max S pro and a Ford mustang gt5000 7.0 ultimate? I doubt it, but they sure are influenced by comics/movies/ads 24/7 into wanting them.
Do you think the average Joe stands a chance again zuck and his friends hiring the top behavioral scientists and paying the 1m a year to make sure their ad delivery platform are addictive as possible?
I don't even condemn businesses (too much). For a single business to be more eco friendly it must raise costs anf lose competitiveness. For a state to mandate these stuff, all businesses will be on the same level - and they'll have to compete for practical or cheaoet ways to be eco friendly.
It's the tragedy of the Commons, and the only way to win is to enforce rules for everyone.
- corporations are responsible for creating products which can be recycled;
- the consumer is responsible for proper disposal of their waste, and also for electing officials who have actual policies on reducing or eliminating pollution;
- local government is responsible for setting up recycling centers, and for enforcing correct behavior in consumers.
The consumer is at the bottom of all this, directly responsible for polluting the environment.
Oft-stated opinions like yours are lazy and ignorant.
And what does "directly responsible for polluting the environment" even mean? If I pay someone to take my trash out and throw it in the ocean am I all of a sudden excempt because I'm not the one "directly" polluting?
Pollution comes from a complex system so it has to be solved as such. Blaming individual participants (specially the ones with less money and power) is reducing the responsability of the rest which is the perfect excuse to do nothing
And this is in a major city in middle Europe, one of the centers of "civilization".
If it's this bad here, what must it be like in countries with less developed social and economic systems?
This is the core of consumer responsibility, and it's a dismal failure.
That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.
(Source: Paraphrasing from my vague recollection of A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, and also articles like this one https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-production-pollution-foreca...)
People are making progress in Utah too