Something I don't fully understand is why single-use plastics are still in use. Every once in a while, a replacement is advertised, but still not used.
The reasons I can think of are:
1. cost - this could be an very simple reason;
2. conflictual requirement - the supposition that chemical indestructibility is what makes plastic at the same time necessary but problematic.
Because single use plastics are transformatively essentially for the entire modern way of life? Until we acknowledge that reality any solution will only sound hypocritical and be ineffective in the end.
The only real solution I see for plastic waste is just to incinerate it and try to build carbon capture plants to undo that fire.
>The only real solution I see for plastic waste is just to incinerate it and try to build carbon capture plants to undo that fire.
I am cool with incinerating and carbon capturing if the Petro-chemical manufacturers pay for it directly or indirectly. The Coca-Cola, Nestle, Procter & Gambles, Unilever etc. need to own up to their sustainability talk.
The externalization of the health and environmental plastic costs needs to stop.
> The only real solution I see for plastic waste is just to incinerate it and try to build carbon capture plants to undo that fire.
IF you can capture it in the first place. Litter is a huge problem, and it wouldn't be if the stuff just rotted naturally. Well, it'd still be a problem, but less of an ecological disaster.
I see steam pyrolysis followed by land filling to be the recycling method of last resort. It can recover at least few hundred gallons of oil for every ton of plastic.
What's to acknowledge? Paper bags work just as well, much of the products absolutely don't need that much plastic packaging, and people lived fine with reused glass bottles/jars (at least some countries still recycle that).
Anything that’s in liquid form is going to come in a plastic lined container at the minimum. Almost all meat products are wrapped in plastic and styrofoam. A good amount of produce as well. Are we going to forego all these conveniences?
> Something I don't fully understand is why single-use plastics are still in use.
Because it's not so simple to replace them in the supply chain, taking everything into account.
I am also not convinced that there really are better alternatives in term of pollution in all cases. I think analysing the pros and cons fully in the complete chain (e.g. from mining to disposal of waste) is also complex.
For instance: Is a thin and light plastic used once and incinerated in a state of the art facility (that might produce heat/electricity in the process) necessarily worse than re-useable glass that is much heavier, may require more energy to produce, and require energy and resources (including water) to re-use? (I take this example because there seems to be a revival of glass bottles and containers as a green alternative to plastic)
I don't think this is a simple question and it touches on many things including how energy is produced, whether plastic is produced from fossil fuels or not, etc.
Moreover, do we necessarily need an alternative to single-use plastics, or would different plastics (fully compostable, sustainably sourced, etc) fit the bill?
It seems to me that "let's ban all single-use plastics" is a simplistic approach in a world that likes simplistic "solutions".
In most of the world, bulk containers of grain equal insect infestation. If there is not enough turnover fast enough, there is also the potential for going stale, mold etc. So there is a need for packaging so the age and condition of a discreet quantity can be evaluated and if needed disposed of without infecting the total quantity.
In addition many plastic packages allow you to see the condition of the grains inside the package, and will maintain the inefrety of the packaging, not degrading when you store them in relatively easy to create dark and cool conditions.
I do hope there are other materials that can replace plastics, but they will be adopted more rapidly for grains, at least, when they can satisfy these needs at least. Stores won't have good reason to switch how they sell these things until they do.
> It seems like we were able to store grain without plastic container for a long period of time.
Bulk (industrial/commercial) storage is pretty much free of plastic from what (admittedly little I understand). However for quantities that people like you and I - normal people in non-industrial settings - this was not solved well before plastics or else plastics would not be in common use, mostly for the reasons I described above.
> My limited understanding is that plastic is more convenient and we’re used to this convenience at this point.
If by "convenient" you mean it makes it possible to measure and sell a given quantity without having to constantly expose the grain to insects and adverse environments, then yes, but that's not usually what I'd call convenient, it's an essential factor in how its distribution is managed.
I mean… we were moving grain around before the invention of plastic, no?
Let’s say around WW1 time. It’s post industrial revolution, but before plastic.
What’s wrong with glass? Painted glass if light is a issue.
Or metal can for unique use?
Heck. Terracotta or whatever that’s called in English worked for millenniums, no? It can seal good enough.
I know nothing about the subject. But I do like glass container a lot so that what I use at home.
I have large, medium and small ones. Some are dark for stuff that don’t like light.
I live in a place build on cockroaches, and they don’t get in.
But I kinda see your point in term of logistic / distribution…
But I persist : I think we became lazy. People could bring their empty container to the shop and fill them.
But… that’s a tiny use of plastic I guess ? That shit is so convenient and handy. We should use it for exceptional occasion rather than being that cheapo disposable material.
Edit :
Re: mesuring.
I’ve been to hippie shop where if you bring a outside container, they tar it before pouring the exact quantity of lentil / rice / whatever you decided to buy that day.
If you need 200g only you can. If you want 2kg, here you go.
Witch remind me: those big ol bag of the depresssion era for flour? They seems to work fine.
Same for the 5kg bag of rice in fabric you find in « ethnic » store
But by mass, the plastic bag is an incredibly small portion of your purchase. Plastic getting into the ocean is a valid concern, but beyond that, the rice bag is a pretty negligible concern compared to the rest of your lifestyle.
> For instance: Is a thin and light plastic used once and incinerated in a state of the art facility (that might produce heat/electricity in the process) necessarily worse than re-useable glass that is much heavier, may require more energy to produce, and require energy and resources (including water) to re-use?
I would also like to know the answer to this. In Germany certain glass and plastic bottles that work with the deposit system (Pfandsystem) are washed and refilled directly (up to 50 times for glass I think) rather than going through a more complicated recycling process. I would have to imagine this is better than manufacturing a plastic bottle and burning it? When I try to find comparisons for this online it's often comparing a recycling process in which the glass is broken down and remade. If anyone knows I'd love to learn more.
I don't remember exactly but I think it was a Quarks&Co waay back that compared glass bottles in the Pfandsystem with plastic ones and plastic ones that don't get reused IIRC. But don't quote me on that, try to find the episode :)
What I do remember is that it's not actually as clear cut as one might think. They also accounted for the fact that glass is much heavier and thus you need to use more gasoline to ship it around (from the bottle producer to the bottling plant, to the stores, to you, you bring it back to the store which ships it back to the bottling plant to wash and refill and so on. And then you can not reuse it indefinitely either. A hard plastic reusable coke bottle is much lighter and can be reused a lot of times in the same manner. I remember seeing a lot of them where you could tell from all the scratches and such. Especially on the bottom.
Related but not plastics: another probably Quarks&Co episode compared apples from Australia shipped to Germany vs. local apples. According to their calculations it was actually better for the enviro ment to ship fresh apples from Australia to Germany than to store local German apples and sell those at some point. Some point because of the amount of resources needed to store local apples in order for them to stay fresh that long. So at some point during spring/summer it starts being better to ship them from Australia.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I will check out those episodes. I have actually heard the thing about certain fruit and vegetables making more sense to buy from overseas than from cool storage. I guess ideally you only eat seasonal food but that leaves very little in the way of fruit and vegetables in German winter.
Especially since you nit only need cold storage. You also need to have a special atmosphere, not just regular air. That's not needed when you store your own apples over winter in cold storage because you don't need to keep them in saleable condition. But nobody buys apples that look like that, even if still totally edible and awesome for pie :)
Way less fresh stuff than we are used to nowadays, yes. But not too bad nutrient wise actually.
Germany being well suited to cabbage for example, making Sauerkraut both gives you lots of fibre and lots of vitamin C. It also stores so well that you can eat it well into the part of the year where you will have fresh veggies. It has lots of good bacteria that help your gut microbiome.
Carrots apparently store well in low tech ways too, like in wet sand preferably in a root cellar.
Most fruit nowadays are eaten for taste, not nutrients and/or people just live in the city so that the low tech ways just don't work any longer. Never mind not knowing about them either.
If you are looking for something else in this direction I totally don't remember the name and its probably 20 years old by now but I remember watching another show where they had a family live on an old farm like they would've more than 100 years ago (at that point). So they did make Sauerkraut for example. Multiple large crock pots full and all that. Not easy, not as nice as today. But what I've been thinking is that with just a tiny bit of modernisms but then also using this "old knowledge" we could all do way better for the environment. E.g. having sugar easily and cheaply available as well as lemons and pectin in packages and pressure bath pots is great. Makes awesome, safe to eat (botulism) jam from all this fruit.
Another great way in case you aren't doing it already: Rumpott. Big glazed clay pot that you start filling with with spirits such as rum and as things become available you put in things like strawberries, cherries, currants and/or plums. Not necessarily mainly used for preserving the fruit but awesome nonetheless around Xmas time (or any time during the cold months).
It's very simple. If I'm the owner a plastic factory not only will I fight any product that can potentially replace the product I make, but I will delude myself and pay to delude others into thinking the replacement product is inferior.
No system is perfect and one of the negative side effects of capitalism is that short term individual interests often overpower long term collective interests.
Short term is relative though. Is it short term relative to a couple years, a human lifetime, or the life times of generations?
Two good examples of industries that historically only looked at short term interests: Oil and Tobacco.
These companies fought and tried to change reality as we know it. They tried to spin a narrative that said global warming was fake or that cigarettes are healthy. The long term effects of global warming will ultimately harm everyone including the companies that make these lies. However, the detrimental short term effects arguably happen after the span of one or two human lifetimes, that's why it's hard for companies to see beyond this horizon.
What about nuclear power? The fallout from the waste spans generations. The price of building these plants now could be paid by our distant progeny.
> Yes they fought through the means of consumer choice, the least oppressive means in history. And they lost.
They lied and deliberately used biased scientific research. These execs even swore on oath IN a congressional hearing before congress that tobacco was healthy even when internal documents leaked by a whistleblower told the exact opposite. This is the new way to oppress people. Lies, deception, omission and obfuscation. It's insidious.
>Nuclear waste doesn't have fallout. Coal today is causing more radiation deaths than nuclear.
I should correct myself, Radiation. Not Fallout. Either way this is the current mantra followed by a minority of educated people who harp this endlessly. You're not wrong and you're more informed than most but you're not looking at the full picture.
There's no numbers on what this waste will do 24,000 from now. There's literally no data and no science on building structures that can encase that stuff for that long or even longer. Nobody knows. So in essence you don't know what will happen in the future. You have no clue yet you support it blindly, why?
That is my point. You don't know and you don't give a shit. The long term effects are irrelevant to you. 24,000 years in the future is not something anyone gives a shit about. Just like how the long term effects of making plastic are irrelevant to the owner of the plastic factory.
Additionally I would like to know your background. Sorry for getting personal, but background influences bias. You seem to be a guy who's super rich and an owner or shareholder of big business.
Hi, shadowlight! Your comment here is a bit out of place. HN is a nice place where folks come for interesting news and conversation. In order to keep this place civil there are guidelines in place, which you can find at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and review at your leisure.
I've included some here for your reference:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Except I'm not doing ANY of that. Your comment is deceptively insulting and your tone is overly polite and fake. Case in point: "Hi shadowlight!".
Look, I remained impartial and neutral and civil in my comment. Read it carefully there is no violation of the rules, I've been here longer than you for sure so I know the rules and I know what constitutes a violation. This is NOT it.
No seriously, it's like a murderer accusing a nun of killing somebody. There is absolutely NONE of what you are claiming is going on here. It's almost an outright lie, I'm curious if you're just biased or if you're a liar.
Additionally who are you? Are you impersonating an admin? You're obviously NOT dang.
It's not written in the law nor is it in the the HN rules but walking around and pretending you're a cop is sketchy and strange. Especially when you're not even remotely qualified to do the job AND you're executing the directive incorrectly.
I'll help you differentiate between snark and no snark. This reply has a bit of snark because I'm talking to a vigilante HN cop, the OTHER reply was completely impartial and civil. That is the difference.
Look in the link above, another example of this guy trying and failing (he literally got scolded by dang) to enforce the rules when he's not even part of authority. I suggest you back off and use the tools given to you to moderate. Use the karma. Get to 800 and you can vote me down if you disagree.
That is completely civil. It is just to the point and adamant rather than fake and simpish and overly polite. Whether what I stated is true or untrue, the nature of what I said was not derogatory or insulting.
I specifically stated that the person supports something, and in my opinion, blindly. I also stated he doesn't care about something and I ALSO implied most of the population of the world doesn't care EITHER. Those are words that are forceful But civil.
You are totally not comprehending the difference between civility and servitude. Learn to put force, power and truth behind your conviction while being civil and not being afraid to harm the other persons precious feelings.
>Calling them "precious" feelings sort of belies the idea that you're just talking facts in a forceful way.
Feelings shouldn't be precious. They should be disregarded. When communicating a point, if disdain is felt it should be presented. If it is not felt then it shouldn't be presented.
>If you struggle to separate your disdain for people who disagree with you then that's a chance to grow, or a chance to dig your heels in.
I hold disdain for certain people. But not for all people who disagree with me. Clearly what you're saying is completely false.
Growth to me is not the ability to separate disdain from disagreement. Growth is the ability to not hide your disdain. To express it when it's required.
To you I am not expressing disdain. You only perceive it as such because you disdain what I am saying. The reality is, I'm the same as you. I'm quite well off. The difference between us, is that I don't twist reality or morality to justify my sins.
I knew you were rich and well off, because I am rich and well off. Why would I disdain someone like me? The only difference between us is that I don't lie to myself.
> Sorry for getting personal, but background influences bias. You seem to be a guy who's super rich and an owner or shareholder of big business.
I'm not any of those things; my family grew up with our Dad maintaining 2 30-year-old cars to keep costs down. I would advise a) keeping any biases in check and b) realising that even if I were wealthy, that would in no way affect the relative safety issues between different power generation methods.
They are in check. I said you seem like a rich person. I didn't say you ARE rich. I would still wager a guess that although you grew up poor you currently are quite well off compared with your past.
What is influencing my reasoning is not bias. You support free market policies that encourage wealth inequality. This benefits those who are rich. Hence my guess is you must be rich because than this would benefit you.
It had nothing to do with power generation but more to do with how you're stating the corporate interests of companies like big tobacco/oil were fair because of "consumer choice."
That is a logical deduction of the situation to formulate hypothesis. It is not a hypothesis derived from bias.
> They are in check. I said you seem like a rich person. I didn't say you ARE rich. I would still wager a guess that although you grew up poor you currently are quite well off compared with your past.
>
> What is influencing my reasoning is not bias. You support free market policies that encourage wealth inequality.
The fact that your first guess is that free markets allowed me to lift myself out of poverty may mean you're more pro free market economies than you realise :)
I'm not against the free market. That's the problem with people like you. It's an either/or thing and you completely fail to see the nuance behind the issue. The free market is an example of a system with many upsides and many downsides. If I call out the many downsides you assume I'm against the free market.
Any normal person can literally see both. It's completely obvious that capitalism has upsides and downsides and currently the upsides out weigh the downsides. However normal people know that we have to keep the downsides in check.
The people who tend to be unaware of all of this are people how are rich because the policies that seek to temper the bad side of capitalism disproportionately effect rich people. That's the main issue with capitalism. Wealth is not distributed fairly, it concentrates in the hands of the few and those few using the money they gained use it to create lies about tobacco/oil and manipulate the public in ways a normal person never would. Hence policies are directed to temper the bad sides of capitalism; but it has limited affect because rich people themselves can influence public option and use their money to perpetuate policy in their favor as well.
How do men justify such evilness? Well of course he lies to himself saying he does no evil and that everything was a consumer choice. Hitler like all other evil men are unaware of how evil they are, these people need to rationalize their actions with excuses.
I'm willing to wager a second guess, in that whatever made you rationalize and justify the actions of Big Tobacco and Big Oil started in an action of your own doing that benefited you majorly. You needed to justify an action that you took of your own free will and that justification changed your view of the world such that it also validated the actions of Big Tobacco and Big Oil. That action or actions(s) is likely responsible for how well off you are today.
Whether the justification itself is valid is besides the point as our biases will likely never agree on that fact. But I'm sure we can agree that the event I mentioned above has happened to you, as no normal person supports this aspect of Big Tobacco or big oil, it literally takes some heavy introspection to reverse this logic and create an alternative world view.
Please don't pretend you're a serious, rational debater when you say things like this. You keep inventing things I must be and insulting them. You should be addressing the points made instead.
The topic of this conversation is two things. Free markets, and your background in relation to your opinion on free markets. If predictions I make about your character are wrong then just say it's wrong and tell me why.
Instead one of the first things you did was deflect. I said you were well off, you said when you were a kid you were not well off. I stayed on course and said that your past has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You are currently well off and that's why you have such opinions about the free market.
I highly doubt you'd support the free market policies you do now when you were poor. Likely you never thought about these policies until you became rich. That is my point. The whole point is that your wrong about the free market and evidence is that your foundations for supporting such a thing have more to do with your circumstance than it does with reality.
Defeating your argument involves getting personal because personal reasons are the foundations of your argument.
If I'm wrong it's easy to point out that I'm wrong. All you gotta do is tell me exactly the inflection point in which you developed this free market logic. Was it when you were poor or when you were rich? I'm simply saying they came about when you were rich.
Here in the NL, plastic bags are an extra charge (at least where I shop), it costs just a tiny bit extra to get nice reusable ones or bring your own - you can return most other single use plastics — like bottled water — and get your money back.
This alleviates #1 above, but I don’t think it would ever fly in the US. Here, grocery shopping is almost a daily experience in the city. You can’t walk 10 minutes without passing within shouting distance of a grocery store of some kind. You buy what you can carry or load on your bike. Bulk purchases get delivered.
In the US, I went shopping about once a week and loaded up on a trunk load of groceries at a time.
I don’t know if this is a product of many tiny stores, making it easy to walk/bike to a store; or a cultural one. But charging (and refunding on return) for these things would be a big step in stopping the use of them.
> This alleviates #1 above, but I don’t think it would ever fly in the US.
Both of these are already the case in many parts of the US. My home state had refunds on plastic/metal/glass containers for ages, and CA (for instance) has a statewide plastic bag fee that I believe passed in a public referendum years ago. This is still the exception both in the US and Europe, from what I can tell.
Looking at a full lifetime you need to reuse cloth bags thousands of times to break even on their higher impact. For sturdier plastic reusable bags you need to reuse them a few hundred times to break even.
I find it hard to believe that the environmental impact of one sturdier plastic bag is equivalent to hundreds of slightly flimsier bags.
I’ve shopped in a few European countries, and found the reusable plastic bags have maybe twice or three times the mass of the “non-reusable” one. I can’t see how they would have multiple orders of magnitude environment impact.
Maybe I'm quoting the wrong part of the video but he suggests you need to use the re-usable heavy bag six times not hundreds of times to equalise the environmental impact?
This looks about right to me - he's comparing with the very heaviest re-usable plastic bags which I could imagine have at least 6 times the mass of the single use bags.
I typically use the lighter re-usables plastic bags - unless I need to carry a lot of heavy stuff - which are maybe half the weight/thickness of the ones he uses for the comparison.
You're correct, it appears I was conflating reusable plastic with cotton canvas. The multiplier goes up for "Total environmental impact" - but 'only' to 54x on average.
> Here in the NL, plastic bags are an extra charge (at least where I shop), it costs just a tiny bit extra to get nice reusable ones or bring your own - you can return most other single use plastics — like bottled water — and get your money back.
It's the same in the UK at the supermarket, but then in the same shop I can buy a packet of chocolates in a plastic bag of their own, with each individual chocolate wrapped.
Same for other goods: I bought a new lamp, it came in a box with styrofoam, plastic wrapping around each individual component, a plastic cover over the plug, temporary plastic clips to hold the cable together.
The problem with bags is - let's call it the bachelor shopper. A modern man's clothes may have pockets, but he rarely wears any kind of handbag in which to hold the reusable shopping bag.
So it doesn't matter if they cost 1c, 10c or 1 eur - I am always buying new bags, have nowhere to put the bag when I am going outside. At least I also use them to throw away trash.
> A modern man's clothes may have pockets, but he rarely wears any kind of handbag in which to hold the reusable shopping bag
typical store-issued reusable shopping bags easily fold to pocket size, and bags that fold into convenient, integrated pocket-size holders are readilt available, too.
“I don’t have a way of carrying reusable bags” is a rationalization, not a reason.
> plastic bags are an extra charge (at least where I shop), it costs just a tiny bit extra to get nice reusable ones or bring your own - you can return most other single use plastics — like bottled water — and get your money back.
All of this is true of where I live in the US, though the 'return single use plastics for money' is fairly specific to beverage containers. And the single use plastic bags are banned outright. Most grocery stores provide paper bags, and charge a fee.
They probably need to bump the fee for bags a bit higher, though. We tried doing the reusable bag thing, but as of yet we haven't successfully built the habit of bringing old bags back to the store, so we just end up buying the paper bags every time. It's something like 5 cents a bag, which is so little that it doesn't inspire.
The plastics/oil industry mislead the public and government about how recyclable plastic is (it's not) to prevent legislation from passing which would reduce unnecessary plastics.
It has been at least a decade since the futility of plastic recycling has been known.
Any politician that tries to rectify the plastic situation will get voted out because people would experience a reduction in quality of life.
It is the same reason why the solution to reducing carbon emissions has not been enacted worldwide, which is increasing taxes on fossil fuels until consumption goes down (which would also solve the plastic issue).
But again, that will cause short term pain by having to consume less, such as not living in big houses/spread out suburbs, flying and driving to far flung vacations, using large personal vehicles, convenience and cheapness of plastic packaging, etc.
I do not think it would make a difference. Replace plastic recycling with the harms of carbon emissions, surely that has been known by sufficiently many people. When push comes to shove, sacrifices on a collective basis are hard to make. Especially when you can point to others that are not making them.
Oh yeah totally, I'm in agreement with the rest of your post.
It's just that in my personal experience most people are extremely ignorant of what can be recycled. They don't even read the flyer their local garbage company gives them. The state of the recycling bin in my apartment complex is an absolute disgrace.
Ever since I was a kid in the early 90s, I always wonder how it was possible that the logistics of recycling sorting could possibly work. How could recycling even happen if all this plastic needs to be sorted into 10 categories and then paper (but not greased paper) and metal and etc. Not only would the system have to account for people who made errors in sorting the recycling, but the system would have to account for the people who do not care to sort it.
So was the world was asking individuals to recycle, and was employing legions of people at the waste facility to double check all the recycling. But then why ask people to bother sorting in the first place? And how would it even be possible to double check and sort all that plastic? It just did not pass the smell test.
And then of course it finally came out that we were just packing it up and shipping it back to China where they did who knows what with it. Gave everyone in the US political points and plausible deniability.
Anyway, I consider recycling to be worth near zero. At this point, the only mitigation is reduce, then a far way down is reuse, and that is it.
Not to put down carbon emissions, but microplastic pollution is a much much much worse problem to have
I'd rather not eat a credit card every year.
And the sacrifice would be to have nice glass containers like we use to have? How is that even a sacrifice?
The fact that governments and the media talk only about carbon emission (without doing much, if I can add - they gave plenty of time to the oil titans to diversify their investments) and don't do anything for plastic is already telling you which industry owns your governments.
> And the sacrifice would be to have nice glass containers like we use to have? How is that even a sacrifice?
The sacrifice is less consumption, due to prices rising because costs of using glass containers is more. See how pissed off people in the US get when gas prices rise.
When gas prices rise, people have to cut back on all consumption, and that pisses off the voting population like nothing else.
>Especially when you can point to others that are not making them.
Each country is only responsible for x% of global emissions. The rest of the world is responsible for 100%-x%. As 100%-x% > 50% each country has to do nothing as the rest of the world is always the worse polluter.
What is this type of fallacy called? I see it all the time.
I do not see what the 50% threshold has to do with anything, nor why the idea of not sacrificing for the whole unless everyone else is sacrificing is a fallacy.
If US makes it so its residents cannot afford to go to Hawaii and Taihiti and Seychelles for their honeymoon, but China continues to allow their residents to go, then unless the people of the US are very selfless, I predict it is not going to well for the leaders of the US.
> Regulating emissions is so unpopular because it goes against financial interests of large companies.
You do not think the general public would be pissed off if they could no longer expect to live in detached single family homes on quarter acre lots and drive large personal vehicles?
It is enormously politically unpopular to let gas prices go up, and I do not see how one can blame large companies for that.
> You do not think the general public would be pissed off
This is a strawman and a false dichotomy often pushed by the industry:
1) choose between modern lifestyle and its ecosocial impact or go back to 1900. Other options cannot be discussed
2) make a mess (e.g. microplastics) and then blame/fine consumers for despite being overwhelmingly responsible for the decisions around industrial processes
I did not come to my conclusion due to “the industry”. I came to it from observing how people behave and what their expectations are. When people’s expectations are not met, it causes unhappiness.
I do not know any people with kids that would choose to live in apartments, or without cars. I would be surprised if there is anything more than a tiny minority (in the US) with kids that does not have a goal of living in a spacious home with backyards and garages in a nice school district.
These expectations are at odds with reducing carbon emissions. Companies being responsible for emissions is just a fiction of accounting. At the end of the day, I believe that a large portion of voters in USA would retaliate against a group of politicians that would make their lives more expensive under the guise of helping future generations and require them to give up large amounts of their quality of life.
However, it is also true that large companies get to disproportionately dump whatever feeble attempts at reducing consumption that do get enacted into consumers, such as water restrictions that affect individuals, but exempt the largest water consumers.
I guess my overall point is we need sufficient people to lower their quality of life expectations, and then that will propel the political will to make the necessary changes to force reductions in consumption.
> Companies being responsible for emissions is just a fiction of accounting.
Uh, you think Bob leaving the lights on in his house compares to operating a factory in terms of carbon emissions? I haven't seen the data and you aren't presenting any but my default assumption would definitely be that industry manufacturing and farming things at huge scale and pumping exhaust into the air by the ton is a way bigger factor than whether Bob drives a hybrid.
Also, before I studied material science (and therefore became an “expert”), I had heard that plastics are difficult to recycle in the mass media - as a teenager in the 90s. The information was there in a digestible form, but most ppl ignored it because it was easier to pretend that we were doing something with our blue bins.
I have clear recollections in undergrad (not mtls science) of throwing plastic into the garbage and getting lectured about it. And lecturing back that recycled plastic isn't really a thing.
Its been known since Flory Higgins back in the 1940s, and DeGennes completed the understanding in the 70s: the crux of the problem is melted plastics dont mix.
If anything in the last few decades methods for recycling plastic have been investigated fairly successfully. But they’re either expensive (sort plastic, return to feedstock), or have image problems (burn in thermal plants, turn into diesel).
Plastic is recyclable though. 3D printing guys do it all the time when they spin their own fiber out of left over junk.
And “made out of recyclable plastic” is a thing, and it works.
What isnt recyclable are mixed plastics, ie consumer plastic. But industrial users (ie folks who have large quantities of the same thing so sorting is cheap) can and do recycle plastic.
Most plastic can be recycled, but it costs more to do so and you get a worse end product than virgin plastic so it is generally not done.
This is why many municipalities maintain their recycling program despite the fact that most of the material ends up in the landfill. The hope is that in the future either virgin plastic will become so expensive that recycling makes sense, or someone will figure out a better way to recycle plastic and make it economically viable. They want to keep people in the habit of recycling.
However, the cost of recycling it is generally more than the reclaimed value of the material, especially for mixed recyclables.
So, we have to do one of two things: either subsidize the recycling of plastic (e.g.: tax plastic packaging, send tax money to subsidize conversion), or switch back to segregated bins (downside: consumers put less material in).
Many people have been spreading misinformation that plastic "isn't recyclable." This is not true. In California, 87% of beverage containers are recycled (thanks, bottle bill!).
British Columbia enacted an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) bill that taxes plastic packaging and uses the funds to centralize and subsidize conversion of material. This resulted in the most sophisticated sortation and recycling plant in North America, located in Delta, BC, where they use laser spectrum analysis to sort plastic, shred and grind it, use high speed cameras and air puffs to sort by color, and then convert it back to usable resin.
This resulted in a 56% recovery rate of all rigid plastics sold in BC. I would argue that 56% needs to improve - it would be good to get over 80% - but plastic has massive CO2 advantages over other materials, such as aluminum or glass, that are incredibly energy intensive, and anything with a 56% recycle rate blatantly disproves the idea that recycling is a myth.
However, without proper public-private partnerships and good regulation, it's very hard to get high recycle rates, and that plagues much of America and other provinces of Canada, where people then throw up their hands and claim it's impossible.
has anyone considered legislating a reduction in the types of plastic that can be used for packaging that would result in an easier time sorting? I.e. all bottles must be made of same thing?
A lot of bioplastics turn out not to be so green if you run a full lifecycle analysis.
Appart from that: Plastic has this somewhat unique property that nobody is really held responsible for its emissions, even in places where emissions are regulated. E.g. the chemical companies are usually only considered responsible for the emissions of their plants, while the bulk of emissions happens on landfills or in incinerators. Waste-to-Energy-Incinerators on the other hand are in many places even considered "green" energy, because they say we're only using waste that's already there.
Advocates could chart the eventual gains, improvements.
I understand there are costs involved. I'm ok with switchover costs, 1 step back before 2 steps forward.
The future of lithium ion batteries are a great example. Eventually, most material will be recycled, cell production will be carbon neutral, most conflict materials (akin to "blood diamond") will be phased out. I'm ok with temporary negative externalities to get us to that rosy future,
Maybe retailer requirements. Walgreens (for example) might require clamshell-type packaging for store displays.
I always wonder why it's used on things that don't need the benefits that plastic provides. For example, I just replaced my keyboard and the new one came in a box but the box was taped shut (single-use plastic) and the keyboard was in a bag (another single-use plastic).
Our society seems to associate such a packaging with the feeling of quality/freshness/whatever. The epitome of this may be on airplanes, where they repackage blankets into plastic bags for every flight (allegedly without even being washed.)
That seems really unlikely. It wouldn't take long to backfire and the negative PR would destroy what little profit was gained by not washing them. It's unlikely the airline is actually repacking anything, in any case. They almost certainly subcontract the cleaning to a laundry service, and that's who re-bags the cleaned blankets.
Plastic bags are such a red herring. They are not a problem in any place that has reasonably decent waste collection and inceneration. You can reuse all the plastic bags you want for the rest of your life, and it won't come close to saving the same amount of energy (or carbon or pollution or whatever metric) of skipping a single transatlanic flight. Or of owning a car. Or living in a stupidly big house.
Environmentalism is full of these pointless "little things" which people think add up to "a big thing", but don't. Tin foil. Cling film. Plastic bags. Paper towels. These are all convenient in daily life and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. This seriously detracts from the message of real environmentalism.
It's much easier to wag a finger at someone and tell them "you mustn't use plastic bags, they're bad for the environment!" than it is to tell them "don't go on vacation to Hawaii, flying is criminally wasteful".
The two great ocean plastic patches are hundreds of km large, and made of mostly plastic bags (polyethylene) and plastic containers (polypropylene) from household items. Not any kind of industrial source. It adds up pretty quickly when there are 8 billion of us.
I suspect you got it backwards here - the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight. But in the end these different types of environmental issues are not exclusive. You can reduce your plastic consumption and plane travel!
People waste time and energy discussing plastic bags. There are laws limiting the use of plastic bags. There "durable" alternatives which are more expensive (and which are inevitably even harder to decompose). Food gets turned into "green" plastic bags. Cotton bags require orders of magnitude more water and energy to produce. Politicians waste their energy debating this stuff, when they could be working on useful legislation to reduce emissions in a meaningful way. This is virtue signalling and is mostly useless.
Much of the plastic in the great garbage patches are fishing related. And the countries where there are laws regarding plastic bags are not the ones dumping them in the ocean. That's mostly the "developing world" (pardon that phrase, can't think of a less awful one). They're clearly not going to adopt "vegan spider silk" bags or any other "greener" alternative; they don't have the money.
> the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight
Nah. ~100% of the single-use plastics I use are incinerated and most of the embodied energy is recovered. I would say 100%, but I can't rule out a garbage truck crashing and losing a bit of cargo or sometihng.
How many more keyboards are damaged in transit with reduced packaging? Where on the packaging spectrum is the optimal value? Where reducing packaging further increases damages to the point that it's more wasteful than a bit of extra packaging? Why not aim for that optimum? Instead of token changes.
Cost is a big one because the external costs of plastics are not priced in. Plastic stuff is so cheap that people buy it for nothing more than a brief chuckle before disposing of it (see "secret santa" gifts, party stuff etc.)
Taxing it appropriately is hard. I've often thought about a simple blanket markup per piece of tat, raising the price of said piece of tat from amusing chuckle to stupid waste of money. But how do you distinguish a piece of tat from medical supplies, for example? I don't think anyone dare suggest taxing all plastic products.
Conceptually, taxing it is very easy. Increasing taxes on fossil fuels will flow down to all fossil fuel derivatives, including plastic. Politically impossible, though.
Just some napkin math, in the US we make 100 billion plastic bags a year out of 12 million barrels of oil. That breaks down to about 200 bags/gallon or .7 cents worth of oil per bag at current oil rates of $57/barrel. If you taxed oil at 10 times the value of the oil, a bag would increase to 7 cents. I'm still not blinking much at that price, it's a rounding error to me and now I have $35/gallon gasoline. It sounds like it's easy conceptually to tax our way out of gasoline, but I still don't think most people would blink at the cost increase to plastic items.
Now that you have $35/gallon gasoline, you will have to adjust your whole lifestyle to consume less. 7 cents might start mattering to you now that you are having to make trade offs to meet your budget.
It hasn't helped that people have lumped issues with plastic together with climate change just because they both involve oil. Plastics use relatively little oil compared to transportation, and unless they're burned the carbon isn't released.
Depends on how much you generalize these statements. Plastic manufacture and logistics scales better than almost everything, mostly because of its chemical resistance, which is fantastic for transport and storage, even when its useless to the end user.
One aspect many miss is that it does not matter if plastics can be recycled as long as it is used rather than dumped into landfill or rivers. Almost all consumer plastics, like most trash, can be profitably burned as fuel in almost all rich countries rather than being recycled. A typical example of this is the trashburning thermal plant in linköping which quite profitably heats the entire city while also providing power and not contaminating the environment beyond the co2 released. It takes a great deal of prefiltering, but it works and the plastics and organics which make up most garbage are good fuel. The additional CO2 released isn't great, but its worth remembering that while plastic in landfills do not contribute to global warming, the methane released by decaying biomass its mixed with both of which could have been burned is a hundred times worse per mass. So burning trash is better for the environment than dumping it in a landfill, and far better than dumping it in oceans or rivers. Burning collected garbage does not solve littering, but littering is insignificant compared to the amounts collected as garbage and then inappropriately disposed of. Inappropriately disposed of includes landfills where birds get to it and fly away with it btw.
This is so obvious and so ignored by the current debate it makes me wonder if someone is trying to point to single use plastics as a scapegoat for bad landfill and garbage management, rather than actually caring. You know, just like they successfully convinced people the problem was caused by individual littering, rather than poor garbage collection a few decades ago.
The unnecessary inclusion of 'spider' in the article makes the claim 'vegan' suspect. It's plant-based silk. There are many creatures that spin silk, no need to mention "spider-like" specifically.
Well, perhaps this is more similar to spider silk than other silks. I would like more detail on this point. But you can't expect too many details in a press release.
That, is one weird spider!
Thanks for that link.
I'm surprised the spider is found in Mexico. It's description sounds like something that should live in Australia.
I agree it's confusing in the title, but in context in the article it's more clear that the researchers call it "vegan spider silk" to capture their intention of creating a material with the properties of spider silk, using the same structure that makes spider silk strong at a molecular level, but using raw materials that can be sustainably derived from plants.
Vegan silk would not be a remotely novel invention (in fact the first synthetic silk was invented in 1904.) "Spider silk" denotes that this silk has superior strength compared to existing synthetic silks. Not sure what you find suspect here.
this comment is a knee jerk reaction, it's pretty obvious why it's appropriate, please make more of an effort (spider silk is associated to strenght, regular silk is weak & for appearance)
They can actually choose whether they want to be milked every morning.
One line leads to a tiny milking station. There, retired surgeons use designer nanopumps to relieve silk gland tensions. The spiders appreciate it and get a tiny block of tofu fly treat afterward.
The spiders who don't want to be milked that particular day can instead enjoy a relaxing day. They other like goes to the relaxation area, full of empty corners ready for cobwebbing and prismed sunbeams that emulate natural variances in brightness. When the surgeons are done with milking, they provide enrichment in the form of RF nanodrones, made from recycled cat toys, to stimulate web strands and act as nontoxic prey substitutes.
Unfortunately accidents do happen, since even the tiniest drone tends to be several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest spider volunteers. Sometimes they exhibit something more akin to a panic reaction than relaxation. Steps are taken to minimize these irregular adverse events, but a balance towards profitability must be enforced.
All in all, like with most vegan products, the quality is much lower but the price can be much higher. It all works out as long as nobody asks too many questions.
Seems to be a pattern with human thinking. Plenty of noble causes, some recent and very very public, get tarnished because of select bad actors. I don't know why but so many of us seem to look for reasons to say that X isn't a problem.
Whether or not i agree with (loud) vegans shouldn't affect the idea that our treatment of animals in large scale slaughter is abysmal. By nearly any measuring stick.
Why are we so prone to write off large, obvious movements? I see it so frequently.. yet i look for a reason to not hate the people that write-off, because it feels like so, so many.
It was meant in jest, but if you must take it seriously, my opinion is that veganism as a movement has largely been coopted by high-gloss, low-impact "plant based foods" marketing that follows all the aesthetics and few of the values of older movement. There isn't a measurable decrease in meat production or consumption, just a noted increase in overpriced prepackaged vegan food products.
I say that as a vegan of more than a decade. Its recent popularity is more indicative of successful marketing than consciousness raising. It's just another fad diet to folks, not a lifestyle change resulting in better livestock conditions.
I took it in jest. I just thought the spiders were eating what they normally do, but consenting to give us milk somehow, despite the fact they don't have nipples.
Could you describe what the values of the older movement are? I would have assumed them to fall under the umbrella of "don't consume animal products and reduce suffering when possible", which the new type of products still achieve.
I think it also likely that much of today's raising of consciousness - for veganism or otherwise - comes from successful marketing; is that inherently bad?
Lastly, two of the largest milk producers have filed for bankruptcy in the last few years, so there certainly seems to be some positive impact. Dairy is bad for humans and animals (and the environment!), and I'm very glad people are accepting that and making a change.
IMHO only -- I don't claim to be representative of any other planteater but myself -- it sought holistic, transformative change. Rather than just "eat less meat" (like Meatless Mondays, which is supposed to be a stepping stone), it was maybe more aligned with the Slow Food movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Food) in that it wanted people to think about how our food systems are connected to not just animal treatment (factory farms, tiny cages) but our communities, our economy, our politics, and ultimately our view of our place in the world (atop it, or within it). I'm not going to dive too deep into that because it would easily be an hours-long discussion, but suffice to say that it viewed animal suffering as the symptom of a systemic disease, the tip of a rotten iceberg, resulting from a disconnected and exploitative experience rooted in modern capitalism. It's not just about whether laying hens have enough space, but the workers behind them, the communities that host the farms, the politics that arise from urban-rural divides into food production vs consumption, agriculture as an economic sector and political force, and ultimately how we as a society treat not just animals but each other and the lands we occupy.
Fast forward to 2021, you have meat conglomerates like Tyson creating brands like Raised & Rooted, which sells nuggets that are half-chicken and half-plant. Ostensibly this decreases the need for as many chickens (or else they're producing only half-dead chickens), but it doesn't really work that way; AFAIK (and I admit I am not a market expert, just an interested bystander) their chicken production is still growing (https://craft.co/tyson-foods/metrics), and the Frankenuggets are just an additional snack item on top of their existing product lines. It supplements the cruelty, the icing on top of the torture, rather than seeking any sort of transformative change.
And by and large the market is headed more and more that way, towards industrial food conglomerates buying up or creating in-house vegan brands to add a greener sheen to their bloody enterprise, without actually changing the way they do business or the way they treat any vulnerable part of the system.
Veganism as its core was, in my opinion, about consuming LESS so that others may live more. Plant-based foods, as a health & diet craze, is more about supplementing your existing diet (and profit) with more manufactured products that ultimately come from the same industrial giants that made it all fucked up to begin with.
It's the difference between back-to-the-land whole-food farming/eating and Soylent, the vegan artificial meal drink.
But that's just my interpretation. Others are free to disagree.
Within that bigger context, though, are plant-based foods still a net improvement even if they don't drive transformative change? It's dubious to me. I think it encourages a mindset akin to recycling: "just do it, don't think about it" in that both are minimally impactful in and of themselves, but make people feel good that they're doing it. I forget the scholarly term for it but there's a body of research suggesting that if you can provide a small action for people to take to alleviate their guilt over something, they're less inclined to make bigger, transformative changes to their lives. Anybody can pick up a package of Frankenuggets and think they're doing the world a favor, and that's enough. But does it result in a net decrease in meat or dairy production? Not as far as I know, but if there is an analysis on this, I would love to be informed.
Regarding the dairy bankruptcy, actually I did not know that, and reading more (boston_clone↗
It seems what you may be recognizing is the delineation between veganism and a plant-based diet.
I consider veganism a philosophy that leads to inevitable action in the world, contrasted against a plant-based diet which is just that - flexible (e.g. those half-meat abominations, or blended cows milk with oat milk), not particularly rooted in selfless ideology/thought process, and excludes all the other ways that other beings could suffer from our consumption practices.
Your analogy to recycling I think is also spot on, especially in the context of plant-based diets - there's a fleeting feel-good thought of "I'm doing my part!" that falls apart under any serious scrutiny. Similarly, companies like Nestle adding plant-based options very squarely fit the definition of greenwashing, IMO.
To supplement my case that vegan replacements are the main disruptors to those industries, let us look no further than the incredible amount of recent lawsuits that attempt to limit how they're labelled, under the false pretense of "customers are getting confused!!1!" [0][1][2][3]
Thanks for sharing your perspective, and mad respect for how long you've been vegan - feel free to drop me a message if you're in the Austin area! There are plenty of hip, plant-based places to quietly criticize while sipping a beer.
(Sorry for the slow reply! Your response made me want to dwell on this some more before answering.) One, whatever my replies may be, I am by no means either a purist or an exemplar. I appreciate delicious foodlike products as much as anyone. I just wish it didn't stop there. But I'm also terrible at keeping up with purity. At the end of the day I usually just eat whatever I'm craving, usually mac and (shitty) cheese more than anything pure or whole.
Two, yes, I'd love to meet up in Austin at some point! I've heard good things about it and always wanted to visit. If I make it out there at some point I'll definitely hit you up.
Three, I have to admit I never thought about the First Amendment issues around this, with Schinner vs the meat industry lawyers as to what the word "dairy" means or "cow" or "burger". Miyoko's is (frankly) just aight, but that they're fighting the good fight means a lot. I have mad respect for the idealists.
What would your ideal world be like?
I used to think I knew the answer to that. As I got to know more people and animals, I'm no longer sure I do. Predator-prey gives way to primary producers and decomposers, with humans caught in the middle trying to oversimplify it all.
Our fatalistic flaw may not even be our selfishness, but our hedonism. We don't plan evil, we just act according to our (base) urges. 99% of us, anyway. We're doomed by genetics, not immorality.
Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Would love to hear your thoughts, here, or over a beer someday in Austin.
Those people just promise that they will reduce suffering it, but is fake advertising. This is the real problem.
Cherry picking the most outrageous cases and in denial about the real consequences of their actions. Releasing minks, for example, is increasing animal suffering, not decreasing it. Opening the chimp cages in a zoo leads not to the chimps being happy, it leads to chimps being shoot and dead, etc, etc...
But they are basically blind to anything excepts what it fits in the narrative. They just choose the next victim, collect the money, and move on.
How is it that this is waterproof and durable packaging material, but also easy to decompose at home? It seems to me on the surface that those two things are at odds with each other.
That was my question exactly. A big reason why plastics are useful are because they are so difficult to biodegrade, and can thus form a water, air and germ proof barrier.
They do specifically say single use plastics where I suppose a lot of applications are in food packaging. It just has to last significantly longer than the food spoilage time to be useful.
When this reaches manufacturing at scale I'll be interested until then this is like every other replacement single-use plastics or every other lithium ion battery new tech promo article.
Look I'm glad to see the new research improvements but these articles don't really do much in the real world except move the academic world partners forward a bit.
Why call it 'spider silk' instead of 'silkworm silk', though? Silkworms (1.) never have long hairy legs; (2.) never have the name Shelob; (3.) never crawl under your bedsheets at night and bite you.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadThe reasons I can think of are:
1. cost - this could be an very simple reason;
2. conflictual requirement - the supposition that chemical indestructibility is what makes plastic at the same time necessary but problematic.
Is there any other factor/complexity I'm missing?
The only real solution I see for plastic waste is just to incinerate it and try to build carbon capture plants to undo that fire.
I am cool with incinerating and carbon capturing if the Petro-chemical manufacturers pay for it directly or indirectly. The Coca-Cola, Nestle, Procter & Gambles, Unilever etc. need to own up to their sustainability talk.
The externalization of the health and environmental plastic costs needs to stop.
IF you can capture it in the first place. Litter is a huge problem, and it wouldn't be if the stuff just rotted naturally. Well, it'd still be a problem, but less of an ecological disaster.
I see steam pyrolysis followed by land filling to be the recycling method of last resort. It can recover at least few hundred gallons of oil for every ton of plastic.
This method was recently endorsed by Sir Attenborough: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/03/25/sir-dav...
https://youtu.be/3_fjEc4aQVk
Cellophane for example is "only" few times more expensive than PE (which is borderline free,) but that's more than enough to sway the industry.
Because it's not so simple to replace them in the supply chain, taking everything into account.
I am also not convinced that there really are better alternatives in term of pollution in all cases. I think analysing the pros and cons fully in the complete chain (e.g. from mining to disposal of waste) is also complex.
For instance: Is a thin and light plastic used once and incinerated in a state of the art facility (that might produce heat/electricity in the process) necessarily worse than re-useable glass that is much heavier, may require more energy to produce, and require energy and resources (including water) to re-use? (I take this example because there seems to be a revival of glass bottles and containers as a green alternative to plastic) I don't think this is a simple question and it touches on many things including how energy is produced, whether plastic is produced from fossil fuels or not, etc.
Moreover, do we necessarily need an alternative to single-use plastics, or would different plastics (fully compostable, sustainably sourced, etc) fit the bill?
It seems to me that "let's ban all single-use plastics" is a simplistic approach in a world that likes simplistic "solutions".
This is totally in necessary. It could be in a paper bag or even a bulk-bin.
I think banning the majority of single use packaging would go a long way at reducing our waste.
In addition many plastic packages allow you to see the condition of the grains inside the package, and will maintain the inefrety of the packaging, not degrading when you store them in relatively easy to create dark and cool conditions.
I do hope there are other materials that can replace plastics, but they will be adopted more rapidly for grains, at least, when they can satisfy these needs at least. Stores won't have good reason to switch how they sell these things until they do.
My limited understanding is that plastic is more convenient and we’re used to this convenience at this point.
Bulk (industrial/commercial) storage is pretty much free of plastic from what (admittedly little I understand). However for quantities that people like you and I - normal people in non-industrial settings - this was not solved well before plastics or else plastics would not be in common use, mostly for the reasons I described above.
> My limited understanding is that plastic is more convenient and we’re used to this convenience at this point.
If by "convenient" you mean it makes it possible to measure and sell a given quantity without having to constantly expose the grain to insects and adverse environments, then yes, but that's not usually what I'd call convenient, it's an essential factor in how its distribution is managed.
Let’s say around WW1 time. It’s post industrial revolution, but before plastic.
What’s wrong with glass? Painted glass if light is a issue.
Or metal can for unique use?
Heck. Terracotta or whatever that’s called in English worked for millenniums, no? It can seal good enough.
I know nothing about the subject. But I do like glass container a lot so that what I use at home.
I have large, medium and small ones. Some are dark for stuff that don’t like light.
I live in a place build on cockroaches, and they don’t get in.
But I kinda see your point in term of logistic / distribution…
But I persist : I think we became lazy. People could bring their empty container to the shop and fill them.
But… that’s a tiny use of plastic I guess ? That shit is so convenient and handy. We should use it for exceptional occasion rather than being that cheapo disposable material.
Edit : Re: mesuring. I’ve been to hippie shop where if you bring a outside container, they tar it before pouring the exact quantity of lentil / rice / whatever you decided to buy that day.
If you need 200g only you can. If you want 2kg, here you go.
Witch remind me: those big ol bag of the depresssion era for flour? They seems to work fine. Same for the 5kg bag of rice in fabric you find in « ethnic » store
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_weevil
I would also like to know the answer to this. In Germany certain glass and plastic bottles that work with the deposit system (Pfandsystem) are washed and refilled directly (up to 50 times for glass I think) rather than going through a more complicated recycling process. I would have to imagine this is better than manufacturing a plastic bottle and burning it? When I try to find comparisons for this online it's often comparing a recycling process in which the glass is broken down and remade. If anyone knows I'd love to learn more.
What I do remember is that it's not actually as clear cut as one might think. They also accounted for the fact that glass is much heavier and thus you need to use more gasoline to ship it around (from the bottle producer to the bottling plant, to the stores, to you, you bring it back to the store which ships it back to the bottling plant to wash and refill and so on. And then you can not reuse it indefinitely either. A hard plastic reusable coke bottle is much lighter and can be reused a lot of times in the same manner. I remember seeing a lot of them where you could tell from all the scratches and such. Especially on the bottom.
Related but not plastics: another probably Quarks&Co episode compared apples from Australia shipped to Germany vs. local apples. According to their calculations it was actually better for the enviro ment to ship fresh apples from Australia to Germany than to store local German apples and sell those at some point. Some point because of the amount of resources needed to store local apples in order for them to stay fresh that long. So at some point during spring/summer it starts being better to ship them from Australia.
Way less fresh stuff than we are used to nowadays, yes. But not too bad nutrient wise actually.
Germany being well suited to cabbage for example, making Sauerkraut both gives you lots of fibre and lots of vitamin C. It also stores so well that you can eat it well into the part of the year where you will have fresh veggies. It has lots of good bacteria that help your gut microbiome.
Carrots apparently store well in low tech ways too, like in wet sand preferably in a root cellar.
Most fruit nowadays are eaten for taste, not nutrients and/or people just live in the city so that the low tech ways just don't work any longer. Never mind not knowing about them either.
If you are looking for something else in this direction I totally don't remember the name and its probably 20 years old by now but I remember watching another show where they had a family live on an old farm like they would've more than 100 years ago (at that point). So they did make Sauerkraut for example. Multiple large crock pots full and all that. Not easy, not as nice as today. But what I've been thinking is that with just a tiny bit of modernisms but then also using this "old knowledge" we could all do way better for the environment. E.g. having sugar easily and cheaply available as well as lemons and pectin in packages and pressure bath pots is great. Makes awesome, safe to eat (botulism) jam from all this fruit.
Another great way in case you aren't doing it already: Rumpott. Big glazed clay pot that you start filling with with spirits such as rum and as things become available you put in things like strawberries, cherries, currants and/or plums. Not necessarily mainly used for preserving the fruit but awesome nonetheless around Xmas time (or any time during the cold months).
It's very simple. If I'm the owner a plastic factory not only will I fight any product that can potentially replace the product I make, but I will delude myself and pay to delude others into thinking the replacement product is inferior.
No system is perfect and one of the negative side effects of capitalism is that short term individual interests often overpower long term collective interests.
Two good examples of industries that historically only looked at short term interests: Oil and Tobacco.
These companies fought and tried to change reality as we know it. They tried to spin a narrative that said global warming was fake or that cigarettes are healthy. The long term effects of global warming will ultimately harm everyone including the companies that make these lies. However, the detrimental short term effects arguably happen after the span of one or two human lifetimes, that's why it's hard for companies to see beyond this horizon.
What about nuclear power? The fallout from the waste spans generations. The price of building these plants now could be paid by our distant progeny.
Nuclear waste doesn't have fallout. Coal today is causing more radiation deaths than nuclear.
They lied and deliberately used biased scientific research. These execs even swore on oath IN a congressional hearing before congress that tobacco was healthy even when internal documents leaked by a whistleblower told the exact opposite. This is the new way to oppress people. Lies, deception, omission and obfuscation. It's insidious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBaBJawnSY
>Nuclear waste doesn't have fallout. Coal today is causing more radiation deaths than nuclear.
I should correct myself, Radiation. Not Fallout. Either way this is the current mantra followed by a minority of educated people who harp this endlessly. You're not wrong and you're more informed than most but you're not looking at the full picture.
There's no numbers on what this waste will do 24,000 from now. There's literally no data and no science on building structures that can encase that stuff for that long or even longer. Nobody knows. So in essence you don't know what will happen in the future. You have no clue yet you support it blindly, why?
That is my point. You don't know and you don't give a shit. The long term effects are irrelevant to you. 24,000 years in the future is not something anyone gives a shit about. Just like how the long term effects of making plastic are irrelevant to the owner of the plastic factory.
Additionally I would like to know your background. Sorry for getting personal, but background influences bias. You seem to be a guy who's super rich and an owner or shareholder of big business.
I've included some here for your reference:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Look, I remained impartial and neutral and civil in my comment. Read it carefully there is no violation of the rules, I've been here longer than you for sure so I know the rules and I know what constitutes a violation. This is NOT it.
No seriously, it's like a murderer accusing a nun of killing somebody. There is absolutely NONE of what you are claiming is going on here. It's almost an outright lie, I'm curious if you're just biased or if you're a liar.
Additionally who are you? Are you impersonating an admin? You're obviously NOT dang.
It's not written in the law nor is it in the the HN rules but walking around and pretending you're a cop is sketchy and strange. Especially when you're not even remotely qualified to do the job AND you're executing the directive incorrectly.
I'll help you differentiate between snark and no snark. This reply has a bit of snark because I'm talking to a vigilante HN cop, the OTHER reply was completely impartial and civil. That is the difference.
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25162954
Look in the link above, another example of this guy trying and failing (he literally got scolded by dang) to enforce the rules when he's not even part of authority. I suggest you back off and use the tools given to you to moderate. Use the karma. Get to 800 and you can vote me down if you disagree.
> So in essence you don't know what will happen in the future. You have no clue yet you support it blindly, why?
>
> That is my point. You don't know and you don't give a shit. The long term effects are irrelevant to you.
I specifically stated that the person supports something, and in my opinion, blindly. I also stated he doesn't care about something and I ALSO implied most of the population of the world doesn't care EITHER. Those are words that are forceful But civil.
You are totally not comprehending the difference between civility and servitude. Learn to put force, power and truth behind your conviction while being civil and not being afraid to harm the other persons precious feelings.
Calling them "precious" feelings sort of belies the idea that you're just talking facts in a forceful way.
If you struggle to separate your disdain for people who disagree with you then that's a chance to grow, or a chance to dig your heels in.
Seems you've made your choice; hopefully one day you'll reverse it.
Feelings shouldn't be precious. They should be disregarded. When communicating a point, if disdain is felt it should be presented. If it is not felt then it shouldn't be presented.
>If you struggle to separate your disdain for people who disagree with you then that's a chance to grow, or a chance to dig your heels in.
I hold disdain for certain people. But not for all people who disagree with me. Clearly what you're saying is completely false.
Growth to me is not the ability to separate disdain from disagreement. Growth is the ability to not hide your disdain. To express it when it's required.
To you I am not expressing disdain. You only perceive it as such because you disdain what I am saying. The reality is, I'm the same as you. I'm quite well off. The difference between us, is that I don't twist reality or morality to justify my sins.
I knew you were rich and well off, because I am rich and well off. Why would I disdain someone like me? The only difference between us is that I don't lie to myself.
I'm not any of those things; my family grew up with our Dad maintaining 2 30-year-old cars to keep costs down. I would advise a) keeping any biases in check and b) realising that even if I were wealthy, that would in no way affect the relative safety issues between different power generation methods.
They are in check. I said you seem like a rich person. I didn't say you ARE rich. I would still wager a guess that although you grew up poor you currently are quite well off compared with your past.
What is influencing my reasoning is not bias. You support free market policies that encourage wealth inequality. This benefits those who are rich. Hence my guess is you must be rich because than this would benefit you.
It had nothing to do with power generation but more to do with how you're stating the corporate interests of companies like big tobacco/oil were fair because of "consumer choice."
That is a logical deduction of the situation to formulate hypothesis. It is not a hypothesis derived from bias.
>
> What is influencing my reasoning is not bias. You support free market policies that encourage wealth inequality.
The fact that your first guess is that free markets allowed me to lift myself out of poverty may mean you're more pro free market economies than you realise :)
Any normal person can literally see both. It's completely obvious that capitalism has upsides and downsides and currently the upsides out weigh the downsides. However normal people know that we have to keep the downsides in check.
The people who tend to be unaware of all of this are people how are rich because the policies that seek to temper the bad side of capitalism disproportionately effect rich people. That's the main issue with capitalism. Wealth is not distributed fairly, it concentrates in the hands of the few and those few using the money they gained use it to create lies about tobacco/oil and manipulate the public in ways a normal person never would. Hence policies are directed to temper the bad sides of capitalism; but it has limited affect because rich people themselves can influence public option and use their money to perpetuate policy in their favor as well.
How do men justify such evilness? Well of course he lies to himself saying he does no evil and that everything was a consumer choice. Hitler like all other evil men are unaware of how evil they are, these people need to rationalize their actions with excuses.
I'm willing to wager a second guess, in that whatever made you rationalize and justify the actions of Big Tobacco and Big Oil started in an action of your own doing that benefited you majorly. You needed to justify an action that you took of your own free will and that justification changed your view of the world such that it also validated the actions of Big Tobacco and Big Oil. That action or actions(s) is likely responsible for how well off you are today.
Whether the justification itself is valid is besides the point as our biases will likely never agree on that fact. But I'm sure we can agree that the event I mentioned above has happened to you, as no normal person supports this aspect of Big Tobacco or big oil, it literally takes some heavy introspection to reverse this logic and create an alternative world view.
Please don't pretend you're a serious, rational debater when you say things like this. You keep inventing things I must be and insulting them. You should be addressing the points made instead.
Instead one of the first things you did was deflect. I said you were well off, you said when you were a kid you were not well off. I stayed on course and said that your past has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You are currently well off and that's why you have such opinions about the free market.
I highly doubt you'd support the free market policies you do now when you were poor. Likely you never thought about these policies until you became rich. That is my point. The whole point is that your wrong about the free market and evidence is that your foundations for supporting such a thing have more to do with your circumstance than it does with reality.
Defeating your argument involves getting personal because personal reasons are the foundations of your argument.
If I'm wrong it's easy to point out that I'm wrong. All you gotta do is tell me exactly the inflection point in which you developed this free market logic. Was it when you were poor or when you were rich? I'm simply saying they came about when you were rich.
This alleviates #1 above, but I don’t think it would ever fly in the US. Here, grocery shopping is almost a daily experience in the city. You can’t walk 10 minutes without passing within shouting distance of a grocery store of some kind. You buy what you can carry or load on your bike. Bulk purchases get delivered.
In the US, I went shopping about once a week and loaded up on a trunk load of groceries at a time.
I don’t know if this is a product of many tiny stores, making it easy to walk/bike to a store; or a cultural one. But charging (and refunding on return) for these things would be a big step in stopping the use of them.
Both of these are already the case in many parts of the US. My home state had refunds on plastic/metal/glass containers for ages, and CA (for instance) has a statewide plastic bag fee that I believe passed in a public referendum years ago. This is still the exception both in the US and Europe, from what I can tell.
I find it hard to believe that the environmental impact of one sturdier plastic bag is equivalent to hundreds of slightly flimsier bags.
I’ve shopped in a few European countries, and found the reusable plastic bags have maybe twice or three times the mass of the “non-reusable” one. I can’t see how they would have multiple orders of magnitude environment impact.
This looks about right to me - he's comparing with the very heaviest re-usable plastic bags which I could imagine have at least 6 times the mass of the single use bags.
I typically use the lighter re-usables plastic bags - unless I need to carry a lot of heavy stuff - which are maybe half the weight/thickness of the ones he uses for the comparison.
It's the same in the UK at the supermarket, but then in the same shop I can buy a packet of chocolates in a plastic bag of their own, with each individual chocolate wrapped.
Same for other goods: I bought a new lamp, it came in a box with styrofoam, plastic wrapping around each individual component, a plastic cover over the plug, temporary plastic clips to hold the cable together.
The bastard material is just everywhere.
So it doesn't matter if they cost 1c, 10c or 1 eur - I am always buying new bags, have nowhere to put the bag when I am going outside. At least I also use them to throw away trash.
Fwiw, I throw a canvas bag in my pocket when I'm going to shop somewhere. And a lot of people carry backpacks anyway.
typical store-issued reusable shopping bags easily fold to pocket size, and bags that fold into convenient, integrated pocket-size holders are readilt available, too.
“I don’t have a way of carrying reusable bags” is a rationalization, not a reason.
All of this is true of where I live in the US, though the 'return single use plastics for money' is fairly specific to beverage containers. And the single use plastic bags are banned outright. Most grocery stores provide paper bags, and charge a fee.
They probably need to bump the fee for bags a bit higher, though. We tried doing the reusable bag thing, but as of yet we haven't successfully built the habit of bringing old bags back to the store, so we just end up buying the paper bags every time. It's something like 5 cents a bag, which is so little that it doesn't inspire.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Any politician that tries to rectify the plastic situation will get voted out because people would experience a reduction in quality of life.
It is the same reason why the solution to reducing carbon emissions has not been enacted worldwide, which is increasing taxes on fossil fuels until consumption goes down (which would also solve the plastic issue).
But again, that will cause short term pain by having to consume less, such as not living in big houses/spread out suburbs, flying and driving to far flung vacations, using large personal vehicles, convenience and cheapness of plastic packaging, etc.
To you. Not to the general population.
It's just that in my personal experience most people are extremely ignorant of what can be recycled. They don't even read the flyer their local garbage company gives them. The state of the recycling bin in my apartment complex is an absolute disgrace.
So was the world was asking individuals to recycle, and was employing legions of people at the waste facility to double check all the recycling. But then why ask people to bother sorting in the first place? And how would it even be possible to double check and sort all that plastic? It just did not pass the smell test.
And then of course it finally came out that we were just packing it up and shipping it back to China where they did who knows what with it. Gave everyone in the US political points and plausible deniability.
Anyway, I consider recycling to be worth near zero. At this point, the only mitigation is reduce, then a far way down is reuse, and that is it.
I'd rather not eat a credit card every year.
And the sacrifice would be to have nice glass containers like we use to have? How is that even a sacrifice?
The fact that governments and the media talk only about carbon emission (without doing much, if I can add - they gave plenty of time to the oil titans to diversify their investments) and don't do anything for plastic is already telling you which industry owns your governments.
The sacrifice is less consumption, due to prices rising because costs of using glass containers is more. See how pissed off people in the US get when gas prices rise.
When gas prices rise, people have to cut back on all consumption, and that pisses off the voting population like nothing else.
Each country is only responsible for x% of global emissions. The rest of the world is responsible for 100%-x%. As 100%-x% > 50% each country has to do nothing as the rest of the world is always the worse polluter.
What is this type of fallacy called? I see it all the time.
If US makes it so its residents cannot afford to go to Hawaii and Taihiti and Seychelles for their honeymoon, but China continues to allow their residents to go, then unless the people of the US are very selfless, I predict it is not going to well for the leaders of the US.
It is a prisoner’s dilemma, if anything.
Human societies have been signing agreement and treaties to access shared resources like bodies of water and grazing land for thousands of years.
There are millions of international laws around trade, transportation, safety, aeronautics down to the smallest details.
Regulating emissions is so unpopular because it goes against financial interests of large companies.
You do not think the general public would be pissed off if they could no longer expect to live in detached single family homes on quarter acre lots and drive large personal vehicles?
It is enormously politically unpopular to let gas prices go up, and I do not see how one can blame large companies for that.
This is a strawman and a false dichotomy often pushed by the industry:
1) choose between modern lifestyle and its ecosocial impact or go back to 1900. Other options cannot be discussed
2) make a mess (e.g. microplastics) and then blame/fine consumers for despite being overwhelmingly responsible for the decisions around industrial processes
e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
[as a side note, most people I know live in apartments, by choice. A lot of them have no car.]
I do not know any people with kids that would choose to live in apartments, or without cars. I would be surprised if there is anything more than a tiny minority (in the US) with kids that does not have a goal of living in a spacious home with backyards and garages in a nice school district.
These expectations are at odds with reducing carbon emissions. Companies being responsible for emissions is just a fiction of accounting. At the end of the day, I believe that a large portion of voters in USA would retaliate against a group of politicians that would make their lives more expensive under the guise of helping future generations and require them to give up large amounts of their quality of life.
However, it is also true that large companies get to disproportionately dump whatever feeble attempts at reducing consumption that do get enacted into consumers, such as water restrictions that affect individuals, but exempt the largest water consumers.
I guess my overall point is we need sufficient people to lower their quality of life expectations, and then that will propel the political will to make the necessary changes to force reductions in consumption.
Uh, you think Bob leaving the lights on in his house compares to operating a factory in terms of carbon emissions? I haven't seen the data and you aren't presenting any but my default assumption would definitely be that industry manufacturing and farming things at huge scale and pumping exhaust into the air by the ton is a way bigger factor than whether Bob drives a hybrid.
Also, before I studied material science (and therefore became an “expert”), I had heard that plastics are difficult to recycle in the mass media - as a teenager in the 90s. The information was there in a digestible form, but most ppl ignored it because it was easier to pretend that we were doing something with our blue bins.
I have clear recollections in undergrad (not mtls science) of throwing plastic into the garbage and getting lectured about it. And lecturing back that recycled plastic isn't really a thing.
Its been known since Flory Higgins back in the 1940s, and DeGennes completed the understanding in the 70s: the crux of the problem is melted plastics dont mix.
If anything in the last few decades methods for recycling plastic have been investigated fairly successfully. But they’re either expensive (sort plastic, return to feedstock), or have image problems (burn in thermal plants, turn into diesel).
And “made out of recyclable plastic” is a thing, and it works.
What isnt recyclable are mixed plastics, ie consumer plastic. But industrial users (ie folks who have large quantities of the same thing so sorting is cheap) can and do recycle plastic.
This is why many municipalities maintain their recycling program despite the fact that most of the material ends up in the landfill. The hope is that in the future either virgin plastic will become so expensive that recycling makes sense, or someone will figure out a better way to recycle plastic and make it economically viable. They want to keep people in the habit of recycling.
People underestimate the enormous lobbying and marketing power that comes with that.
However, the cost of recycling it is generally more than the reclaimed value of the material, especially for mixed recyclables.
So, we have to do one of two things: either subsidize the recycling of plastic (e.g.: tax plastic packaging, send tax money to subsidize conversion), or switch back to segregated bins (downside: consumers put less material in).
Many people have been spreading misinformation that plastic "isn't recyclable." This is not true. In California, 87% of beverage containers are recycled (thanks, bottle bill!).
British Columbia enacted an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) bill that taxes plastic packaging and uses the funds to centralize and subsidize conversion of material. This resulted in the most sophisticated sortation and recycling plant in North America, located in Delta, BC, where they use laser spectrum analysis to sort plastic, shred and grind it, use high speed cameras and air puffs to sort by color, and then convert it back to usable resin.
This resulted in a 56% recovery rate of all rigid plastics sold in BC. I would argue that 56% needs to improve - it would be good to get over 80% - but plastic has massive CO2 advantages over other materials, such as aluminum or glass, that are incredibly energy intensive, and anything with a 56% recycle rate blatantly disproves the idea that recycling is a myth.
However, without proper public-private partnerships and good regulation, it's very hard to get high recycle rates, and that plagues much of America and other provinces of Canada, where people then throw up their hands and claim it's impossible.
But thanks that was all very interesting.
Appart from that: Plastic has this somewhat unique property that nobody is really held responsible for its emissions, even in places where emissions are regulated. E.g. the chemical companies are usually only considered responsible for the emissions of their plants, while the bulk of emissions happens on landfills or in incinerators. Waste-to-Energy-Incinerators on the other hand are in many places even considered "green" energy, because they say we're only using waste that's already there.
I understand there are costs involved. I'm ok with switchover costs, 1 step back before 2 steps forward.
The future of lithium ion batteries are a great example. Eventually, most material will be recycled, cell production will be carbon neutral, most conflict materials (akin to "blood diamond") will be phased out. I'm ok with temporary negative externalities to get us to that rosy future,
I always wonder why it's used on things that don't need the benefits that plastic provides. For example, I just replaced my keyboard and the new one came in a box but the box was taped shut (single-use plastic) and the keyboard was in a bag (another single-use plastic).
That seems really unlikely. It wouldn't take long to backfire and the negative PR would destroy what little profit was gained by not washing them. It's unlikely the airline is actually repacking anything, in any case. They almost certainly subcontract the cleaning to a laundry service, and that's who re-bags the cleaned blankets.
Environmentalism is full of these pointless "little things" which people think add up to "a big thing", but don't. Tin foil. Cling film. Plastic bags. Paper towels. These are all convenient in daily life and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. This seriously detracts from the message of real environmentalism.
It's much easier to wag a finger at someone and tell them "you mustn't use plastic bags, they're bad for the environment!" than it is to tell them "don't go on vacation to Hawaii, flying is criminally wasteful".
I suspect you got it backwards here - the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight. But in the end these different types of environmental issues are not exclusive. You can reduce your plastic consumption and plane travel!
Much of the plastic in the great garbage patches are fishing related. And the countries where there are laws regarding plastic bags are not the ones dumping them in the ocean. That's mostly the "developing world" (pardon that phrase, can't think of a less awful one). They're clearly not going to adopt "vegan spider silk" bags or any other "greener" alternative; they don't have the money.
> the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight
Nah. ~100% of the single-use plastics I use are incinerated and most of the embodied energy is recovered. I would say 100%, but I can't rule out a garbage truck crashing and losing a bit of cargo or sometihng.
Taxing it appropriately is hard. I've often thought about a simple blanket markup per piece of tat, raising the price of said piece of tat from amusing chuckle to stupid waste of money. But how do you distinguish a piece of tat from medical supplies, for example? I don't think anyone dare suggest taxing all plastic products.
One aspect many miss is that it does not matter if plastics can be recycled as long as it is used rather than dumped into landfill or rivers. Almost all consumer plastics, like most trash, can be profitably burned as fuel in almost all rich countries rather than being recycled. A typical example of this is the trashburning thermal plant in linköping which quite profitably heats the entire city while also providing power and not contaminating the environment beyond the co2 released. It takes a great deal of prefiltering, but it works and the plastics and organics which make up most garbage are good fuel. The additional CO2 released isn't great, but its worth remembering that while plastic in landfills do not contribute to global warming, the methane released by decaying biomass its mixed with both of which could have been burned is a hundred times worse per mass. So burning trash is better for the environment than dumping it in a landfill, and far better than dumping it in oceans or rivers. Burning collected garbage does not solve littering, but littering is insignificant compared to the amounts collected as garbage and then inappropriately disposed of. Inappropriately disposed of includes landfills where birds get to it and fly away with it btw.
This is so obvious and so ignored by the current debate it makes me wonder if someone is trying to point to single use plastics as a scapegoat for bad landfill and garbage management, rather than actually caring. You know, just like they successfully convinced people the problem was caused by individual littering, rather than poor garbage collection a few decades ago.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagheera_kiplingi
One line leads to a tiny milking station. There, retired surgeons use designer nanopumps to relieve silk gland tensions. The spiders appreciate it and get a tiny block of tofu fly treat afterward.
The spiders who don't want to be milked that particular day can instead enjoy a relaxing day. They other like goes to the relaxation area, full of empty corners ready for cobwebbing and prismed sunbeams that emulate natural variances in brightness. When the surgeons are done with milking, they provide enrichment in the form of RF nanodrones, made from recycled cat toys, to stimulate web strands and act as nontoxic prey substitutes.
Unfortunately accidents do happen, since even the tiniest drone tends to be several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest spider volunteers. Sometimes they exhibit something more akin to a panic reaction than relaxation. Steps are taken to minimize these irregular adverse events, but a balance towards profitability must be enforced.
All in all, like with most vegan products, the quality is much lower but the price can be much higher. It all works out as long as nobody asks too many questions.
The last paragraph is ripe with ignorance, too.
What exactly were you trying to achieve with your comment?
Whether or not i agree with (loud) vegans shouldn't affect the idea that our treatment of animals in large scale slaughter is abysmal. By nearly any measuring stick.
Why are we so prone to write off large, obvious movements? I see it so frequently.. yet i look for a reason to not hate the people that write-off, because it feels like so, so many.
> Why are we so prone to write off large, obvious movements?
Every time ethics are involved some people can feel judged, feel guilty and project it into anger. Cynicism becomes an easy coping mechanism.
One example is people stating that they don't care about something. (If you don't care, why are you spending time saying it?)
Another is accusing entire crowds engaged in causes of being hypocritical or egotistical.
...then social media stepped in created a huge echo chamber.
I say that as a vegan of more than a decade. Its recent popularity is more indicative of successful marketing than consciousness raising. It's just another fad diet to folks, not a lifestyle change resulting in better livestock conditions.
I think it also likely that much of today's raising of consciousness - for veganism or otherwise - comes from successful marketing; is that inherently bad?
Lastly, two of the largest milk producers have filed for bankruptcy in the last few years, so there certainly seems to be some positive impact. Dairy is bad for humans and animals (and the environment!), and I'm very glad people are accepting that and making a change.
Fast forward to 2021, you have meat conglomerates like Tyson creating brands like Raised & Rooted, which sells nuggets that are half-chicken and half-plant. Ostensibly this decreases the need for as many chickens (or else they're producing only half-dead chickens), but it doesn't really work that way; AFAIK (and I admit I am not a market expert, just an interested bystander) their chicken production is still growing (https://craft.co/tyson-foods/metrics), and the Frankenuggets are just an additional snack item on top of their existing product lines. It supplements the cruelty, the icing on top of the torture, rather than seeking any sort of transformative change.
And by and large the market is headed more and more that way, towards industrial food conglomerates buying up or creating in-house vegan brands to add a greener sheen to their bloody enterprise, without actually changing the way they do business or the way they treat any vulnerable part of the system.
Veganism as its core was, in my opinion, about consuming LESS so that others may live more. Plant-based foods, as a health & diet craze, is more about supplementing your existing diet (and profit) with more manufactured products that ultimately come from the same industrial giants that made it all fucked up to begin with.
It's the difference between back-to-the-land whole-food farming/eating and Soylent, the vegan artificial meal drink.
But that's just my interpretation. Others are free to disagree.
Within that bigger context, though, are plant-based foods still a net improvement even if they don't drive transformative change? It's dubious to me. I think it encourages a mindset akin to recycling: "just do it, don't think about it" in that both are minimally impactful in and of themselves, but make people feel good that they're doing it. I forget the scholarly term for it but there's a body of research suggesting that if you can provide a small action for people to take to alleviate their guilt over something, they're less inclined to make bigger, transformative changes to their lives. Anybody can pick up a package of Frankenuggets and think they're doing the world a favor, and that's enough. But does it result in a net decrease in meat or dairy production? Not as far as I know, but if there is an analysis on this, I would love to be informed.
Regarding the dairy bankruptcy, actually I did not know that, and reading more ( boston_clone ↗ It seems what you may be recognizing is the delineation between veganism and a plant-based diet. unknown_error ↗ (Sorry for the slow reply! Your response made me want to dwell on this some more before answering.) One, whatever my replies may be, I am by no means either a purist or an exemplar. I appreciate delicious foodlike products as much as anyone. I just wish it didn't stop there. But I'm also terrible at keeping up with purity. At the end of the day I usually just eat whatever I'm craving, usually mac and (shitty) cheese more than anything pure or whole.
I consider veganism a philosophy that leads to inevitable action in the world, contrasted against a plant-based diet which is just that - flexible (e.g. those half-meat abominations, or blended cows milk with oat milk), not particularly rooted in selfless ideology/thought process, and excludes all the other ways that other beings could suffer from our consumption practices.
Your analogy to recycling I think is also spot on, especially in the context of plant-based diets - there's a fleeting feel-good thought of "I'm doing my part!" that falls apart under any serious scrutiny. Similarly, companies like Nestle adding plant-based options very squarely fit the definition of greenwashing, IMO.
To supplement my case that vegan replacements are the main disruptors to those industries, let us look no further than the incredible amount of recent lawsuits that attempt to limit how they're labelled, under the false pretense of "customers are getting confused!!1!" [0][1][2][3]
Thanks for sharing your perspective, and mad respect for how long you've been vegan - feel free to drop me a message if you're in the Austin area! There are plenty of hip, plant-based places to quietly criticize while sipping a beer.
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/robindschatz/2020/02/20/why-veg...
[1] - https://vegnews.com/2019/3/arkansas-outlaws-labeling-caulifl...
[2] - https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21507907/louisiana-veggie...
[3] - https://wholefoodsmagazine.com/grocery/news-grocery/oklahoma...
Two, yes, I'd love to meet up in Austin at some point! I've heard good things about it and always wanted to visit. If I make it out there at some point I'll definitely hit you up.
Three, I have to admit I never thought about the First Amendment issues around this, with Schinner vs the meat industry lawyers as to what the word "dairy" means or "cow" or "burger". Miyoko's is (frankly) just aight, but that they're fighting the good fight means a lot. I have mad respect for the idealists.
What would your ideal world be like?
I used to think I knew the answer to that. As I got to know more people and animals, I'm no longer sure I do. Predator-prey gives way to primary producers and decomposers, with humans caught in the middle trying to oversimplify it all.
Our fatalistic flaw may not even be our selfishness, but our hedonism. We don't plan evil, we just act according to our (base) urges. 99% of us, anyway. We're doomed by genetics, not immorality.
Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Would love to hear your thoughts, here, or over a beer someday in Austin.
Cherry picking the most outrageous cases and in denial about the real consequences of their actions. Releasing minks, for example, is increasing animal suffering, not decreasing it. Opening the chimp cages in a zoo leads not to the chimps being happy, it leads to chimps being shoot and dead, etc, etc...
But they are basically blind to anything excepts what it fits in the narrative. They just choose the next victim, collect the money, and move on.
Look I'm glad to see the new research improvements but these articles don't really do much in the real world except move the academic world partners forward a bit.