Plastics in general make me nervous. I watched a talk from an endocrinologist that many plastics and their byproducts can bind to chemical receptors, throwing off the production and ratios of various hormones and neurotransmitters. We made a big push against BPA-free plastic years ago, but there may be other varieties that are just as harmful: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/tritan-certi...
(I'm also very nervous about "biodegradable" plastic which appears to break down granularly, but persists microscopically in the environment.)
As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store, the vast majority of the products we place in them are still wrapped in huge quantities of single-use plastic. While metal cans and glass jars are at least somewhat more recyclable/reusable, I'm not even sure we have a good replacement for the necessary evil of food-safe containers.
If someone more knowledgable than myself had suggestions on how to look for safer/greener plastic varieties, or general strategies to reduce their use, I'd love to hear them.
"biodegradable" plastics are chains of polymerized lactic acid. Proper disposal requires heat and time, but the chains do break down in nature, and lactic acid is everywhere, unlike many other "plastic" materials which are much more exotic. (talking about polylactic acid PLA)
It is also true that many plastics are active biologically, mimic hormones, etc. etc. BUT to temper this fear you have to realize that nearly everything is. Many foods, "essential oils", and natural plant and animal exposures have the same sort of hormone mimicry or other biological drug-like interactions which are poorly understood at best.
The point I am trying to get across is that your body is not an impenetrable fortress that new and evil synthetic compounds are attacking. Instead, biological interactions with small effects are everywhere, and while concern about some of them isn't unwarranted, it should be tempered by the idea that these influences abound.
Cool, thanks for those details. I'm certainly not succumbing to any sort of naturalistic fallacy, or any illusion that plastic is in an intrinsically unique category compared to other products. I'm more operating from a general Precautionary Principle, where I want the burden of proof to be on demonstrating long-term ecological and health safety, especially for substances that come into contact with food and water.
It's difficult because ontologically you can never actually prove something is "safe". It's proving a negative (never any harmful effects).
Some harms are subtle or situation dependent, and small effects will only show up under widespread or frequent use.
Perhaps deliberately slowed or phased rollout could help.
It would also make materials science and the chemical industries "feel" a lot more like medicine. Companies would have to spend billions on studies to get new chemical formulations or materials to market which could have similar effects on innovation (and monopoly) to those we see in the drug market.
Not necessarily bad depending on what you value but the effects would be very far reaching.
Shrug. You can define "safe" as an absolute and then argue absolute is impossible, yes. It's a bit of a straw man argument though.
Or you can drop the binary label and start developing statistics about known effects and outcome ranges. These things can be done; further understanding of bio-chemical systems and simulation makes discovery by widespread experiment less and less extant.
The issue isn't that looking for and finding effects positive or negative is hard, the issue is that few are trying and few are interested in the effort. (i.e. most people either have the conservative, 'everything is safe' attitude or the luddite 'everything is bad for you' attitude, and neither involve much discovery)
You can’t drop the binary label if your intent is to do something with the information. Ultimately there will be a “safety” threshold at which these materials would be allowed or not.
If the only statement is “we should generally be studying everything more, in an undirected manner with no stated purpose aside from the inherent value of simply knowing more about everything and letting each individual draw their own conclusions”, then yeah sure, but there’s nothing stopping this from happening now, aside from the fact that such a mission statement doesn’t provide particularly strong incentives.
Generally when it comes to hazardous materials, there's not a binary 'banned/OK'. There can be restrictions on use for given applications, restrictions on purchasing, etc. Rarely are materials completely banned outright.
This feels like a bizarre straw man. Yes, you can use lead paint on road markings because no one will lick them and lead paint is amazingly resilient to water damage -- but I think we all have a shared understanding in a casual conversation about what we mean when we say "lead paint is banned", there's no need for someone to say "well actually -- that's not strictly true, current regulations still allow for non-consumer use and old buildings are still grandfathered in if they have not been repainted, and additionally its not an outright ban but like most substances it means it has to fall under a certain percent content". Either way, these are still ultimately binary restrictions in their respective domains. It's a cascade of if statements, not a smooth function. Just because there are twenty binary decisions, or the decisions are in separate categories, does not make them non-binary. A non-binary approach would be something like having a gradient of punishments for a smooth spectrum of allowed percentages. It's hard to properly describe, because again, it's not really often seen.
Granted. I mean, strictly speaking, we can't prove that the gravitational constant won't change tomorrow. :) But I would like a substantial enough body of evidence from competent and disinterested assessment(s) so that our societies can take the right long-terms risks on new materials (where "new" = less than 100 years). Obviously easier said than done; I like the idea of putting it in the same category as medical treatments (though let's be frank, even that process is hardly flawless).
Wouldn't a limited version the naturalistic fallacy be somewhat appropriate here?
Until we have better science on the subject[1], it seems reasonable to me to assume that our bodies have had time to evolve and adapt to naturally occurring substances in a way that they haven't to man made chemicals. Of course I'm sure this doesn't apply perfectly, but it seems like a reasonable heuristic.
[1] An additional problem is that, even when there is "science", I am often not equipped to determine if it was a sham funded by industry, whether a given chemical is just some functionally identical variant of a potentially unsafe substance, etc.
Late reply, but yeah, this is roughly my view. I think the Naturalistic Fallacy label should be applied to absolutism: the old/"natural" thing must be good, the new/"unnatural" thing must be bad, both of which are clearly false. But I think there's an argument for taking the history of selection pressures (or lack thereof) into account when making risk assessments. This could also be compared to Chesterton's Fence [0], or even the Lindy Effect [1].
> I am often not equipped to determine if it was a sham funded by industry
Yeah, this is a problem. :( While I trust that there are good actors in most subfields of scientific inquiry, many domains (health in particular) are exorbitantly expensive to empirically research, inevitably leading to perverse incentives, or at least the absence of incentives to do thorough and holistic research.
21st century medicine (and many other fields), in my prediction, will be the century of small effects. The broad strokes are out of the way, mostly, and it's now time for the less glamorous and more numerous small details and ever more complex interactions.
I wonder how much time they require in a natural environment. I left a small chunk of PLA outside for weeks and saw literally no signs of biodegrading. It might be better than regular plastic but its no banana peal.
No, PLA won't just rot. In industrial composting environments it will be completely gone. In cool dry environments it will last for a long long time.
They use PLA in dissolvable stitches (one of a few options) and those thin fibers are dissolved within a few days to a few months. It depends much on environment.
And while it is possible to recycle glass, in practice it is tough. Glass is heavy and therefore costly to transport. It also generally has to be sorted by color before it is recycled (and this is a problem with U.S. multi stream recycling collection). https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...
The other thing I wonder about is all the extra crap on nearly all bottles: glue and stickers and wrappers and ink. I suspect some/most of what I put into recycling just ends up in a landfill anyway. And what kills me is, if our E2E supply chain was anything resembling sanity, there's no reason the identical bottle couldn't be shipped back to the manufacturer to be washed and reused directly! (...pandemics notwithstanding)
Maybe it's unrealistic, but in light of the efficiency and innovation created by standard-sized shipping containers, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to push manufacturers to standardize on various glass bottle shapes and sizes, to make them easy to reuse directly across different products and locations.
The so called "Normbrunnnenflasche" was introduced in 1969 by German mineral water bottling companies to have exactly this: [1]
* Standardized size (holds 0,7 l)
* Can withstand pressure, therefore suitable for sparkling water
* Can be used roughly 50 times: the bottle develops a matte ring through repeated handling indicating the approximate number of refills
* Any nearby retailer can take it back, and
* Any nearby bottling company can then use it for their own beverages
The important takeaway here is that it's REUSE, not RECYCLE, that might have the potential to reduce plastic production.
Legally, producers and retailers (!) have to clearly indicate which beverage containers are reusable (Mehrweg) and which ones are single-use (Einweg). [2] This is a great example of nudging people into environmentally positive behavior. Single-use deposits are higher than reusable deposits.
I think package standardization would be a revolutionary benefit to humanity, beyond even what the shipping container has achieved.
I remember visiting Japan and being blown away when I walked into a bookstore - almost every book was a standard size. This means bookshelves can be a standard size. This means people can fit books into their small homes efficiently. Boxes are designed to fit the books perfectly. Cloth book-covers fit library books perfectly. Coming back to North America, it felt that bookshelves were a war between publishers to produce the most awkwardly shaped book that would stick out from the shelf more than any others.
In an age where Amazon will ship you a toothbrush in a 1' box stuffed with paper, where a lot of consumers don't even see the product on a shelf so the attractiveness of the box doesn't matter, think of the benefits that package standardization could have.
Apparently the USSR would wash and reuse glass bottles, and the container shape would be the same whether it contained pickles or whatever. I've only heard this anecdotally though.
How will they wash the bottles? A friend of mine used to work for coke (now retired), he always drank from cans or plastic bottles because he didn't think they washed glass good enough).
Well they can wash and desinfect medical equipment at hospitals (admittedly not everything) and restaurants wash glasses and cuttlery every day. Why should we not be able to wash bottles?
We could alleviate that problem by standardizing glass containers, eg: have one or two standard soft drink containers. Same for wine bottles, milk jugs. Glass containers don't need to be re-melted. They can be washed and reused in a plant.
I don't think you can use a scale to weigh the outcomes of technology, there WILL be positive and negative impacts.
It's also useful to think about how a technology changes our culture, way of life and way of thought.
There are many positives that can be said about plastics, but it has shifted us into a "throwaway lifestyle", i.e. packaging, containers. Many plastics are used in a very ephemeral manor, which is great if you want to consumerism. But i suspect this obsolescence is baked into plastics.
These throwaway lifestyle items is someone elses business, someone elses jobs, someones elses ability to put food on their childrens table.
I totally get the "war on plastic" tendencies when you see how it's hurting our oceans but it's very important to separate that which is something that can be fixed with some underlying idea that plastic in itself is a problem. It's not. It's literally right now saving lives through the ability creating single use masks, gloves, medical instruments, part of ventilators and I could go on.
We are getting a taste of what the world would look like without consumerism and the use of fossil fuels etc. I don't know about you but I prefer consumerism to what we have now.
I actually like the non-consumerist, non-fossil-fuel-consuming aspects of our current situation. If it wasn't for the omnipresent dread and social isolation, I'd say things were pretty good. The air is clear, there are people walking outside, CO2 emissions are down.
I've been thinking the same thing. It's really nice being able to go for a walk or bicycle ride without so many cars out on the road. It's neat hearing about people starting gardens, and exciting that businesses are finally being forced to take telecommuting seriously.
Obviously people dying is horrible, and the economic damage could be problematic, but I do hope that whenever this is all over, some good may come of it.
You also like the destruction of the economy, the 30% unemployment, the lost retirements, the collapsing mortgage market?
If you just think this is a short break before we get back to normal you are in for a rude awakening.
This will change everything both for us, our children and their children.
Millions of companies are going to go bankrupt and people are going to get poorer which means more people are going to die from this not the least from famine.
I think I already mentioned the specific aspects I liked. But sure go ahead and be outraged about a bunch of things I didn't say.
> more people are going to die from this not the least from famine.
That didn't happen in the last recession - mortality rates apparently went down overall[1], though suicides were up[2]. And farm work isn't going to stop, so it isn't clear why there would be a famine.
Anyway, stay safe and take care. It's obviously a tense time for everyone, and I hope you and your family and friends are all well.
Last recession was vacation compared to this. This is a very very different scenario. This is like being in war, business cant happen even if you wanted to, even if there are customers.
I am not outraged, i just pointed to the consequences of what you are enjoying so much.
I'm not making a case for plastic being/creating a "problem". Plastic as a technology has allowed us to make cheap, single use products that are easy to replace and hard to repair. Like you are saying masks, gloves, etc.
In the broader sense, human thinking has shifted to this mode. We can't fix this start over, it reduces the pride of ownership and being accountable for your things. When you have no pride of your material possession, why would you develop pride for culture, institutions, countries. These are all things that we can just make to our pleasing.
I would argue that this might not be a global pandemic if it were not for global trade/consumerism.
I completely agree (disposable plastic bags are an underappreciated marvel of both engineering and manufacturing, despite their faults) but exactly the same thing could be said about asbestos.
And even the safe uses of asbestos are now (mostly) off-limits because of the taboo.
It seems to me that for applications other than food/beverage containers there's probably not an issue as long as it isn't used to create a throw away product by replacing more durable materials.
Synthetic fabrics could be an issue due to micro-plastics; however, unfortunately there just aren't good alternatives for many applications; particularly for vegans. For example, for cold weather gear you basically have synthetics or wool. For rain gear the only non-synthetic options that I can think of are leather, oil-skin, and waxed cotton.
When I was living in Melbourne I recall reading a story about the asbestos plant in sunshine (suburb of Melbourne). It was talking about how the kids used to play in the mountains of asbestos dust on the property and how on windy days the asbestos would fly through the town and give the impression it was snowing (quite scary to read this with today's knowledge). It was definitely considered harmless for a significant time.
> According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.
I don't know if that means that "BPA-free" is often deceptive advertising, or it's referring to different additive that's technically not BPA but problematic for other reasons, or what. (Bear in mind, as a layman, my mindset on this stuff is that the burden of proof should be on proving safety, not on proving harm.)
> As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store ...
Maybe that's worth a little less applause during a pandemic. E.g. the governor of Massachusetts just reversed the ban on plastic bags ... and banned reusable shopping bans, during the emergency. Fear of pollution is getting pushed back by fear of germs.
The film is thin, and it will burn away during melting. So it will certainly help to reduce the plastic pollution compared to pure plastic bottles and cans.
Even if we had 100% recycling, most if not all forms of recyclable plastic can only be recycled once into the "Made from recycled materials" type of plastic which cannot be recycled again.
So the Oil industry will still have massive demand for new plastics if every piece of existing plastic got recycled only once. For recycling to work, we need a solution that makes it easy to re-use many many times.
This is why recycling really isn't the answer to solving the plastics crisis anyway
It's a bit more complicated I believe, because with each cycle the material loses some degree of quality, but there are several categories to begin with.
So the thin water bottles (PET) might be reused only once, but advanced plastic required by medicine containers, infant food packaging, or even thicker bottles, may get recycled multiple times.
I’ve heard a sentiment from people that it’s ok to drink lots of bottle water, use plastic utensils, etc. because they can be recycled. Plastic won. Try to tell people that they’re wasting their time trying to recycle and they’ll freak out.
"Reduce" is at odds with people's desire to consume. Unfortunately, due to the way evolution optimized humans to select mating partners, it's going to be nigh impossible to address the cause of the problem.
There may be some evolutionary aspects, but mostly it's a consequence of our culture. When disposable one-use items and containers did not exist, society was fine (for the most part). We would be fine if they largely disappeared as well. What ultimately allowed the shift to occur was that the externalities of disposables were never correctly priced into their production and usage. We can certainly fix that.
I feel like there is another side too, of "plastic replacement" industry that also doesn't particularly have our interests at heart either. Do I really think reusable aluminum drinking straws are the answer to humanity's next crisis? Are plastic straws even in a top 1000 list of humanity's problems? Is the change even a net positive if the average person uses an aluminum one three times and throws it out? Or is it just someone (maybe even well intentioned) looking to make a quick dollar?
> Is the change even a net positive if the average person uses one three times and throws it out?
Well, the point of the aluminum drinking straws is that you don't throw them. What's the point if you're gonna throw them in the end anyways? Just wash it, like the rest of utensils that you use.
Anyways, I think we can all survive without straws. McDonals where I live has started just not giving you straws at all, and the cup has a message that if you want straws, ask the people working there for one. Looking around me when eating there, most people seems to be able to drink their sodas just fine without straws.
> Anyways, I think we can all survive without straws
Yip, and that's somewhat the point. But for whatever reason we keep getting lulled into the idea that we can fix the problem of consuming too many resources without actually consuming fewer resources.
Yeah, the same McDonalds are obviously not using the lids as the lids are only there for putting a straw in and you cannot drink from the cup with the lid on, so they are also served without lids.
Guess the next step is to replace the paper/plastic (not sure what material it is, guessing a mix) cups with actual glasses that gets washed instead of thrown.
We need to ban most consumer uses of plastic. Plastic is much like nuclear waste, it's harmful to life, and takes thousands to millions of years to degrade. Outside of uses like medical devices or smaller electronic devices, plastic is just wasteful. At the supermarket, I just cringe when I see a single banana or apple wrapped in plastic wrap. And I shudder to imagine the future health effects all the microplastic beads in the water supply are doing to us.
There would also be less food waste if the stores just, you know, gave away the products about to spoil to people who, you know, aren't rich enough to be picky about their bananas.
That does happen with bread at least. I grew up in a place where shopping at the "canned food store" and "bread store" was common. These were places that sold food that had expired off the shelves of other stores at steep discounts. Sometimes the food was just given away by grocery stores, too.
I agree with you if (1) it is done gradually as not to cause unintended consequences (2) certain higher value plastics used in long lasting products are not banned and (3) compost-able plastics are allowed. There already are compostable plastics that can easily replace most cheap plastic out there but they are slightly more expensive. If everyone is forced to use compostables instead of cheap throw-away plastic, the compostables would fall in price very quickly.
This is not a technology problem it is a very simple externality problem. We have the technology to solve it it just costs a little more and the people that are creating the problem are not bearing the costs so they do not care.
Penn and Teller are full of it as usual. Glass/metals recycling is perfectly beneficial. Paper recycling is generally beneficial if you can get people to recycle the correct paper. But in situations where paper waste is relatively uniform (such as printer paper in offices, schools, etc.) paper recycling can be very efficient and profitable.
It turns out that plastics recycling (at least at the consumer level) is not that beneficial and probably just an elaborate marketing campaign. If Penn and Teller dug in and did their research and outed plastics recycling as a marketing campaign I would say they are great public intellectuals and forward thinking visionaries. Instead they just recycled (get it?) some long refuted right wing lies about all recycling and thus ensured nobody would take them seriously. And if part of their argument was correct that was completely coincidental.
Did you actually watch it? They point out that at the very least aluminum recycling make sense. At the time glass and paper recycling seemed to have some questions around profitability. They mostly spent the episode dedicated to plastics.
They also admitted that despite their findings they found it very difficult to personally give up on recycling. That's what makes the lie so effective. We want to believe we are helping, that we are doing something effective that makes up for our wastefulness and excess consumption. We aren't.
Some single-stream systems have stopped taking glass. Paper/cardboard seems to be cost-effective so there isn't a real pressure to remove that. If anything it's one of the few things (along with metal) that the recycling systems actually get decent recovery rates from.
The reasons for removing glass in particular seem to be: 1) it's the heaviest component, so removing it decreases transportation/processing costs, 2) after China stopped accepting exported glass, there's a lack of processors who will take it, and 3) broken glass shards contaminate more valuable things in the stream, plus damage machinery.
Plastic isn't really cost-effective either and has low recovery rates, but it's at least lighter than glass and doesn't break into shards as easily, so a lot of places still take it, if only to make people feel good.
I was thinking paper not because it's not cost effective in itself, I just kind of assumed wet or soiled paper was a source of contamination for other things.
I think plastic should be a priority because it seems to be the most disasterous of recyclables when it comes to environmental contamination. Taxing plastic packaging to include externalities would probably fix this.
What would help is to figure out a use for more things. Ideally we get so good at sorting washing and recycling that everything goes to recycling and they figure it out from there. I throw a lot of things in the trash that could in theory be recycled but they don't currently (partially because of contamination). Still I have more recyclable trash than landfill trash by volume (this isn't as good as it sounds as they don't want us to crush the recycling, while landfill bound trash compacts well)
I think you're right, but we'd eliminate plastic- paper and metal are economically recyclable.
Paper is a huge problem, too. It's one of the most polluting industries, up there with mining. And, I believe, that is just the production of paper- not including the forestry that is also required.
I am afraid, that environmental topics will drown in current pandemic. There will be millions units of medical safety equipment disposed in coming months. Probably this will be incinerated since contaminated. It’s basically all sorts of plastic. Maybe this will push forward recycling industry to deal with large amount of plastic waste. Maybe not.
I can speculate, that more and more products in the stores will be wrapped to create safety feeling for the buyers. “Buy here, our food is well packed and clean!”
Shutting down the economy and reduced pollution that resulted will far far outweigh increased medical supply disposal. Just go look at the skies in India and China.
Disagree. If the pandemic becomes severe enough that supply chains are significantly disrupted, it may become easier to convince people that reusable materials are better than single-use plastics that are dependent on mass scale manufacturing overseas.
We've been down this road before, quite a few times. Once the crisis ends, everyone quickly returns to their old ways. I'm not that hopeful for a permanent shift away from disposable everything.
From the initial 3Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle, people have opted for recycling because it's the only one that does not actually require you to do much.
But the 3Rs are hierarchical, with the first one being the most important: reduce your waste output. Then: buy used instead of new, avoid single-use items.
You can start with a reusable shopping bag, mug, water bottle, bowl, utensils, cloth napkin.
Just to drive the point home, recycling bins are largely land-filled in the USA. They're only recycled if the municipality can strike a deal with private recycling contractors. Often they just say no, or ask to be paid to handle it. So off to the landfill.
This kind of dishonest dealing seems to be just absolutely everywhere. It is really depressing. How do you even fight it. It probably is all legal, but it is corrupt as hell and condemns everyone else to pay hugely for a small group’s gain. Maybe we can support 7bn people on this earth, but not this way.
(I'm also very nervous about "biodegradable" plastic which appears to break down granularly, but persists microscopically in the environment.)
As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store, the vast majority of the products we place in them are still wrapped in huge quantities of single-use plastic. While metal cans and glass jars are at least somewhat more recyclable/reusable, I'm not even sure we have a good replacement for the necessary evil of food-safe containers.
If someone more knowledgable than myself had suggestions on how to look for safer/greener plastic varieties, or general strategies to reduce their use, I'd love to hear them.