Yes? At this point, it's hopeless - plastics are expanding like never before, Shell expanding several new enormous factories right in the US. No politician is interested in stopping it either, since the lobbying industry for plastics is also going strong. The only legislation passed in modern time is against single-use plastics, which is just a tiny drop in the ocean (!!) of plastic.
And also, the clothes industry is massive and went from an already cheap source like cotton, to plastic.
Consider the forces here that push plastics - influensers, marketers and huge brands. It's hard to find consumers or manufacturers willing to pay several times more for the better alternative..
EDIT:
In the end, it's up to consumers. Personally, I'm using glass, it's infinitely re-usable. I use hemp clothes, it lasts many times longer and I don't own a car, I bike everywhere.
Not sure how the "it's to late to do anything about it" is supposed to contribute to this debate. It's also factually wrong. The production of new plastics could be drastically reduced through regulation of both the production itself and its use cases. Most food and drink containers could be made from non-plastic materials. I've built a house that uses maybe 5% of the plastic that is common in construction where I live. You could pull out the cables, window seals, roof cover and switches and basically leave the rest of the house to compost. The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics. There are a thousand ways to drastically improve this problem, fatalism only contributes to it.
> The government could mandate that producers of plastics must offer a convenient and financially attractive way to hand in old plastics.
We already have this. It's called trash can. How would letting the producers handle this instead would change anything? The plastic was still produced and will end up in a landfill or the ocean.
I couldn't speak for other brands, but Brother will give you a free shipping label so you can send your empty toner cartridge back to them. It's not charity, they want it back because they can reuse most of it in ways that a melt-and-remold style recycling scheme can't.
I see no reason the same couldn't be true of most packaging, in addition to things like TV's. If you built it, you ought to be uniquely positioned to recycle it.
In addition to trying to get consumers to change their habits we should also be fining/billing manufacturers when their stuff end up as litter or in a landfill. If they don't like it, they can redesign their processes to avoid it.
I think we should be subsidizing plastics that end up in landfill. It's the best place for it, as it's both safely contained and impractical to take out again, making it a reliable form of carbon sequestration.
That sounds like a fine idea to me, so long as the product was designed to end up there rather than it being the catch-all solution for anything whose maker didn't think ahead.
Why not pay people per kg to return plastics. We have a scheme in Germany where you get something like 30 cents per glass bottle that you return. Even people who don't care about this small sum leave their beer bottles in a convenient place for others to pick up as a result. Mandating a non-trivial payment per kg of plastics would create the incentives for people to not only throw stuff in the bin if they find it convenient, but also for others to collect plastic trash that nobody else feels responsible for.
Collect it for what? Glass is somewhat easily recyclable, most plastics are not. Even if it's collected with utmost care, it will be taken to a landfill, or "sent to China for recycling" (spilled in the ocean) or burned in a power plant - none of which is that great. Conversely, if it's thrown in the regular trash, it will probably end up in a landfill, which is probably right now the best solution for it.
This topic is about plastics getting into the environment in an uncontrolled manner being a huge problem. The first step to do something about this would be to make sure that you collect as much of the plastic currently in circulation as possible. Offering a financial reward for collection would be one way to achieve that.
If recycling is not an option, burning would at least solve the problem of microplastics, if a complete burn of these materials can be achieved. Controlled storage in a landfill would be another option, until there are better solutions to handle this type of trash.
My point was that there are some policy options to approach this problem and "all is lost" neither a constructive, nor factually correct point of view.
Plastic replacement isn’t like leaded gasoline or ozone-depleting substances where you had just a few applications to design alternatives for. It’s in fucking everything. Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously.
It’s going to take generations for it to be fixed, and it probably won’t happen until humans and other animals get much much sicker.
>Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously.
We can just go back to the material we used to use for shoes: leather. If there isn't enough cow skin for shoes for 8 billion people, we can just vastly increase the amount of cow farming we do. Oh wait...
Leather shoe soles have worse grip than plastic ones. Switching will increase the number of deaths and serious injuries from people slipping and falling on hard surfaces. Leather soles also wear out much faster.
Are you kidding me? Even if that were true there are probably 500 ways of making leather soles equally grippy to plastic soles that would either eliminate or drastically reduce the use of these materials. There are also other biodegradable alternatives to plastic that could be used. Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be. These are cheap excuses that are quite transparent in the attempt to justify simply changing nothing.
I'm talking about synthetic elastomer soles specifically, not the tops and sides of shoes. They last for decades and have excellent grip. There's no way to make leather soles anywhere close to as good.
That may be the case, but the last few pairs of "normal" shoes I bought had to be discarded after a year or so, not sure if the sole was still ok, but it didn't matter: they were done and because of their construction you couldn't fix them.
My last pair of quality leather shoes held up nicely for about three years and it's now relegated to construction and garden work. My current pair is spotless after two years. The soles on these are synthetic, but they degrade about as quickly as the tops. Not sure where you draw your experience from, they don't match with mine.
EDITED TO ADD: Of course quality shoes can be refurbished with new soles, so even if a leather sole would only last a couple of years, you could simply get a new sole slapped on.
If there some reasonable way to make leather soles grippy, it would have been done ages ago I think. Instead, back in the old days, leather shoes that needed grip were probably made with rubber soles.
>Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be.
True, but there's tradeoffs here. For hiking boots, for instance, some people swear by "sturdy" hand-made leather boots, but the problem with these is they're much heavier than modern boots made with synthetic materials. For a lot of hiking, you don't want heavy weights on your feet, and the shorter-life tradeoff is worth the performance improvement. I'm sure the same goes for most other sports. Just look at the shoes that professional athletes wear: they're probably plastic-based, and it's not because of cost, it's because it's better to have something that's as lightweight as possible and performs as well as possible, even if that means throwing them away after one competition.
The "good old way" of making leather soles grippy is nails, just to give one example. Even using synthetic materials instead of hobnails would reduce plastic consumption quite a bit for these use cases.
I've hiked quite a bit in various types of boots and yes, It's nice to have lighter shoes, but for most people most of the time a kg more or less won't make the damndest bit of difference. Only a fraction of all hikers are attempting trails under circumstances that require top-notch performance gear.
I guess you're a slow or easy hiker or something, because most people can immediately tell the difference between boots with a 1kg per-boot difference between them. I'm not even some kind of super-serious hiker, but I'm not going to choose boots that weigh double. Even walking around town that much weight would be annoying and tiring.
Anyway, I do agree about using synthetic material for the soles, and leather construction doesn't necessarily have to be super-heavy.
99% of people are „slow and easy“ hikers so I’m in good company (though I have hiked a couple of alpine long distance trails). We buy synthetic shoes because they are cheap, look flashy and are marketed on Instagram. I’m not saying that people don’t notice the difference, I’m saying it wouldn’t make a difference to their general quality of life if the affordable (or only) option would be a shoe made out of 95%-100% biodigradable materials. I don’t really care about the 0.1% of people who go to outer space or climb Mount Everest or the 1% who do competitive trail running. Let them wear all the “high performance” great they want/need. But the default option (due to price and convenience) for the rest of us should be something that does not pollute the environment for the next 1,000 years.
All the more we should start ASAP then. It’s too late to have zero adverse consequences but you’ve got to be a defeatist (who ironically is engaging in debate) to choose to do nothing.
Even if it is "too late" for this generation or the next generation or the next 5 generations that is not a reason to simply don't care and continue to make the problem worse. That is the kind of attitude that kept us from doing anything against climate change when it still was cheap to do so (just 15 years ago). I really wish people would start seeing these problems as a positive challenge that can help transform society for the better instead of just another opportunity to spread fatalism.
climate change can’t be prevented, it’s a natural oscillating cycle on a grand scale, but not making plastic is totally on us, though perhaps we will all freeze or boil long before drowning the ecosystem in plastic, there is some real bitter irony in being hopeful that nature can take us out before we do even more harm, if it can’t then I guess Earth will have proven itself not so resilient, but I suspect on a long enough timeline the Earth will absorb it all deep into the white hot swirling depths for refinement, climate change may end up being a big part of the solution
Man made (hint hint) climate change was first described more than 50 years ago and while the window of cheap opportunity arguably has closed by now, it could easily have been addressed without too much cost up until about the year 2000 or so and somewhat cheaply until about 2010. Most countries are now making concerted efforts to address it but now it costs a huge amount of money and we will experience some severe consequences nonetheless. Still better than doing nothing, which could render huge swathes of the globe uninhabitable for humans.
I'm not really worried about "the earth." The planet and nature will continue to exist and even if we fuck up the ecosystem we are dependent on and billions will die as a consequence, "nature" will simply continue to exist. Pretty insects and rainforests don't have an intrinsic value to me but I care about them deeply as the basis for human existence and prosperity.
if there really was such a clear and obvious and dire threat that could have been mitigated it likely would have been, but this theory has been repeatedly debunked by climate scientists, it’s just that many of us only hear one side of the story because our media (hint hint) has been captured by political interests that want convenient black/white fear mongering they can use to manipulate the flow of money and regulation to help them direct power and wealth toward their allies, interests, investments, etc
So you got climate science denial, a global media conspiracy, and shadowy political/business interests directing the fate of the world. Very original. I've worked in media. If there ever was a profession incapable of being part of a successful conspiracy with a world-wide coordinated agenda its journalists.
Also: on the one hand you believe in a worldwide conspiracy to suppress "the truth" but on the other hand you argue that climate change (the addressing of which is a threat to entrenched business interests) is not real because if it were, it would have been solved by now? I mean, do you realize how wacky you sound?
> The most remote, otherwise pristine environments
Microplastic pollution in the Himalayas
I have travelled a fair bit and I think the days of describing the Himalayas as remote | pristine are long past.
The area suffers from blow in micro plastics to be sure .. but as your linked article notes:
Additionally, Himalayan region draws many domestic and international tourists throughout the year, resulting in generation of massive and unmanageable volume of plastics wastes and finally ending up in the open landscapes covering forests, river streams and valley. Fragmentation of these plastic wastes can lead to microplastic formation and accumulation in the Himalayas.
The staging areas for an Everest ascent, for example, look like an open field rubbish dump with literal tonnes of waste that has been walked in and then abandoned.
Southern Ocean coasts and beaches are far more remote in terms of fewer feet on the ground, they, of course, have volumes of washed up micro plastics.
I’m curious to hear about what you did with the house (I’m thinking about building/renovating a house in a few years). Did you go DIY or hire a contractor? What were some of your replacements for plastics?
We basically built an all-wooden house: Timber posts and beams (not the flimsy sticks that are used commonly in construction in the US but solid 8" posts), interlocking OSB-boards on the inside for air tightness (this can also be achieved with other wood-based techniques, my house has an air tightness comparable to passive house construction), wood fibre insulation material (15+ inches on all sides and the roof), clay plastering on the inside (great for thermal mass).
The house is really air tight but moisture can get out through the walls easily without causing rot. There are thermal bridges. Window frames are from oak. We have a bit of plastics-based insulation around the foundation and the roof is covered with an oil-based-rubber, but that's about it except for smaller items like cable insulations, switches, etc.
We did some of the interior stuff DIY but the major parts of the construction were done by various contractors.
We chose wood fibre because we wanted the house's CO2 footprint to be as low as possible. We are slightly above passive house levels in terms of ongoing energy use (mostly because the house has an inefficient shape = not a cube) and we produce more kw/h from solar power each year than we use despite having a relatively inefficient electricity-based heating system. But we also wanted to reduce the CO2 emitted during construction and cement/concrete is really bad in that regard.
The wood fibre insulation has a fraction of the embodied energy/CO2 emissions of concrete and fossil fuel based insulation and it is fully compostable. I could theoretically also be reused if the house is demolished at some point, as it doesn't deteriorate if it stays dry (or is allowed to dry quickly after getting wet), though I think that would be unlikely to happen. Also, wood fibre is an excellent insulator against heat, which is nice given that our summers can get quite hot.
The wood-only construction also eliminates all thermal bridges, as wood is itself an insulator and the required fasteners are small diameter and do not reach through the entire wall.
A note on the contractor question: The basic construction of the house is quite simple (post and beam not too dissimilar to the German "Fachwerk") and given the right tools and location could be done completely DIY. Check out this YouTube channel for traditional wood framing techniques: https://www.youtube.com/@KrisHarbour Our contractors used a more modern design approach and metal fasteners but it is basically the same basic construction.
Professional contractors have professional equipment for this type of construction, though and can put it together really quickly. The basic framing of the house was constructed over a couple of months or so off site (with mostly two guys being involved, I think), transported in pieces to the build site and put together over the span of five days, including the roof construction. The insulation and OSB were added over the span of a few weeks.
No it's not. Please don't spread sinister pro industry falsities like this. Nothing has ever changed because of some symbolic drops in the ocean.
Regulation and collective action is the only thing that has ever worked, all personal lifestyle choices are romanticizations about personal effects that the industry loves because it has pushed responsibility to consumers, like much of the astroturfed recycling movement that is theatre hiding actual policy making.
If people want to do anything that makes any kind of actual difference they should get into anything that's anti the big industry lobbies or collective action and see through the jungle of astroturfing and "lifestyle signaling" greenwashing noise.
I point out in my post that it's hopeless, that huge forces are pushing for more plastic. What's left? Only consumers affecting the supply and demand - or tech.
Voters have a much higher chance of collectively modifying this behavior than consumers do. It's not easy, and the will doesn't seem to be there yet, but it's a hell of a lot easier to influence politicians than corporate conglomerates.
This is the exact wrong conclusion to draw. The only way we've ever solved issues like this (CFCs, lead paint, leaded gas, etc.) is on the supply side through regulation. Yes, it's challenging and there are forces resisting these efforts, but it's certainly possible and has been done before.
I was always a bit surprised to see these. At work, we used to have your classic Nespresso plasticy-cardboard coffee cups. They could be reused during the day, but you'd basically throw them away after a few uses.
Now we get some "eco" "compostable" ones. To my untrained eye, aside from the different color, they look and feel exactly the same. They even have a drawing on them that I interpret as "we kill turtles". Not sure how these can be considered "green". I'm also curious how healthy it is to drink a hot beverage out of them.
The eco cups are PLA. They are derived from a completely different source from the petrochemical plastics. While that doesn't on it's own make them completely safe, they likely have massively different properties from other plastics.
There are plastic rocks forming. Those aren't rocks with plastic melted on top of them. They are literally plastic rocks formed via the same processes alongside normal rocks. We could ban plastics tomorrow, and it wouldn't be enough. We've screwed over the entire Earth.
It's basically the same situation as lead. It's been spread all over the place and doesn't break down. Thank god we at least managed to stop adding to the problem though.
There are unfortunately still several sources of lead: solder, galvanized metal (something that gardeners and farmers use a lot!), cheap manufacturing, ammunition, airplane fuel, apparently still a lot of fishing equipment, and several other hobby and industrial sources.
One day we'll start having microorganisms that can break down plastics efficiently. It took a few million years for wood, so I'm not holding my breath until it happens, but it will almost certainly happen. So the worse that can happen to the Earth itself is it'll have a layer of plastic residue just like it had a layer of wood residue (coal) until we started digging it up.
Of course, as George Carlin used to say, the planet is fine: it's us that are fucked. We'll see how bad the effects of plastics on the long term really are, but if anyone suffers, it'll be us, not the planet or life on it in the long term.
People consider it a shocking or impossible policy to ban single use plastics, but future generations will look back on plastics the same way we do at lead paint or asbestos. We're poisoning ourselves and our planet.
Absolutely! Many think we are smarter than previous generations but just looking around and all the weird stuff we produce, I think we are just as stupid it will just take a few generations to realize it.
> future generations will look back on plastics the same way we do at lead paint or asbestos
Only if there is an alternative, which doesn't exist at the moment. And no, plastics are way less dangerous than lead point or asbestos, its main problem is its sheer quantity.
My city banned single use plastics ages ago. Plastic bags banned over a decade ago now. Plastic cutlery and containers banned in 2020. People freak out at the start and complain but no one cares and life continues on. Personally I bring my own bags to the supermarket since the paper ones are a bit annoying, but its trivial to just stuff one in my pocket before I leave.
>People freak out at the start and complain but no one cares and life continues on.
And what are we supposed to do against this, raise in arms?
In my country we have two big parties but they are in cahoots (practically have the same progressive opinions on everything) so we can't even vote to have these authoritarian policies removed. There obviously are other parties but it would take something big, or reaching a tipping point, to break this cycle. It's not as easy as "no one cares". Many of us care but are powerless.
Yeah, every place I look people that decided to replace single-use plastic either goes for plastic-coated paper or "reusable" plastic that is thrown away after use.
But are a big net loss for any reason you can have to the ban.
If you make an awareness campaign, people will replace a lot of it with glass, metal, or plastic that actually gets reused. But they keep using a lot of single-use things. If you out-right ban them, people go directly to what can out-right replace them, and it's always those things.
I liked what San Jose did and turned single-use items to request only. It's amazing how little changes like that can be so impactful, where we switch from default include to default ask.
Much of the 80's recycling movement was funded as greenwashing by the plastics industry. The lie was that plastic was a "closed cycle" and "infinitely reusable." In the late 90's/early 00's, "biodegradable plastic" was another lie.
We need to ban all materials that persist with poisonous degradation products. Most bottles should then transition back to glass or to enamel-lined (not BPA) cans. Glass persists for thousands of years but isn't much different from rock. There's no need to worry about glass pollution because fragments quickly weather.
thoughts and prayers for your bingo, but i consider myself part of the environment and thus object to suffering from more externalities of a technology that i consider partyly inferior (glass bottles are a lot heavier).
the argument that glass is better in terms of decomposition when littered stands, but does not tell the whole story. (not unlike guns are good for self defense but the externalities paint a totally different picture)
when you choose to deliberately expose yourself to vulnerability and walk barefoot, you take that responsibility onto yourself and can't blame others for what you stand on. the same would be true in nature
Presumably, you have eyes, and can easily avoid glass pollution. That's what I do when I go around barefoot. I've stepped in/on all kinds of nasty shit, but never on anything sharp.
If you don't have functioning eyes, I apologize, and imagine being blind and barefoot is a tricky combination.
Man, we’ve got to chill with the condescension on here (often guilty of it myself because I too am a stinker). Every time I’ve stepped on glass, it was a tiny sliver I couldn’t see which is why I stepped on it.
Its all still greenwashing. "You can save the world without even getting up from your chouch!" is the sales pitch of the day. I'm far from what you'd consider an environmentalist in the sense of the current vernacular and I have a ridiculously low carbon footprint (my electric bill 9 months out of the year is $2 a month to give you an idea) and very low rate of disposal of plastics. All it takes is a handful of lifestyle changes. It's not even hard.
One important note here is that one of the reasons we use plastic so much is because it is not biodegradable. Any material that would replace plastic packaging, for example, has to at least be less biodegradable than the contents itself. For food that's probably relatively easy, but less so for many other items.
This is an apathetic mindset and is part of the problem. "I can't do anything! The whole world has to change or it can't be done!" It's not healthy to disempower yourself with respect to your own life. I do it, so it can be done. Everyone will be different everyone has tolerances, but it can be done. People make the problem larger than life so that they have am excuse not to do anything. The only thing you can change is your own behavior.
I have similarly low electric bills for much of the year by way of solar panels and Powerwalls. The solar power is enough to power the whole house (with all electric HVAC & appliances, and no natural gas), charge the batteries, charge the car, and export the excess to the grid. Most nights the batteries supply enough power to make it through the night, even with the A/C or heat running intermittently. Only when the batteries are drained to their reserve limit do we have to import electricity from the grid, which we sometimes go for days without having to do.
Not who youre responding to (but probably who you thought you were responding to) but where I live is not Hawaii or the pacific northwest, it's not all roses. It gets hot and it gets cold, not Montana cold and not Arizona hot but still a bit extreme. And very, very humid.
There's always a reason to say you can't do it, but I do what I can and if it's important to you you can too. It's a change in habit and lifestyle, that's all. Live lighter and don't rely on comfort like you'll die without it.
> Live lighter and don't rely on comfort like you'll die without it.
While for some people it's a comfort issue there are lots of people that will literally die without cooling during heatwaves.
Besides that, you can't expect people to be productive (especially in jobs where you're supposed to make use of your brain) when they are slowly cooked in a hot office.
Brain work is the most privileged about working conditions, imagine how many kitchen workers would drop dead from hwat exhaustion if their managers weren't freezing them towels every summer.
Sure, I don't expect everyone to be like me. I know not everyone can.
But everyone lived without air conditioning for all of human history until about a hundred years ago. The number of people who will die without it is much less than you'd think, and there are ways to keep cool without it that people used when they build houses, public buildings etc before air conditioning.
If it costs me $20k to get the solar panels + battery set up and they're good for ~15-20 years, its not really a $2/mo power bill. Amortizing the $20k over 20 years that's still just under $84/mo for the hardware. If it only lasts me 15 years its ~$111/mo.
And that's assuming I had all the cash on hand at the time to install the system and didn't need to take out a loan. If I had to finance half of that ($10k), at 6% APR over that 20 years that's $71/mo for just the financed half and adding that $10k amortized is another $41.66 for a total of ~$112/mo.
It was way more than $20k, but I didn’t do it for the cost savings. If I remember right, the panels are warranted for 20 years and are supposed to last at least 25, and I think the batteries are guaranteed for 10 years.
The batteries are so expensive that they pretty much throw cost savings out the window, but it’s very nice having the added resilience to power outages, as well as knowing we can run the A/C and charge the car (especially at night) without causing our local utility to burn more coal.
I’m not under any delusions that my solar panels are going to save the world, but at the same time I think it’s important that we all do what we can while we expend our efforts in other ways too (voting, petitioning local governments and utilities to allow and incentivize more solar, etc.) that will have a much bigger effect if successful. I also like setting an example for the people around me. Since adding solar, we’ve had several neighbors and family members ask about it, and two so far have added solar themselves. I of course don’t know, but I like to think I may have at least nudged them in the right direction when they decided to add solar to their own houses.
In the winter, spring and fall I use no air conditioning and basically my electric bill is my laptop, phone charging, lighting and a little $200 fridge from home depot. In the summer for the hottest 3 months of the year I will use air conditioning, not central but a small low space unit and that runs me about 40 bucks a month. In the winter I run a couple of little space heaters and that usually runs me about 20 bucks. If I use gas instead of those it runs me about 40 bucks a month average in gas.
I use no solar or anything like that, but I do intend to, if I want to continue living light like this I would be able to do it all on modest solar.
It doesn't hurt that I live near the ocean, and in a pretty small space (albeit not well insulated at all; I prefer to spend my time outdoors so the space is for sleeping and showering and cooking and what not) so summers are not as extreme and winters too, but it does get hot/cold enough that I need something for the extreme parts of the year.
I answered it above, but I almost always cook at home. I use gas though, so maybe not fair comparison since heating elements draw a lot of power. Through 9 months out of the year I probably use $50 worth of gas strictly for cooking, so still lower in cost in the end than you're doing, but I'd say if you're cooking on an induction stove and living in a larger space than me you're doing pretty good at €20 a month. You could probably do a little better, I don't know if you have a TV or a desktop PC or a lot of little electronics plugged in taking phantom draw (I have none of those things), or what your electric rates are, how big of a refrigerator you have, etc. €20 is really good for almost anyone.
Don't buy bottled water, don't use disposable grocery bags, buy things in glass over plastic containers, and cook your own food. Those small changes alone will reduce your plastic disposal by like 90%.
Won't it also kill you if you put something acidic in the bottle? Like water with a spritz of lemon? That's why copper pots have a lining, anyway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdigris
Yup, and although correct about coppers antimicrobial effect it only kills bacteria on contact. So I suspect a majority of any bacterial contamination in the water, will never come in close enough contact with the copper walls for it to have any real effect.
Water bottles, if not cleaned properly with a soap and brush on the inside, will be coated with a bacterial "lawn". Copper prevents that. Lots of bacteria need such a lawn to propagate, only some can multiply without a substrate. So even if the "free" water part won't be desinfected, copper has an overall positive effect on the bacterial content of your drinking water.
As someone who washes my (steel) water bottle at most 1x a week, and drinks ~10-14L of water a week, I've never gotten sick from drinking out of my bottle before.
You can usually tell if the water in your bottle is going bad / filled w bacteria..
No. I was just explaining why copper is better in that regard, not that I would personally care that much. I do prefer stainless steel, because it is more robust, dishwasher-safe and cheaper.
Everybody uses glass for water even if it does not kill bacteria. Shouldn't be the main factor to choose one over other. People must filter their drinking water and remove the pathogens before filling their bottle in any case.
If this is not possible, take in mind that your immune system can take care about bacteria. In 99% of the cases after a learning period, local bacteria will stop being a problem. Unless your live in areas with very unsafe water sources or particularly dangerous organisms this shouldn't be a main factor in the choice.
> Is it safe to drink water from copper bottle everyday?
> If you have been drinking water that has been constantly stored in copper bottle or vessel, chances are high that you might be at the risk of copper toxicity. It can cause severe nausea, dizziness, abdominal pain and can result in liver and kidney failure.
No thank you. I get the struggle to not use plastics, I try to avoid it myself too (especially buying water in plastic bottles in shops is something I never do), but alternatives are subpar, either very heavy, fragile and overall impractical for outdoor sports (ie glass), or some other issues. What happened to stainless steel? Heavy but at least should be inert and nearly indestructible, no? I mean those without some crap BPA lining inside, like thermos but single walled.
Nothing happened to stainless steel bottles, they're available. About twice as heavy as a plastic bottle, when empty that is. Full it's more like 900g vs 750g.
I stopped using plastic bottle because it tends to accumulate biological matter or whatever, and a smell / bad taste builds up over time.
I switched to stainless steel and couldn't be happier. Decathlon stores in europe sell very good stainless steel bottler for different size.
I'm like you, just adding a bike (found in garbage), foraging (figs, medlars persimmons, oranges, lemons), collecting food at the end of garbage (lots of waste), no fridge, no hot water, no A/C or heating, €10/mo electricity bill
I think my two pieces of luxury technology I use are my laptop and by Fridge. Being able to preserve food without 'preservation techniques' is just so dang handy!
>There are lots of "grey water" uses that don't require drinkable water, like watering plants, flushing toilets.
Yes. I've heard/read grey mentioned many times in permaculture articles.
I like the fact that permaculture takes a systems or holistic approach.
Another nice, small but useful example of permaculture design is the concept of guilds, when it comes to planting crops around a house.
They plant by category, in concentric bands called guilds, with the guild nearest to the house having most commonly used plants such as herbs, then vegetables, then grains, then fruit trees, etc.
So you have to walk less to tend to or harvest them.
Edit: I may have used the term "guild" incorrectly.
The Wikipedia article on permaculture uses it differently, under the section "Guilds".
Yeah you're talking about zones. Zones refer to the intensity of maintenance / how often you'll be harvesting from them. Zone 1 around the house is most frequent - zone 5 is way in the jungle where you harvest wild guavas once a year.
Guilds are about companion planting - they're combination of plants that form a small ecosystem where they provide benefit to each other. E.g. comfrey is often used around fruit trees to break up subsoil (it has very long taproots, to 10 feet or so), and as a prolific mulch producer (cut it back every couple months, and chop and drop the leaves in place). Nitrogen fixing plants are common, as a way of providing nutrients. Etc.
>> 5. Collect rain water and/or use less water
>
> Not sure about that -- With modern pollution rain water is not likely to be safe to drink (depends on your location)
Water availability is also very different from country to country, region to region, and even town to town. How your water usage affects the environment depends on so many things.
I collect rain water but use it on the veggie garden. So either it is safer because I ma not drinking it directly OR it is worse because the planet are bio-accumulating it. I don't know.
I guess not for drinking. OP is planting trees, so assumably has land where some kind of forestry/agriculture is in being carried out. That needs quite some water. (eg. freshly planted trees need irrigation to have a fair chance of survival)
Also washing, showering can be done with rainwater if you are really a minimalist.
You shouldn't be washing your car in the driveway. Even if you use environmentally friendly soap, or no soap, the water coming of the car isn't exactly clean.
Professional car wash places are required (depending on location) to collect and dispose of their waste water in a safe way. When you wash the car in the driveway, the waste water will either go into the ground or the storm drains, neither of which will ensure that the waster is cleaned before reentering the environment.
I solved this problem in minimalist way - I wash my car maybe twice a year. It sits in my driveway in rain anyway because my garage is waiting for some spare time so that I can finally reuse all that pallets I collected since last year (mostly clean pallets I've already made some nice yard furniture for myself and family, all those pallets already have planned use but I don't have enough time).
You said "mostly clean" and I assumed that this was about dirt and debris, and the stuff they're treated with is not visible. There is a stamp on the side which shows how they have been treated, though.
For moving around town i just walk, maybe sometimes I use my 20yr old bike. My car is used only to travel from my town to nearest city, because it takes 3x more time to go with bus->train->taxi to where I need to go and is a little more expensive. Then it sits idle 5 days. It's more like 1.2tons and is not that guzzling, 7L/100km. Diesel or hybrid would be guzzling even less, but they break more and/or are more expensive. I'm not a eco freak, I do what I can, but some people really do need to own some transport. In Poland, if I see someone with a big pickup, it typically means he actually DO uses it to pick up various things otherwise it would be too inconvenient to own such a big car.
Yup, I worked at a car wash and the water coming off of cars is absolutely disgusting. Had to wear some sort of hazmat type suit to clean the trench as we called it.
We're gonna preserve our quality of life one exception at a time all the way to societal collapse, it seems. How much quality of life can we have when billions are on the move due to heat dead zones, collapsing one government after another?
At my parents' house rain water was collected in a well and that was used for things like flushing toilets and watering plants. This was already in place 30+ years ago mainly cause it's "free water" (apart from the cost of building the well and the pump)
Over here, your water bill has 2 components, the price of the fresh water and the price of the waste water. Waste water is at least as expensive per m³ as fresh water, sometimes more than double. If you are using rain water, you save on the fresh water price, but you have to still pay for the waste water. And since waste water price is calculated from your fresh water consumption, you either have to have a second meter for the rain water (expensive) or you pay for an estimated amount of rainwater calculated from the roof area you are collecting from. Also very expensive, because the estimate is always not in your favour.
So not really "free" at all, and rather expensive enough that nobody does it...
This also depends a lot on your locality. If you live in an area where septic tanks are allowed you don't have to pay for city sewer usage.
You can also skip that entirely with a composting toilet. Again depending on your local laws, gray water can often be drained directly outside, potentially through a leech field if required. Plenty of areas allow this for specific uses like washing machines, the only reason it can't be done with standard toilets is because of the solid waste.
Not OP, but ag land can be under €10,000 an acre (well under in some places) which puts it in the "pricey but not unobtainable for the serious tree-planting enthusiast" category.
Putting a seed somewhere has a pretty low chance of producing a tree some years on. Conditions need to be good enough, and there's fierce competition in the plant world, as well as animals and lawn mowers that curb growth.
Which is why I asked, what OP actually did.
I know folks who have planted trees on public land and on land owned by corporations, which seems cool but also kinda stressful.
A bit less minimalistic: ride your (non e-) bike, scooter, skateboard, kayak, sled, basically anything non motorized. Use best tire quality so you don’t change then often.
A bite more minimalistic: prefer walking barefoot anytime you can. Shoes are tire that wear out.
King of related: still looking for shoe/soles that last. My grand mother used to wear wood clogs, not sure where to find some that fits me.
How are you going to transport heavy goods without some kind of motorized or motor-assist vehicle? Unless you want to keep horses or donkeys.
Ebikes are a godsend. Without one I'd have to get things delivered by van.
This is the problem with environmentalism-as-actually-practiced -- the conversation starts with plastic pollution, you look away for five seconds, and suddenly there are a bunch of ascetics one-upping each other in the "LARP as a third-world peasant" game. There is no social defense mechanism against it. Normal people look at this and think "no thanks". It's all about focus on minimizing downside and (implicitly) self-flagellation for the sin of living in a rich country; there is no focus on things with upside potential, like "how do we increase the supply of clean energy so we can have cheap material abundance".
I don't want to live in squalor. I want to enjoy a hot shower of crystal clear desalinated water, heated by electricity made in the searing heart of a nuclear reactor, and it all costs a fraction of a penny to run.
I want to live in the same world as you but we’re not here yet! Our best way to get there is to use our current tech and ressources as they are precious while keep on advancing tech, instead of using those ressources to build the maximum throwable stuff we can and disperse the waste.
It’s not about copying thinks third world but about health, resource management and public space enjoyability.
I want to make a case for the e-bikes: they are less strenuous than the traditional bikes but require a good degree of cardiovascular exercise. This is a good incentive for older people
For shoes, due to my health they get limited use and I can't really tell how durable they are but my first pair of Ahinsa shoes has lasted a couple of years without much wear. Not minimal in that they use high-tech ingredients (and are made on the other side of the world from me :/ ) but very nice shoes that seem likely to be reasonably durable (the thin sole takes some adjustment if you aren't used to it) and are produced in the EU (less labor exploitation than many places).
Gobi boots from VivoBarefoot are my favorite. Re-used ones are available at revivo.com, and I've worn each pair continuously for 3 years: working, hiking, sun, rain, etc.
I have a pair of ENIX Sandals I bought 6 years ago that I wear when it's really hot. They're also great.
It does not seem that easy and does not seem that important to be honest. Donating 100 dollars monthly to sensible causes seems more beneficial than all combined and easier for lots of people.
3. 4. 5. 4. are barely positive if positive at all (considering environment, some are definitely healthy)
Preferring walking is a big one, definitely worth more than “donating“.
For most, it would require living in a smaller space, in a more urban area and is probably the most people can do to reduce that impact on the environment.
The energy spend that comes from living in detached single family home that multiplies all the distances mass has to travel back and forth from that home (and subsequent homes) dwarfs everything else.
Walking is healthy and often is a signal that you live in a walkable place. Living in walkable place (concept similar to lately popular 15-minute cities) is important from environment perspective.
But, for example, preferring walking to more energy efficient cycling means you need more calories => eat more => affect environment more.
Very often living healthy is at odds with being environment friendly. I do not say you should live unhealthy but lets not confuse those two things.
I feel the same way. One private jet flight would take 100+ years of OP’s “minimalism” lifestyle to be carbon neutral. Want to know how many private jet flights left the Super Bowl in 2023?
And that’s just one event.
Being politically active and pushing for a carbon tax would do far more than any amount of individual lifestyle choices.
Sure, for walkable destinations. Having a bike is more efficient (calories per mile) and hugely increases the practical range. Commuting, even grocery shopping, and being social is hugely more practical on a bike then walking.
8 -> copper is toxic. People with some genetic traits will suffer cirrhosis and shouldn't use it for water storage. Cooking on copper pots specially should be avoided. Iron and Aluminum are safer.
Here's what I want to know, has anyone done any studies on what happens when sugars enter the penis? Is it better or worse than drinking the beverage? OP might be well advised to avoid fucking his beverages.
You should reevaluate what you consider common. Schizophrenia, a condition you probably rarely witness in every day life, is around 1 in 100. You don't interact with 30,000 people even over the course of a year.
I assume that the list from less toxic to more toxic is:
silica -> iron -> aluminum -> copper
With a logarithmic scale unit between each step or so. We ingest and tolerate much more aluminum than copper in our daily journey and we could drink water with much more iron oxide dissolved on it than aluminum oxide without suffering permanent problems
Titanium in perfectly pure form is very reactive and it would be dangerous in contact with organic matter.
Fortunately, it is pretty much impossible to come in contact with pure titanium, because whenever it is exposed to air it becomes immediately covered with titanium dioxide.
The ratio between electric charge and radius of the titanium ions is such that titanium dioxide is one of the least soluble oxides. It is practically inert in water or blood.
This inertness of the titanium dioxide ensures that titanium is one of the safest materials for making implants that will have to stay forever in a human body or for making objects that will be in contact with food.
While glass remains the best food-contact material, titanium is a decent choice for applications where glass might break, e.g. spoons.
On that scale, titanium would be placed between silicon and iron. It should be kept in mind that the position on that scale actually refers to the behavior of the oxides, not of the pure elements, because all the elements mentioned are oxidized quickly in air and they are oxidized even faster in a living body.
Titanium dioxide is more inert than silicon dioxide, so less of it can become dissolved, but once the two oxides are dissolved, the silicon dioxide is safer, because most living cells have mechanisms to deal with it.
You should be careful of leaded glass, I've read research that shows it leaches into the liquid it contains (this is a problem in e.g. decanters where the acidic wine sits for several days).
How careful? Everything is a trade-off, without numbers on the quantities, extraction rates, and what levels are tolerable for short or long-term exposure we can't make a reasoned choice.
Plague is (was) worse in terms of its mortality rate, but Covid is worse in that we still don't have a way to eradicate it, so it's going to continue to be a health risk for some time to come.
It's also a required element so I guess a question might be how many micrograms of copper are consumed per day by using a copper lined bottle. Adults should get 900 micrograms daily unless they are also consuming a lot of zinc and then one must do more math. Gastric bypass surgery is thought to be a risk factor for copper deficiency. Usage of proton pump inhibitors may also contribute to copper deficiency by reducing the ability of the body to absorb dietary copper.
Most homes have copper water pipes. That's probably more important to test as corrosion in water bottles should be easy to spot. There are test kits one can buy to test their water at home.
My home was built in 1970. Most homes in my area were built in the 70's and 80's. When I rebuild my home I do plan to use PEX. I also want to use the ManaBloc port adapters because that was a damn cool idea whoever came up with it. Then I will just have to worry about chemicals leeching into the water such as MTBE and tert-Butyl alcohol unofficially of course but I don't drink from the well water anyway.
My plumber prefers copper pipes. He's replaced a couple of leaks (in PVC pipes) with copper at core junctions in my house. I never knew it was dangerous.
Copper is also more expensive, more showy, and probably easier to manipulate. But what it provides more benefit for the plumber is not necessarily the best for the client.
It depends on the type of glass. Some glasses are incredibly resilient, and some of them are flexible. They all look the same, so people who don't know tend to think of all glass as the same substance.
Some glass is also plastic. But I think outside technical discussions and deceptive marketing glass is usually used to refer to borosilicate or soda-lime since those are what most widespread glass products were for a while. Recently there are more varieties of glass that are marketed as glass to take advantage of the good reputation (in some ways) of borosilicate and soda-lime. But this is like using the term fruit in a technical way, it is just not what most people mean by the term glass.
This is me. I'm a clutz and I use mason jars in a little cloth sleeve. I drop like 2 a year and I end up with a wet bag of glass. That sucks but I just buy another $2 jar from a thrift store and I'm back in business.
You use Mason jars for drinking? You could also try kombucha bottles. They have a nice cap and the glass is stronger because it needs to withstand pressure, so it survives falls better.
Iphones had the same problem. Solved it with an outer rubber skin protecting the tablet. Should be easy to do the same with glass bottle while avoiding algae grow at he same time
Hmmm, copper is an essential trace nutrient found in the soil. Your body will not survive without it. As always, devil's in the details, but it is believed most humans are low in copper. Aluminum is a disaster for your body and the bodies of other creatures as far as we know.
I dont think cooking at home necessarily produces less plastics.
Most (in Norway) veggies, meats, some spices, sauces, etc come in
plasticcontainers.
This is good since it preserves the produce, so it has a longer shelf life.
but the drawback is plastic.
Not being a fan of sugary drinks is fine, but as long as people buy water
coffee, etc in pastic it is not a clear win for the environment.
It is a win for a persons health.
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free an area as big as Africa for wildlife/reforesting)
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
The population growth trend is already declining in many (western) countries and is projected to go down in a few decades max everywhere. Best contraceptive is education, prosperity and urbanization.
IMHO the best way to limit our negative impacts is
- stop exploiting other countries (there are almost no poor countries, only overexploited ones)
Good luck trying to convince Russia or China to stop exploiting other countries, abandon fossil fuels or stop animal agriculture.
Here is the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland, playing right into the hands of those authoritarian monsters.
There are two possible answers to climate change: avoidance and preparation. Avoidance means that the world reduces its CO₂-footprint to zero or less to limit global warming or even to revert it. Preparation means that, if global warming cannot be avoided, states prepare for the changes in weather, sea level, agriculture, etc.
Avoidance can only work if all nations worldwide do participate to reduce their CO₂-footprint. If some big nations do nothing, or even worse, if non-consumption of fossil fuels by western nations causes a price drop and a shift of fossil fuel consumption to the rest (instead of an overall reduction), avoidance by the west is pointless and a waste of resources. All the world has to participate for avoidance to be successful.
On the other hand, preparation mostly works on a more local level. Nations with coastlines invest to protect those, nations threatened by water shortages invest in countermeasures such as maybe desalination or storages, etc. Even if the rest of the world doesn't care, preparation will mostly work for the local community.
Both avoidance and preparation need a lot of resources. But allocation to avoidance is only sensible if every nation agrees to it, otherwise those resources are wasted and far better spent on preparation.
The problem is, the general preparation problem is even harder than the avoidance problem. How do most countries handle 60m+ sea level rises from a complete melting of Antarctica? Where is going to get to a regular wet bulb temperature above 35 degrees? Can we handle the level of ocean acidification that business as usual will result in? We need to prepare, but let's not pretend we don't also need to avoid as best we can.
Well then you didn’t understand the point of climate activism. It’s not about “saving the climate” but instead “keeping our home habitability”. You can choose to:
- keep packing more fellow on your homeland, our children with them. Don’t change anything but wish them good luck, the Science and Industry will solve everything as it always did anyway, right ? Guess what, it won’t make the two giants stop being authoritarian.
- not doing (much) more children in your homeland so no descents will suffer from the density. The “authoritarians monsters” will probably profit of that.
Do you really value democracy and freedom (I value it a lot, me too) so much that you continue gambling with descents’s home habitability?
It’s not about giving up but about recognizing that adding more soldiers won’t stop the war.
I absolutely agree on trying to become a better person in terms of producing less waste. My point it, little effort won't work. We need radical solutions that could work on the global scale.
I want people to think big. Instead of carrying a water bottle and use paper bags focus on how you can help a whole country like India or China or even a whole continent like Africa.
Set goal of stopping Coca-Cola from dumping their plastic waste in Afrika. This would include much more effort than just carrying a water bottle or sleeping 8h.
Would you elaborate on your thought? Why questioning the demography is “enemy of mankind”? Is there other subjects/sciences we should avoid completely to be friends with mankind?
I'm sure there were anti-natalist groups in the thousands of years of human history but well they weren't so numerous a 100 years ago, and they probably won't be so numerous a couple of hundred years from now either.
>Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car.
as do their human companions. I mean if you're going to Modest Proposal pets, why stop there?
And here's #13: turn off your phone, your laptop, your desktop computer. Read a book if you want edification. Go talk to someone in person if you want to express your opinion.
No. The problem is overall resource consumption. Which is a product: people * consumption/person. Since consumption per person has a lower limit, there has to be an upper limit for the sustainable number of people on the planet. Since standard of living should be at least equal to that of your ancestors, resource consumption per person will also be above the bare necessary minimum. And since the normal mode of population growth is exponential, any change in consumption per person is meaningless anyways, the overall resource consumption would be exponential nonetheless. So yes, we are always on the verge of overpopulation, followed by catastrophic collapse. We only avoided collapse in the past because technology (industrialization, green revolution) enabled exponential growth in resource production. But that might be a one-time thing.
Wrong. Pollution per person is extremely unequal across the world. There's a significant fraction of human population living in a completely sustainable manner and another fraction that is destroying life on earth.
Don't try to blame the first group for the sins of the second.
When three companies move nearly all the food around the globe, and we throw away between a third and half of our crops in transit, telling me to change the menu to save the planet is a bad joke.
I’ve had a lot of water bottles over the years. This is quite an unpopular take, but I believe PET to be lesser of all evils.
I’ve spent a lot of
money on numerous steel and plastic water bottles. They all break and good luck recycling them. Most likely they end up in landfill.
PET bottles use less raw resources, are cheap, lightweight, extremely durable, and when they reach end of life they’re easier to “recycle” (downcycle is probably more accurate).
Modern PET bottles shouldn’t leach into your water. You can at minimum use them until the expiry date on the bottle. If you’re concerned about leaching, don’t take my word and do your own research.
Steel is mostly recycled. Pet is very much not. Pet does leach (as microplastic). No point in buying plastic bottles unless they're pla. Just reuse a water/soda bottle you bought on a whim.
I read PET actually is recycled extensively. I mean, you need to recycle it, but it's economically viable to actually recycle it rather than just make it "someone else's problem".
Iirc it gets downcycled, not recycled. You can't make bottles out of it anymore, it goes into textiles or something. And that's in the highly optimistic case in which it makes it to a recycling center, which doesn't happen for 80% of plastic.
Steel is not recycled by consumers. You cannot put steel in a recycling bin.
You _ may_ be able to take steel to a resource recovery centre. However if the travel uses oil or electricity that comes from coal, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being worse for the environment than a PET bottle.
With regards to leaching, the FDA has declared PET bottles safe for repeated use.
Electricity coming from coal is not something you address by using plastic bottles.
There's almost nothing worse than forever plastics at this point in time. They're everywhere, they're toxic, and we don't know how to fix it.
Steel is recycled as often as it's economically feasible to do. It's not hand selected by consumers because there's already a whole process for dealing with metals in general that's been in place for a hundred years. Which is ideal really, the less I have to select by hand the better.
Here it's scavengers stripping it out of refuse (and everything that's not bolted to the ground, really). In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
The FDA is also cool with BPA, pfas, teflon, etc. Don't rely too much on it. PET is safe, ish. As i wrote: use it, avoid buying new. It does leach microplastic but those are everywhere so it's "safe", and by that I mean it's unavoidable "background pollution" these days, as there's microplastic even inside produce.
> Electricity coming from coal is not something you address by using plastic bottles.
That’s not my point and I think you’re deliberately misinterpreting it.
> In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
This sounds like wishful thinking. Do you have any evidence to support this claim? “Don’t worry, just trash it and it’ll probably get sorted in Mexico” doesn’t inspire confidence.
Is your particular bottle going to be part of the 20%? IDK... but it's more likely by definition that the PET one is going to be part of the 70%, and is also more damaging in every possible way.
Oh and a note I neglected to make: the recycling failure scenarios are wildly different for steel and PET: steel is easily disposed of by the environment, and doesn't really cause any problems, in fact it's a great oceanic fertilizer.
I was with you until the whole sleep away the day bit, then you lost me. It sounds more like a cover for depression or learned helplessness than a desire to do good. If that's how you see things then I question the rest of it.
What I have been wondering is, as an one mere person, trying my best to save the planet is really helping the earth while the industry is ruining the earth by tremendous impact? I mean, I am doing my best what I can to save the planet but sometimes I felt it is a droplet into the ocean so I want to find some logical reasons why I keep doing that.
Oh I get it, I just think it's naive. I've read dune several times over the past 40 years, and the person I was in my youth would have agreed with you.
These days, not so much. I believe in building communities via mutual aid and support, and that if people have their basic needs meet they will produce incredible results. People want to do good, but are often too tired or too afraid or too burnt out to do it.
There are two possibilities for each human to try:
1. Pour all your effort into becoming a kinder, wiser human, and watch as it rubs off on the people around you in surprising and far-ranging ways, amplifying itself into the world through "network effects." Allow this to become a virtuous cycle.
2. Become cynical and bitter, and watch the opposite happen.
In either case, the world will present you with all the evidence you need that your way is objectively correct and that everyone who sees it differently is clueless (though in the first case, probably not with so much disdain and contempt...).
You can insurrect or revolt from either of those two conditions. My experience (not with country-scale insurrection, of course...) is that the results will be drastically different. These aren't things you do instead of acting, but attitudes and habits you develop through all action.
> China from senselessly expanding their industry and to convince the third world from developing
This is such a insane way to look at it.
The constant fight for increased profit has offshored manufacturing and created a market for constant crap to buy. China isn't expanding industry in a vacuum, to suggest degrowth should only be for the third world, that historically was exploited for the growth of the first world, is honestly a crazy stance.
I like to tell people that eco-fascists are easy to spot, when someone says "we need less people", ask them who goes first.
The west has driven us to this current state for the sake of profit. We ship plastic bullshit across the oceans burning bunker fuel to shave 6 cents a unit off the margin.
The west has built a society so alienated and so dependent on endless, unsustainable growth. The perfect consumer is entirely dependent on capital for their every need. Yet you point out the issue is the third world looking for some dignity after a century of hyper extraction capital.
I saw a silly tweet today, it went "In a way, we're all in a rich dude's poorly designed submersible".
We're all dying for those bastards RPG min/maxing. The real path is anti-profit, durable long lasting items, and interconnected local economies.
This stuff feels good on a personal level and does absolutely nothing to "save the planet" or our ailing bodies. Still tons of plastic everywhere throughout our lifestyles, primarily from industry and infrastructure.
The entire chain of things you listed are riddled with plastic. Tools in the manufacturing and shipping processes, to build the roads, insulation, millions of miles worth of pipes for fuel, insulation, water, all the packaging for the food and products, packaging for shipping the products, metric tons of single-use disposable things, large and small, used in all kinds of industry, in our air, food, water. Fucking everywhere.
Oh but thank God I planted a tree and reused a little plastic shopping bag. That'll really hedge against the hell wrought by the plastic-industrial leviathan that's coiled around every part of our lives.
Small actions on a personal level can help people feel efficacy and engage on a larger level. Political and economic action is absolutely what's most important, but humans have weird psychology. Some for instance will not engage in the larger political action because they feel they are not virtuous enough (they don't bring a plastic bag along, they don't recycle) and if they can't do the small things that they misconstrue as essential, then f*(& it might as well just run the F-150 all day in a parking lot with the windows open and the AC on and vote for drill and burn politics.
In a rock band, you have a guitarist and a drummer and a singer and a bass player. Not everyone does the same thing. We all need to contribute in different ways at different times.
Plastics are indeed everywhere and have made some aspects of daily life better while making other aspects worse. Neither of the extremes of overemphasizing personal virtue and nihilism are useful.
Depending on the carbon footprint of the food you eat to power that bicycle the effective MPG may actually be quite poor. A e-bike has lower emissions than a cyclist powered by lentils.
You should look into the battery supply chain. It's quite horrible for the environment. There's no way of consuming that will save us, we need to consume drastically less. We won't turn society around before hitting rock bottom because that's who we are.
A lot of the classic list of feel good things do little or come with giant asterisks and this is a good example.
Potable water shortages are a very serious problem... that affects particular areas at particular times.
A little town on a tributary of the amazon in the rainy season can use as much water as they want to water their lawns or bath in and it will cause no issues, while a drought striken area must preserve all their water.
The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use and carbon emissions.”
We can electrify the processes, make the power grid mostly green and require industrial processes to recycle most of its water. In fact the tech exists and the legislation exists and works.
I inherited my fabric shopping bags from my grandmother, she made some of them 30 years ago.
They are also many times thicker than the cotton bags you can buy in stores, so they might very well need another couple generations before they are carbon neutral!
Yeah much of the problem is that people aren't currently willing to change their lifestyle to embrace the "reduce" and "reuse" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" triad. They only know two options: "Paper or plastic?" because the vast majority of people don't want to bring their own bags from home to the store. Or their own cup to Starbucks. Or their own to-go food box to the pizza place.
I'm trying to imagine how DoorDash would even work without single-use plastics? Maybe we'd have standardized reusable containers with deposits on them that could be returned to a central location for $1-2 refunds per container, where they'd get sanitized and re-distributed via restaurant supply companies.
Australia banned single use plastics ages ago, some states decades ago. At the start you get the complainers telling you that they will just buy new bags every time, but theses days almost everyone brings their bags with them. People just have to be dragged kicking and screaming but they eventually do move.
Oh wow. Okay. This[0] is...exactly the model I gave actually. $6 deposit apparently. Amazing - I'm actually blown away that this is already implemented across a large country.
Technically not all of Australia has yet banned single use plastics, W.Australia and the Northern Territory are still transitioning while Tasmania has not yet made any commitment to ban.
But that's most of the population doing away with them and most of the population (by my in Australia networked experience) being pretty happy with that.
I'm not aware of any public health campaign either overt or guerilla to convince the public that they're bad healthwise .. your link is to the UK's Daily Mail which is well known for making big drama for click bait and loving to stir up contraversy.
The article linked, reduced to it's core, is reporting on the findings of Associate Professor Dr Mark Green from some years past:
which all looks very sound .. but it hasn't (yet ?) turned into any wide spread official public campaign to warn people away from microwaving food in plastic containers.
The Daily Heil [1] loves to manufacture faux outrage and hysteria.
No drama, it was less about correcting you than putting context on the comment above yours - we're not all the way there yet!
As for the link, small potatoes, many get taken in by overly bombastic Daily Mail | Sky News headlines and copy - there's usually always some kernel of truth in them, but a lot has to scraped away to get there.
A rule of thumb seems to be that oil drop test : PFAS make fibers grease-repelling.
Of course it could also just be from a very thin (and much less toxic I assume ?) layer of polyethylene that those non-recyclable "paper" cups seem to use ?
I'm willing to and I mostly do bring my own bags to the grocery store. Sometimes I forget. Let's say I forget twice a year and opt to buy paper bags in those cases. We have just learned "[...] to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times [...]". Depending on how often I go grocery shopping a year, I have now already come quite close to nullifying any positive effect of bringing my own bag compared to buying plastic bags every single time. And we haven't even considered the environmental impact of the bags I remember to bring with me most of the time.
Note that according to that study, in terms of climate impact, the paper bag is better, not worse, than the LDPE bag. It's worse in terms of "total impact", which considers the categories below and I'm not sure how the total score is aggregated -- I'm sure it's explained in detail, the report has 144 pages.
CC Climate change
OD Ozone depletion
HTc Human toxicity, cancer effects
HTnc Human toxicity, non-cancer effects
POF Photochemical ozone formation
IR Ionizing radiation
PM Particulate matter
TA Terrestrial acidification
TE Terrestrial eutrophication
ME Marine eutrophication
FE Freshwater eutrophication
ET Ecosystem toxicity
RDfos Resource depletion, fossil
RD Resource depletion, abiotic
Water Water resource depletion
They also come to the conclusion that it's always better to incinerate paper bags (at end of life) rather than recycling them, which is interesting? If you intend to recycle your paper bag, you need to reuse it 73 times before you do so, because recycling paper is bad (recycling the plastic bag: also bad!). Again, in terms of "total impact"; I think in terms of climate change they say recycling either is good.
And I'm not sure if the paper bags they looked at were themselves made from recycled paper, which they usually are in stores here and which presumably changes the calculation (in either direction). It's odd because they look at like 5 or 6 LDPE variations, including breaking them down as recycled/non-recycled, but I can't find any mention of the paper being recycled or not. Again, 144 pages, maybe I've overlooked it. They do distinguish bleached and non-bleached paper.
Last but not least, they assume you need two paper bags for each LDPE (reference) bag (not enough weight capacity). The same is, hilariously, true for the organic cotton bag (but not the non-organic one!), not because of weight but because of volume constraints. So if they had chosen a slightly smaller -- or larger! -- shopping trip, lots of numbers would go up or down by a factor of two.
I'm not saying the report is bad or anything -- I'm not qualified to say either way --, turns out lifecycle analyses are complicated and full of judgement calls which inevitably get compressed to single statements like the one in the fine article.
> I'm trying to imagine how DoorDash would even work without single-use plastics? Maybe we'd have standardized reusable containers with deposits on them that could be returned to a central location for $1-2 refunds per container, where they'd get sanitized and re-distributed via restaurant supply companies.
That reminds me of how much better to-go containers are in some other countries! I was blown away by the quality of to-go containers when I ordered delivery in Beijing, the containers could easily have been used more than once.
I actually would be interested in seeing what a world with zero disposable packaging would look like. Imagine if everything you bought at the grocery store used packaging that you had to return afterward. Think peanut butter put in jars that get returned and cleaned.
Related, I remember when Costco ketchup came in giant gallon sized aluminum cans.
It's very responsible of the New Yorker to bring this up. For individual studies it definitely depends on how "environmental impact" is defined.
For example, looking at only GHG emissions, you'd have to use a ceramic mug 500 times (without breaking it!) before the GHG emissions of creating the mug was less than the GHG emissions of creating 500 styrofoam cups. That's because a styrofoam cup is 99% air and merely contains 4.4 grams of plastic (about 4mL of volume before it's foamed up and pumped full of gas). Whereas a ceramic mug weighs 200-400 grams. Just kilning the 400g of the mug to dry the clay uses a lot of energy / creates a lot of GHG emissions, compared to processing 4 grams of plastic.
However, GHG emission is just one part of styrofoams environmental impact. The ceramic mug can be crushed up and essentially become part of clay again. The styrofoam just ... never decomposes. The styrofoam contains (and literally is itself) an endocrine disruptor -- so even as it does "decompose" it pollutes the environment with itself and other chemical additives in the polymer. The styrofoam is likely to contaminate your food as well, especially when restaurants put hot food in it and it melts small holes in the styrofoam box, or when kids chew on the styrofoam cups. But then, ceramic mugs may have various harmful metals in them or toxic chemicals/metals in its paint and glaze.
Basically, it's very, very important for us to start doing full hazard and lifecycle analyses of the materials we use at large scales. Overall, I think we're currently greatly underestimating the hazards of most of the newer modern materials. I also think the energy requirements to switch back to traditional materials would be untenable -- and still require ubiquitous quality control to minimize harmful heavy metals / etc in the raw materials.
But I think anyone who says "well it's just too hard then, forge ahead!" is terribly misguided or callous. And most people who say "we need to go back to metal/paper/wood/glass for everything!" needs to be fully prepared to describe to listeners/readers how that would affect daily habits -- you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups. I don't think everyone who pontificates on this is a hypocrite -- many of them do advocate for reducing consumption above all else. It's just a very hard sell.
But we don't have any roadmap at all for taking these contaminants out of the environment once they disperse throughout it.
> you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups
Of the many things we need to change, this is NOT a hard sell, I have been doing it for several years now, and for the past few years I have even gotten a discount... there's a caveat though : it's a plastic cup (unlike their paper cups with what I assume is an extremely thin plastic layer), and I now realize that I haven't really done the kind of math they did there, neither did I double-check my university where I got it about just how harmful this cup was supposed to be.
Still, some countries (like Germany ?) successfully resisted the phasing out of the (unbroken) glass bottle deposit system, that plastic bottle sellers are trying to get rid of.
> you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups.
Tens of thousands of people already do this, if not more.
The relevant section is 6.3. The cited number is relative to a LDPE carrier bag (page 25 has pictures of what that is). When considering only climate impact, cotton bags are better after 52 times reusing them.
Note that those numbers, as I understand it, assume that the reference LDPE bag is reused as a garbage bag (EOL3), which is optimal but probably not what usually happens? But EOL3 only differs by a factor of about two (page 59) from the other two EOL options, incineration and recycling; I think landfill is not an EOL they looked at because it's not done in Denmark, nor did they consider the impact if the plastic bag is not properly disposed of, ie. it ends up in the environment.
The best solution is then probably re-using your plastic bag. Where I am you don't give free plastic bags anymore. Instead they'll sell heavy duty ones that can carry something like 20lbs and I've never seen break. And of course they have the shop's logo all over it.
The problem with these sort of equivocations is that they conveniently side-step the categorical argument. One something like; do not surround yourself with trash.
realshadow has rule 7, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503179, "quality over quantity". That is a value argument, not an efficiency argument. Only arguing from efficiency is essentially internalizing the logic of the machine. If everything is evaluated whether it minimized/maximizes one metric or another, quality of life will, inevitably, decline. In this case, surrounded by plastic trash, ingesting, drinking plastic trash.
Plastic bags must die. Why? Because they are trash. That's the value system I would love to see in this world.
You raise an interesting point, but isn't this just moving to another extreme? It seems like both quality and efficiency have their place, we are probably putting too much emphasis on efficiency at the moment, but completely focusing on quality and disregarding efficiency isn't the solution either. It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?
If we stick with the plastic vs cotton bag example, we are considering two factors: some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n. If n=1, would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality? Isn't it also mostly trash in this case? What is trash? I'd argue it's a product that we cannot or do not squeeze any additional utility out of. How about n=10? n=20?
> isn't this just moving to another extreme?
> It seems like both quality and efficiency have their place,
Actually, I would agree with that for sure. The real world is grey, and multiple things are true at once. I'm certainly guilty of leaning to the other extreme here.
> some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n
I believe I understand, and I appreciate the overall push back.
But starkly put, and to be a little flippant ..
> would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality?
.. absolutely yes. Certainly in this case. The reuse number is incredibly (incredibly) flexible. In no world n=1 will be a given. The only reason we have reuse of one for a bag, is out of habit, simply put. Habits change all the time. A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value. It may have a lot of other uses. Do we even need a bag? 80% of time, the store clerk gives you a bag out of muscle memory, not because you can't hold a couple of items in your hands or stuff in your pockets. The utility of a plastic bag might even be closer to 0 than 1.
> It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?
I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
> A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value.
I agree that on average, a cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. Some cotton bags absolutely will only be used once, however. Sometimes it's even predictable that a cotton bag will only be used once. Ideally, we would get people to use whatever product is best suited for the situation at hand on a quality-environmental impact pareto front. There is no catch all that's going to be the best solution in every situation. We shouldn't give out plastic bags like their going out of style, but I'm also not sure we should eliminate them completely.
> I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
Yes, I was trying to say that quality is hard to measure by calling it an ill-defined metric. You are still trying to maximise it, even if you cannot measure it. I get that, I'm with you most of the way, but I just don't think you can only look at quality. We could be creating the most high quality neighbourhood at the cost of increasing entropy outside of it. Nothing comes for free.
It's a lot about recycling and very little about how it's poisoning human beings.
I have a lot of unpopular opinions about plastic. I personally think it's not that big of a deal. Benzine compounds are naaty, but they're in your drinking water. I don't like them. But most plastic is organic compounds since it comes from oil. There are already microbes metabolizing it in the wild, and it's a rich energy source that most organisms aren't using, you can expect that adapted niche to be filled very quickly by those organisms. Additionally, I think there's too much of an aversion to burning it. Whether its for disposal or for fuel via depolymerization, I think we need to be burning more plastic. If you're worried about CO2 bear in mind, this stuff is in the environment and will decompose eventually. Overall I'm not that concerned about it, besides some things like PFAS and benzine compounds.
And all that said, I'd bet money I dispose of significantly less plastic than the average European. First is water bottles. I don't do water bottles. I use those 5 gallon jugs and a hand pump dispenser on amazon, it works like a super soaker or a garden sprayer. That alone has me ahead of most Americans. Beyond that I prefer paper bags, and glass over plastic containers. It's just lifestyle decisions, I hardly care but I do it, it's not even effort at this point, it's just different habits. If you care and can't be bothered and I don't care and do it, do you really care? Avoiding single use plastic in your household is not really all that hard, things you can't avoid like linings in cans and what not aren't the problem, grocery bags and water bottles are the big ones, and you can do other things like never buy teflon, which I also do.
> But most plastic is organic compounds since it comes from oil.
It being an organic compound doesn't mean it's safe or something we should ignore. Asbestos is an organic compound with wildly useful properties.
> Additionally, I think there's too much of an aversion to burning it.
At home, its a terrible idea - it's super duper toxic a d leave a horrific nasty waste to dispose of. In a commercial setting maybe, but I'm not convinced it's going to be handled correctly without serious regulation.
> And all that said, I'd bet money I dispose of significantly less plastic than the average European. First is water bottles. I don't do water bottles. I use those 5 gallon jugs and a hand pump dispenser on amazon, it works like a super soaker or a garden sprayer. That alone has me ahead of most Americans.
Eh, are you comparing to Europeans or Americans? I don't have stats handy but tap water is potable and suitable for a large number of uses. No need for any plastic.
> Avoiding single use plastic in your household is not really all that hard, things you can't avoid like linings in cans and what not aren't the problem, grocery bags and water bottles are the big ones, and you can do other things like never buy teflon, which I also do.
You can't just decide the plastics that you use aren't the problem. Avoiding single use plastics might not be hard for you, I live within shopping distance of 3 supermarkets all of whom package most of their fruit and veg in single use plastics. That's my number one source of plastics, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Apologies, I misspoke, you're right. My google-fu this morning was weak and I didn't fact check. That said, here [0] is a list of different dangerous organic compounds - Asbestos was a (poor) example.
I'm talking about how it will degrade into carbon dioxide and what not as microbes learn to decompose it, so long term it's no worse than burning.
In rural places a lot of people burn their trash in pits. Just don't stand over it while it's burning and you'll be fine. Id argue this is significantly less bad than it piling up in the ocean.
I'm comparing to Europeans and Americans. I don't drink tap water, I refill 5 gallon jugs.
Once you factor in the time scales involved, your justifications for why plastic isn't much of a problem disappear. There is no significant decomposition of plastic by microbes in the wild. Nature will fill niches but there's no evidence or guarantee that microorganisms will ever develop a significant and widespread enough ability to degrade plastic. There are microbes that literally eat rocks, but there are still plenty of rooks in the world. Nature developing this ability to a significant level will take a very long time. Plastics have been around for several human lifetimes and millions of microbial lifetimes and we only see hints. Even if we take an optimistic view, there will be multiple human lifetimes very badly affected by plastic pollution.
We probably also don't want a microbe that is so effective at eating plastic, seeing how much we rely on it. At the first sight of a truly plastic eating microbe, manufacturers will start making plastic immune to organic degradation and the cycle starts again.
Same with burning, you can't say it'd end up as CO2 anyway as one is an immediate effect and the other theoretical and very long term. I do agree that "energy recovery" as it is often called is better than landfill disposal but it is the lesser of evils. It's not always clear that not using plastic is a net benefit as its use might be reducing other environmental effects. In which case I agree that using minimal plastic and then using it for power generation is an option.
There's no significant microbe decomposition yet. Fact is, there are microbes that do it, it is an abundant energy source, and so you'd expect these microbes to fill that niche quickly. Failing that, we will engineer some. I think the current common wisdom timelines for plastic decomposition are wildly wrong and based on old evidence and understanding, I think within 100 years lack of durability of plastics due to decomposition is actually going to become a problem. I would hope someone would engineer plastics that can resist it, the reason single use plastics are so ubiquitous is because they're cheap, not because theyre long lasting, you don't need grocery bags to last a thousand years, so long lasting plastics for durable applications and plastics for which microbes exist to decompose them for single use would be ideal.
When I was a kid almost all packaged foods came in tins or glass containers. So did sodas/soft drinks. Biscuits and cookies came in large tins or cardboard boxes and the grocer weighed out what you wanted and put the contents into a paper bag. The greengrocer would put your fruit in a paper bag and you, the shopper, would place those paper bags into a string shopping bag.
Supermarkets, which were just coming into vogue, either didn't offer shopping bags or if they did they were made of paper.
Large items came in cardboard boxes and heavy items came in timber crates, fruit came packed in low grade wooden boxes which were later great for storing things in. Heavy machinery was often crated in large wooden containers.
Toys were made of either wood or metal plate or diecast. ...But rarely of plastic. Plastic LEGO wasn't available, instead we kids played with wonderful Meccano made of steel!
By comparison, plastics were few and far between and confined to a certain class of objects such as ballpoint pens, drawing set squares (often celluloid), radio cabinets (Bakelite), but TV sets cabinets were still fabricated from wood (3-ply and or Masonite) although the dials and knobs were plastic.
Despite the current whingeing, the introduction of certain plastics was a great benefit, for example, from the mid 1950s onwards when PVC replaced perishable vulcanized rubber as electrical insulation in household wiring, electrical fires became much less common. That was a great advance forward.
All this happened not that long ago. Things started to go really pear-shaped around the mid 1960s early '70s and by the 1980s it seemed that just about everything came in shrink-wrapped polyethylene or such.
Now I can no longer buy, say a galvanized bucket, instead I have to buy crappy plastic ones that do not last—not long ago I bought three at the supermarket and the handle fell off one even before I got it home. Large plastic bins I use to put things in are made of polyethylene or similar and after the plasticizer bleeds out they becomes brittle and crack then fall to bits—it really is a damn pain this stuff just doesn't last.
Plastics have their place. One of the great problems is that they are being abused in the ways we use them, back to those storage containers for a moment: if made of a good high grade durable plastic that's also thick enough not to break in normal use they'd last a lifetime after which they could be disposed of properly, instead they are deliberately designed to fail after little or no use. We've now reached the stage where these containers sold for domestic use are not fit for purpose.
I'm of the opinion we need to tax the shit of plastic when it's used in items that either don't have an appropriate lifespan (i.e. not made sufficiently durable), and or where suitable alternative material exist—for instance wood, metal and glass for bottles etc.
The argument that, say, glass is dangerous and plastic is safer doesn't hold water. Even in my lifetime I've seen a society that ran on glass and it ran OK! In cases where plastic has to be the preferred option then simply tax the shit out if it. People will either make do with cheaper glass or they'll pay a premium for plastic. Plastic drink bottles could have deposits on them so high that no one would ever think of disposing them other than to return them for the deposit.
The only real problem in bringing plastics under control is opposition from greedy corporations that have nothing other than profit in mind. The first thing we citizens must to do is to limit their ability to lobby government on such matters.
When I visited Tokyo a few years ago, I enjoyed the convenience of the vending machines and the fact they have 7-11/Lawson/Family Mart convenience stores on every downtown block. It was a bit concerning to see the huge amount of plastic bottles being consumed. I read that in the past, they would ship them to China for recycling but China no longer wanted to be a part of that trade. It seems to me there should be a better alternative to plastic bottles. I know it is convenient and is safer/lighter to carry than glass. I would hope by now, we would have invented a paper bottle with wax liner or something similar that can replace all the plastic bottles.
As I said, sometimes plastic has the advantage. For example, say you ride a bicycle and you carry a plastic water bottle in your pants cargo pocket (as I do), then if or when you crash to the ground it won't shatter as glass does. Same for beaches, broken glass amongst the sand is not a good combination.
These are good uses for plastic—especially if bottles have an effective deposit on them. (Even if you own a refillable bottle and consider it a permanent fixture, it too will ultimately be returned for the deposit at the end of its useful life).
It's not a matter of banning plastics, it's all about implementing clever regulations that protect the environment. Trouble is corporate and vested interests will fight us every inch of the way to stop them from being introduced.
On the matter of alternatives to plastic (and glass), this is difficult if we want to get rid of plastics altogether as presently there's not much to choose from for liquids other than aluminum or steel cans but they're also a good choice being easily recyclable (and the deposit system works well with them too).
Drink containers, whilst a big problem, can easily be solved with the deposit system. A much harder issue is the inappropriate use of plastics and that mainly takes two forms, (a), using cheap or the wrong type of plastic in applications where it breaks and thus is disposed of inappropriately, and (b), its use in packaging. Most packaging can be made from other non-plastic materials (cardboard, etc.) which are very satisfactory and environmentally friendly (as was done in the past).
Considering how ubiquitous plastics are, they look rather harmless to me.
We are wasting hundreds of millions of tons per year, we eat it, drink it, we have been doing that for decades and we are still discussing statistical signifiance.
Sure, not completely harmless, but few things are. And considering the tremendous value plastics have brought to society, I'd say the downsides are comparatively small. What worries me more than human poisoning the article is about is the effect of microplastics on marine life, as it is less studied than people and there is some evidence that the physical (more than chemical) properties of plastic particle might be damaging.
It doesn't mean there isn't something to be done. Proper waste management is the obvious one, and I don't mean anything fancy, I mean "do not empty you trash in nature" thing that is unfortunately much too common, especially in developing countries. Properly managed landfills would probably solve 90% of the plastics problems. Reducing disposable plastic is, I think, generally a good thing, but not before making sure the alternative is not worse, and of course making sure that "disposable plastic", is not "throw it in nature plastic". We should also research better plastics: make sure the durable ones are actually durable, and that the disposable ones degrade properly, also consider the petrochemical industry that backs it up and maybe switch to more sustainable sources.
If you actually read the article before commenting:
> The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic are pretty straightforward; they include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract. Animals that fill their guts with plastics eventually starve to death. The risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens. In addition to their main ingredients, plastics may contain any number of additives. Many of these—for example, polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, which confer water resistance—are also suspected carcinogens. Many of the others have never been adequately tested.
Honestly it’s not surprising that scientists are worried about the harmful effects of plastics to human health because the introduction of many substances non-native to the human body brings about some kind of long-term illness as a negative reaction. Just because you can’t detect it with your senses and within a short time frame doesn’t mean that a phenomenon is not happening.
People could really do more with questioning their opinions more than just jumping straight into availing of their freedom of speech.
I was actually reacting the the hyperbolic title "plastics are poisoning us". And while the article is more nuanced and rather well researched, the subtext essentially "ban plastics", and judging by most of the comments here, that's what most people took away.
My argument is essentially that while it is perfectly normal and expected that researchers study the health risks associated with plastics, and that it is just as expected that we address the issues we discover, we have to make sure the solution is not worse than the problem. And since plastics are what I believe to be relatively harmless for the massive and careless use we make of them, I think it is an important consideration.
How could even the most extreme of plastic bans be worse? I imagine not being able to cheat death here and there as the most significant loss, other than what, less convenience? The world wasn’t significantly worse without plastic.
>Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens.
This is like arguing that table salt is dangerous because one of the chemicals involved, chlorine, is a chemical warfare agent. Despite the title of the article, they don't provide much evidence of plastic actually poisoning people outside of plastic recyclers and textile workers.
Chlorine is a basic chemical element and benzene and vinyl chloride are compounds. You made a counter-argument so devoid of intellectual rigor that your examples do not even compare.
Also, what are you saying that there’s no evidence? Even if it’s not in the article (which is an opinion piece, not a scientific journal), then you should have had the diligence to look up the claims before taking a stance? Plenty of objective sources cited in their Wikipedia articles alone:
There's microplastics which are now absolutely everywhere. Apparently we consume a credit card's worth of plastic per month. Nobody should feel ok about consuming a drink that's got a ground up credit card in it, yet that's what we're doing.
In Asia especially it's crazy how plastic is often used - you go to a 7/11 to buy a cold drink, they put it in TWO flimsy plastic bags which you throw in the first trash can you come across. So the thing has a useful lifetime of under a minute. They also give you a plastic straw, wrapped in plastic which goes in the trash a few minutes later.
All that stuff is produced in a dirty process and will linger in the environment for way too long.
> There's microplastics which are now absolutely everywhere. Apparently we consume a credit card's worth of plastic per month. Nobody should feel ok about consuming a drink that's got a ground up credit card in it, yet that's what we're doing.
And what's the effect? We've been doing this for decades?
I think you severely underestimate not only how long effects can take to show, but how long and complicated it can be to fund good long term scientific studies.
There's this belief that if something has an effect, it'll just show up magically on the news after the minimum amount of time, without taking into account all the hurdles people have to go through to research. Even if you didn't have powerful companies with interests against the research being published, it would be complicated.
I think the point is that we don’t see the major spikes that the ubiquitousness of plastics combined with the alarm levels raised by headlines like this would theoretically produce.
If plastics are indeed poisoning us, the hazard ratio seems to be small enough that it would require significant research to quantify.
Compare to, say, the lung cancer skyrocket that happened in the 70s-90s from the 30-year smoking habits developed in the 40s-60s.
With plastics, either the lag time for effects is really long, the effects themselves are so spread out that any meaningful bump for a single one is hard to identify, or we are reducing other causes of the same issues in lock step.
There could be observable effects that haven't been widely attributed to microplastics yet. Eg. the decrease in male testosterone over the last few decades.
Microdosing can also result in slow development of symptoms. Is everyone fat because of sedentary lifestyles? Endocrine disruption? Maybe plastic ingestion makes people lazy. We don’t know because almost no one has asked. And now you can’t even create a control group to study it.
But we haven't used plastic for millennia, and sure while it gets everywhere, some environments are far higher in microplastics than others, so doing comparisons should be easy
When I was in Tokyo, 25 years ago, I got to the point where I’d trick the convenience store cashiers into not putting a single can of soda into a plastic bag. Which they would do, every single time. So I’d hand them my money, then pick up the beverage while they were busy with the till.
It was a public debate issue at the time, trying to solve trash problems. I don’t know where they are at with the problem now.
As usual, its difficult to nail these attributions down for a long time. Look at arsenic-containing green wallpaper, leaded gasoline, asbestos, and CFCs. They were all "fine" and widely-used until it was obvious that they were terrible.
Maybe some type of microplastics / endocrine disruptor is responsible for increased cancer rates, increase in autism and ADHD, increase in gender dysphoria, increase in obesity etc. This is really hard to prove since we breathe and drink that stuff for many decades now.
But it's not that we need plastics that urgently. Synthetic fibers in clothes, which generate microplastics household dust, could be largely replaced with cotton. Plastic food packaging could be replaced with a modern variant of cellophane. Car tires (which also generate major amounts of dust) could perhaps also be made to a higher percentage of biodegradable material.
Of course all these alternatives aren't free, but maybe they are worth it.
Back when I wrote it, I suspected the industry intentionally worked with government to distract the public, and now in this article it is confirmed:
Under public pressure, a company like Coca-Cola or Nestlé pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. When the pressure eases, it quietly abandons its pledge. Meanwhile, it lobbies against any kind of legislation that would restrict the sale of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wallis quotes Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, who once said, “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”
The word 'Plastic' needs to die. Instead we should be more specific on the type of plastic.
Teflon, PLA, ABS, resins, foams, etc... are all plastics, but they are so unrelated outside their long chains, its terrible to stereotype them all into one category.
You aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon, but rather the manufacturing process. You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine.
Eat something with BPA in it, you are probably going to have a bad time.
Maybe the solution is better labeling. I know its near impossible to have perfect consistency in plastic manufacturing(I worked in foam, mind boggling we consider testing these foams one time, and considered it the same foam for the next 8 years). However, knowing precursors, additives, and potentially process would make a huge difference in our ability to track problems.
EDIT: Someone called out PLA as potentially dangerous. After looking it up, I'm skeptical of the oxygen double bond attached to a carbon attached to an oxygen. The wikipedia article had no health concerns, but that carbon atom seems ripe for reaction. Let me change my answer on PLA to 'I don't know'.
Teflon Aka Polytetrafluoroethylene cookware represents a health hazard. The stuff contains a great deal of Florine and breaks down at 300C, but that’s not purely binary instead it becomes increasingly unstable as your approach the temperature. Further no manufacturing process is perfect, I wouldn’t therefore assume eating significant quantities would be safe.
That said, it’s generally used as a coating rather than a structural element so there’s less of it in the environment.
PS: Toothpaste which you should mostly spit out generally contains less than 0.5% fluoride compounds such as sodium fluoride NaF or tin fluoride SnF2, the F in both being Florine.
"Fluorine" is also the terminology used for covalently bonded Fl moieties, not just difluorine, the gas.
Fluoride is the ion, but if you want to get pedantic, you're not adding the ion to toothpaste and drinking water - you're adding another fluorine compound which is dissociating in solution.
Ie, when you salt your food, you're not tossing in Cl- ions directly.
I understand that Teflon might be a hazard in pans but feel like it reduces the amount of burned food in contrast to steel/iron pans so much for me that I hope it is a net gain.
(sorry in advance for all who want to suggest iron skillets. I can't make them work in daily use.)
If you are regularly burning food in steel or iron pans, maybe it's time to understand why? I cook in exclusively iron and steel cookware and I cannot remember the last time something got burned (excepting when I deliberately charred something.)
Please don't take your skill in this for granted. It's a gift. I've been using cast iron pans sporadically for four decades, following all of the common advice, and failing magnificently every time. I still use one occasionally to put a crust on a steak ... and then use a small piece of chainmail[1] to defeat the klingons.
It's not that I don't believe you. It just doesn't work that way in my pan on my stove with my food at my skill level, at all. I gave up and buy nonstick pans and replace them every other year or so.
I don't cook enough (and never steak) for you to assign me much weight, but FWIW I've had a (lighter, spun) cast iron skillet for 8ish years. I followed a seasoning procedure available online that involves (IIRC) 3 rounds of applying thin coats of flaxseed oil and leaving it in an oven at a fairly high temp.
This process went fine, but I always had to baby the pan (had to be very careful cleaning it with said chainmail, very careful with what/how I cooked in it) and had to re-do the initial seasoning several times when it got too troublesome.
This process would leave the pan at a dark brown, and for a while I blamed this on not removing rust well enough before seasoning or not babying it well enough for it to build up to a ~normal black coat.
At some point during the early pandemic I tired of this. I decided to do something similar on the stovetop where I could observe/iterate better. Apply a coat, wait for it to stop smoking, and repeat until it was black. (plus a few for good luck; I didn't keep track; this took maybe dozens of rounds?)
I've had a much better time since then. The most ~babying I've done is applying a few fresh coats if I don't use it for a while or water doesn't bead when I rinse it.
Yeah, when my cast iron skillet starts to act up I'll just lightly scrub it with dish soap and a brillo pad, dry it, then add a very light coating of oil and heat it up on the stove until it smokes. You want some ventilation of course. Then, it's restored to easy fried egg condition.
Same. it's an art form sometimes, and i've cooked the same dish and had it come out great... and then the next time get charred like a mofo.
I suspect it has to do with electric vs gas and being able to get and maintain a stable temp with gas. But that could just be a poor craftsman blaming his tools.
I would probably give up on cooking if I had to buy a new set of pans every year. That sounds entirely ridiculous. It's seriously not some special gift to be able to cook on a carbon steel, stainless steel, or cast iron pan. I've even trained people who have never cooked before in a single cooking session. Were they perfect right away? Nope. But it isn't that difficult and learned quickly after a few solo attempts
I cook 99 out of 100 of my meals, and 9 out of 10 meals I cook in a small counter-top air-fryer. The whole gadget costs less than a good pan. That 10th meal is probably eggs in a non-stick pan, so that pan lasts years longer now.
I bought a nice new range right before I discovered the air-fryer, and it now functions mostly as a device for holding up the air-fryer.
I've taught people to juggle or even (barely) ride a unicycle after a lesson or two. That doesn't mean those aren't difficult skills to acquire.
Plus, many people who are learning do not have the privilege of an experienced teacher. Relying on instructions, videos, and trial & error takes more time and energy for most people. I agree with you that it's worth the effort though.
I guess that it is due to the heat source (ceran cook top) and being used to using too little oil (with a teflon pan I use less than a teaspoon in most cases).
I have been learning how to season, cook with, and clean cast iron. As someone who did not grow up using it it’s definitely not intuitive. The other challenge is that I either have to lock it away or teach everyone else in the household how to care for it. At various points in my life I’ve had coatings ruined by roommates, partners, guests, and housekeepers who did things that seemed perfectly sensible like letting it soak in soapy water.
It's similar to how my partner has a stainless steel pan that I avoid using because I have not had the bandwidth to internalize the right ratio of heat, time, and oil to cook things on it without burning/sticking, whereas they have no issue with it. It's a good reminder not to take internalized skill for granted.
Soapy water won't break down the molecularly bonded fat and iron on your cast iron. If you mistake leftover grease for seasoning, then sure, soapy water will get rid of it.
The trick to not sticking on steel pan is just preheating it properly. A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick. Just let it get hot enough.
> Soapy water won't break down the molecularly bonded fat and iron on your cast iron.
In that case I'm not sure what the exact mechanism was. But I know that after others have used/cleaned a seemingly well-seasoned pan I've had to deal with chips, flakes, and/or rust and had to go back through the whole annoying seasoning process. And of course it's entirely possible that despite carefully following instructions that I've done the seasoning wrong -- chemistry is the only class I ever flunked.
> A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick.
My partner made a similar recommendation. It sounds trivially easy but for whatever reason I have not managed to make it work. Given that cast iron (generally) works fine for me I've had minimal motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of another material, though I would like to give it another shot at some point.
It's gaslighting by the cast iron/stainless steel crowd, pure and simple.
I've talked to multiple experienced and home chefs about this disconnect and they've admitted two things:
1) cooking on a screaming hot pan is possible of course. It's how all professional kitchens work. But it's way harder! You have to pay close attention & the timing for error is very small. Cooking at lower heat on Teflon lets you make more adjustments.
2) After doing everything perfectly, and seasoning perfectly, for the same heat you ABSOLUTELY still need more of some oil or butter on a cast iron or stainless steel then you would for an equivalent Teflon pan. This is non-negotiable.
you can season stainless steel just like you season cast iron, it just requires more coats to hold and will need to be repeated more often. I've seasoned my skillets and frying pans. I'd never bother with my sauce pans bc they get acidic stuff like vinegar for poached eggs, tomato sauce, or fruit, but they're steel anyway so I can just scrub them with wire wool.
This is a bit like saying asbestos may be a hazard in walls but I just can't seem to get the knack for not lighting my house on fire :(
I say that partially as a joke but also it does sort of sound a bit absurd, in the sense that your cooking techniques are just sort of wrong if you are repeatedly burning food to your non-non-stick pan. You need an oil or fat on your pan to provide a buffer or to bathe the food in liquid.
You just perfectly illustrated why people keep disagreeing about this.
You can cook a lot of things on a "non stick" telfon pan without an oil or fat.
You can cook far fewer things on a "non stick" cast iron without an oil or fat.
But the cast iron crowd will gaslight the rest of us, and claim that we are just seasoning it wrong but otherwise it is indistinguishable and only superior.
Now, I do think some of them are coming coated in silicone-based coatings. The consensus I get asking "are these carcinogenic?" is "probably not?"
But the other problem is determining what a particular pan is coated with: I have not seen a single manufacturer label their pan with anything more informative than that it is coated in "magic science stuff".
300 C is typically the highest setting on a stovetop. I never go above medium when using Teflon cookware. I've not used a cooking thermometer yet, but https://homebli.com/stove-top-temperature-knobs-what-the-num... gives a good general guide line under a section labelled Stove Top Numbers to Degrees.
Also, I only use 'plastic' utensils with the pan. The result, not a single scratch on the pan. The surface looks brand new, I've been using it over a year.
I'd have thought that fluorine, like oxygen, is a strong oxidizer (fluorine being even stronger), and so fluorides, like oxides (e.g. rust) would be extremely stable, among the most stable compounds possible. Unless I'm forgetting the other side: Maybe the other half of the compound is not a strong enough reducer? It's a hydrocarbon though, it burns well in oxygen...
That said, even oxides do break down when heated. Like, that's what smelting is...
Carbon Florine bonds are some of the strongest you will find. Carbon tetrafluoride CF4 is almost as safe as nitrogen at room temperature. Tetrafluoroethylene C2F4 is actually explosive on the other hand because of it’s carbon carbon bond, the stuff is happy to spit out the carbon and get CF4.
> Maybe the other half of the compound is not a strong enough reducer?
It's about as strong as most of the molecules on your body.
But I don't think that fluoride moving around is the problem. Looks like the problem is exactly the stability, and some long foreign molecules installing themselves in your body.
> Now, since PFOA belongs to a large group of chemicals called PFAS, consisting of 4,700 similar substances, it might be tempting to just switch to one of the other PFAS chemicals that hasn’t been restricted yet. But that wouldn´t solve the problem, it would only postpone and perpetuate it. [1]
I.e. there's a whole zoo of similar compounds, and all those type specific safety claims are all at room temperature. The whole point of their use is often on heated surfaces, getting near and over the safety limit.
Sorry, but PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) may be a PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances but not a Perfluorooctane Sulfonate PFOAS) however, it is definitely not a PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid).
Your link does not contain a reference to PTFE and looking at the meaning of the acronyms should provide evidence fluorethylene is not a sulfonate or an octanoic acid.
The manufacture of PTFE may involve generating these as bio-hazardous byproducts and PTFE could be contaminated or even break down into them, but they are chemically not the same.
I think you misread: GP claimed that PTFE is a type of PFAS, and separately: PFOA is also a type of PFAS. And if PFAS is the problem, it wouldn't be useful to ban specific classes like PFOA if they are just replaced by different classes of PFAS.
I'm not sure about the last claim: it isn't clear that all PFAS are equally bad, so replacing PFOA with a different PFAS might be worthwhile. It seems hard to study, but with Europe banning PFOA, perhaps we'll get some more insight.
Here’s a direct quote from your link: “Health Risks of Teflon Coating
Teflon is generally safe, but heating it to above 300 degrees Celsius or 570 degrees Fahrenheit poses a danger to your health.”
Note they didn’t say Teflon was safe at 299C, the risk is chemical breakdown not a phase transition like water which boils at a specific temperature and pressure. When used properly pans shouldn’t get anywhere close to that temperature range but it’s very possible to get to a dangerous temperature if there isn’t food in the pan.
All the carbohydrates will be coated with Acrylamide or burnt to a crisp. Acrylamide is believed to be a carcinogen (Acrylamide is converted to a compound called glycidamide , which causes mutations in and damage to DNA) and shown to be in animal models.
Once you're frying, roasting, and grilling things at this temperature you are increasing cancer risk completely unrelated to any cooking materials involved. That's true of french-fries, bread, steaks and a zillion other things. It's why they're tasty (see Malliard reaction).
I certainly consider cast iron relatively safe, but it's polymerized unsaturated oil is likely to leach acrylamide and associated chemicals. It's just that compared to the food you're eating it's not relevant.
Hate to be the raving "seed oils are going to kill you" guy, but Acrylamide can be greatly reduced by swapping your vegetable-based cooking oil with something like tallow, lard, or coconut oil: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27374529/
I see online a lot of talk of the temperature and off-gassing relationship. I've also heard that it's slightly misleading because it's temperature and time dependent, where the temperature risk has to occur in such a short period of time that it doesn't reflect cooking use. However, I could not find the off-gassing studies; do you have links? It seems like the temp of 340C most often cited, apparently from a DuPont study.
> PS: Toothpaste which you should mostly spit out generally contains less than 0.5% fluoride compounds such as sodium fluoride NaF or tin fluoride SnF2, the F in both being Florine.
And table salt is made out of Sodium and Chlorine, one of which is explosive when mixed with water, and the other is used to gas soldiers in trenches if you're into committing war crimes.
What matters is what effect the particular chemical has when you put it through common household uses, not the effect of its constituent parts.
I added that because the first two responses seemed to be confused.
Anyway, uncommon household uses can also be a safety concern. People still do occasionally get poisoned by mixing ammonia and bleach even despite the repeated warnings.
Talking about the constituent parts is similarly relevant when you’re heating something to significant temperatures. Many reasonably safe substances really shouldn’t be tossed on a bond fire etc. For other things it’s not the substance itself that’s a concern but impurities from the manufacturing process. People often think of past recalls as companies doing something dumb, but I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get this stuff right.
What does the oxygen double bond bit do? (Automation/controls here and high school organic chemistry was a long time ago, but I've printed kilos and kilos of PLA parts... some parts seem fine after being installed outdoors in full sunlight in a hot environment, they're nonstructural and covered in dust though.)
I'm sorry if this is inaccurate, I'm pulling from orgo 10+ years ago, and I feel like an artist using feelings.
If you look into molecular orbital theory, the double bond causes overlap, which makes the bonds unstable. It can more easily jump off and create a new bond. If you want to see an even worse situation, look at Nitrogen triple bonds.
Further, the extra oxygen attached to the carbon makes the bond a bit polar since you have such a heavy electron clump on one side of the carbon.
When neighboring carbons are linked to oxygen, you get a less stable molecule.
That said, yeah, PLA is known to not be very stable, and that's part of the reason its biodegradable. It degrades into lactic-acid based large molecules that living beings have no problem on destroying. (But are toxic when you get several grams of it, so beware if you are doing strange chemical experiments with PLA.)
Prusa has some good info on it. It’s not recommended for outdoor use although I have some outside now doing fine so far (I’m testing PLA vs PETG). https://help.prusa3d.com/article/pla_2062
PLA - poly(lactic acid) - is biocompatible to the point that it is used in medical implants. It breaks down into lactic acid, which the body produces itself during exercise and can safely metabolize.
Breathing smoke and dust from PLA is bad, because breathing any type of smoke or dust is bad. Wildfire smoke is bad, but wood is not a harmful chemical.
We actually do understand the chemistry of plastics. And to a very large extent they are very safe, primarily because they are incredibly stable and non-degradable.
Even the studies of e.g. BPA health issues point to very weak effects. You need to do meta-analysis on tens of thousands of individuals to have statistically significant effects, and even then they are weak and it's not easy to say whether you have successfully eliminated confounding factors.
And "BPA-free" plastics just use BPF instead, with very similar chemistry. The consumer-facing BPA fuss is primarily driven by companies that want to sell products; health agencies are primarily concerned with occupational exposure, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger in terms of dose per body weight. BPA is metabolized in the kidneys to the benign BPA-G and excreted in urine; a dose 250 000 times the EU dose limit is cleared by the body in 24 hours.
PFAS is a similar story. Over long timescales with stupid disregard for basic PPE, like cross country ski waxing trailers where people were breathing C8-dust without masks for a thousand hours per year, there has been clear health concerns identified. So people are saying "there is no safe lower dose limit" and companies are switching to chemicals that haven't been used in the same context so there is little to no data on exposure safety, and saying "this will be safer".
What plasticizers, chain extenders, flame retardants, fillers, stabilizers, colorants, reinforcements, blowing agents, antistatic agents, and lubricants are used with PLA?
I'm not asking to play 'gotcha' with your comment, but because when I've attempted to do my own research on this, I find it easy to get information on the polymer itself, but the polymer is never used by itself in a product. As far as I can tell, most polymers are not actually useful without a cocktail of additional chemicals added to them to change their physical characteristics. From my research, raw polymers tend to be extremely brittle and frangible, completely unrecognizable when compared to the products we use made from them.
And those additional chemicals are extremely difficult to find information on. Like when they're used, what they are, etc.
As a person completely naive to the finer points of plastics manufacture-do these additives tend to be drawn from a fairly small and well-understood universe of chemicals and combined in predictable ways, or is it a bit more DIY at the level of a specific manufacturing plant or product spec or batch run?
I guess my mind is instinctively reaching for the ways FDA attempts to ensure food safety by compelling manufacturers to publish ingredient lists, and by maintaining registries [0] of hopefully-well-understood additives (and banning the rest, in historically dangerous categories like colorants).
Sure from time to time agitators take that information out of context to whip up a scare about one ingredient or another, and sure some of the food that comes in from overseas has after-the-fact labeling that’s a little sus. But at least there’s an expectation that the information must exist and be legible.
Actually I think both cancer and plastics needs to remain as jargon for their respective fields, and instead media should focus on specifying the important elements that are easily digestible to the public and also not too wide reaching. Somewhat of a lost art apparently.
To stay with your example, it would be like discouraging the media from saying "cancer is cured" when they actually might mean "this specific type of lung cancer has a cure". To bring it back to "plastic", the media could focus on saying things like "teflon coating encourages these negative reactions..." as opposed to "plastics are poisoning us" which is way too vague to matter.
> You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine.
Can we? Have these been tested? Alone and/or while interacting with other such things in the wild? Or have these chemicals/plastics been introduced because they can be (i.e., no regulation or oversight), not because they are safe and have been proven to be so.
The default of "they're safe" is not the default we should be using.
We refer to them as plastics because it's meaningful and useful to do so in most contexts, including the context of the harm they do. Whether that harm is done during manufacturing or ingestion is irrelevant. They're all plastics and they all cause harm.
It's not useful to nitpick over their long chains or oxygen double bonds. That rhetoric contributes nothing but deflective nerdery and confusion to the conversation.
As we become more interested in the relatively new information about these materials, different kinds of conversations are occurring than we've had in the past. To facilitate these new interests, it's entirely possible that some of the more specific terms could/should/will become part of the household or water-cooler vernacular. BPA already has.
> deflective nerdery
FWIW, the point about carbon bonds was actually a response to nerdery that's already present here, in a forum intended for digging into the nerdy details of various subjects.
"Plastic" is not actually a useful or meaningful term. E.g. if scientists made perfect artificial skin that was atom for atom identical to your skin it would be mostly made of plastic.
Not all "plastics" cause harm (at least, not any more than the skin you shed every day).
If you go up to someone in the street, and tell them about the plastic in the water supply and food they eat, how it's harming them, and that we need to better clean it up and regulate it, they're going to understand exactly what you're talking about, and they won't get into a debate with you about whether you're talking about dead skin, artificial skin, or BPA.
They won't understand, they'll just think they do. Just as if you talked about the dangers of "chemicals" and how dihydrogen monoxide kills thousands of people a year.
I've seen countless disagreements on numerous topics caused by people thinking they both have the same definition of a term and even more instances of confusion because the intuitive implicit definition that came from the example usages they'd seen of a term was a non-representative subset of the things matched by the explicit definition.
Nuance and clarity of language matters, otherwise you'll ban "chemicals" and discover you actually have no sane definition of it and are inflicting a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Many dental flosses are literally strands of ptfe and some studies correlate using them with higher blood concentrations of pfas.
Many “compostable” paper food and drink containers are lined with a ptfe film, which does get into the food.
Okay sure maybe it’s all leftover pfas reagents, (or maybe some break down but ignore that) it’s impossible for anyone to know that this particular instance of ptfe doesn’t have residual pfas.
No, we are awash in labels already and I am sick of everything having a legal treatise attached to it. Labels just throw the problem back in the laps of consumers, an approach which clearly does not work.
> No, we are awash in labels already and I am sick of everything having a legal treatise attached to it. Labels just throw the problem back in the laps of consumers, an approach which clearly does not work.
Some labels are good and informative. Some labels are just a way for corporations to blame consumers for what consumers cannot do anything about.
Falsehood:
- "Consumers are purchasing toxic products, so that is what we make."
Reality:
- "Consumers buy what is available and they can afford."
Recycling labels are some of the biggest falsehoods. Many plastics are simply not recycled at all, I think at best only #1 and #2 plastics are largely ever recycled. Even things like orange juice containers are considered not recyclable due to their heavy plastic coatings inside the paper shell and they will get sorted out to be dumped.
It's one way industry has scammed the public by convincing them much of the waste generated by low-cost (to the manufacturer) packaging was recyclable.
Brand names were introduced to fight product adulteration. We still default to assuming that is working today. We should probably demand that this is actually true.
Like those "WARNING: This product can expose you to [name of chemical], which is known to the State of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov." stickers. Fortunately I don't live in California.
The problem is that without labels you're having someone in government decide what risk levels are acceptable to everyone and that simply doesn't work when you have a population that includes upper class suburban mum who is willing to pay for $100 bananas to decrease her lifetime cancer risk by 0.01% and a homeless dude with a $20/week food budget.
And guess which one of these groups has actual influence on government policy? Yup, its the poor who get screwed.
Government regulation often benefits everyone. When a regulation forces all manufacturinng to reach a certain standard, then economies of scale for that drive down the overall price.
If you let consumers decide, what you end up with is upper class suburban mums eating healthy bananas, while the homeless dude eats bananas that were grown in a superfund site.
The main criteria for government regulation is that it appears to benefit the upper middle class who influence government (by being the media, by being organized voters/campaigners and by being the actual senior government people discussing and deciding). Where the regulation is low cost and scales well you get an improvement for the poor too. If scale doesn't apply well (e.g. surgery) or if regulation helps and doesn't harm the upper middle class (e.g. the mountain of regulations around housebuilding in the uk) or if the regulation only appears helpful (e.g. the overregulation of nuclear power) then the poor will suffer (e.g. by dying while on waiting lists or being unable to afford housing or having eye watering electricity bills).
Even if you disagree with my particular examples of the above three classes I think you'll be able to come up with something for each of them.
I see your point though I think you're overstating it. TBH I think the nutrition facts label works reasonably well, and balances sufficiency with market flexibility.
You might not think much about having specific types of labels, but its basically impossible for a chemist to know anything beyond ~8 generic types of plastic in the US.
Target is an example of labels working and allowing consumers to be informed while still taking responsibility at the corporate level.
They have a chemical policy[1] that is moving in the right direction, and labels like Oeko-Tex 100, Oeko-Tex Made in Green, Clean Beauty, BPA Free, Paraben Free and Recycled. The changes they are making as a part of their chemical policy (eliminating PFAS and other concerning chemicals from cleaning and baby items) are benefiting everyone, and consumers who have specific concerns can quickly get more information about what they are buying. Most consumers are increasingly aware of risks, but most do not have the desire or time to look into the manufacturing process for everything they buy.
Our skin is a (bio)plastic. It is indeed a completely useless term. Distinguishing between "synthetic" and "non-synthetic" isn't very useful either; all these compounds have in common is that they are toxic carbon-based polymers. It's the fact that they're toxic that is important, not that it's a carbon-based polymer.
I don't want more labels. I don't want to have to be an "informed consumer" when im buying cookware in order to know whats going to give me cancer. Those products shouldn't exist.
Everything has or might have a risk. For all we know carrots increase the risk of cancer.
If we banned everything that increases the risk of some sort of bad thing we'd probably end up banning everything (or more realistically, everything we'd do studies on).
No, the symmetry of "anything could be dangerous" is broken by reality, by what is actually dangerous. Arguments of the form "all things look the same if you ignore all their differences" don't work.
Uh... I think you're assuming all your readers have the same precise understanding of "actually dangerous" that you do.
Is walking "actually dangerous"? Is cycling? Is driving? Is swimming? Is hang gliding? Different people will give different answers to these questions and I've even kept them all to the domain of transportation!
Once you get to the realm of all chemistry things get very murky. E.g. Is sugar dangerous?
In practice we're evolved creatures full of hacks that work well enough to mostly not die before we've had kids, I would be very surprised if there was a single substance we consume (both intentionally and not) that doesn't damage something.
I thought the reason people switched to PLA for 3D Printers is that the fumes for it were less toxic than other types of filament. I've never heard of PLA being used for food containers.
We have this attitude regarding materials which is pretty close to “innocent until proven guilty” but the fact of the matter is that all you can know about any novel material is whether or not it kills you quickly.
I think we either need to appreciate that the industrial world is poisoned and take that as the cost of doing business OR stop poisoning ourselves at the cost of substantial technological progress.
Ester bonds are not usually dangerous. Wait until you find out what all the natural and synthetic flavorants inside your food are!
As far as polyesters go, the main cause for concern is the endocrine disrupting effect of polyethylene terephthalate[1] and the inability of PET to be broken down completely, leading to microplastic pollution. By contrast, PLA can be broken down by heat or a select number of micro-organisms, and the lactic acid monomer used to produce it is non-toxic. The polymer is formed by a simple condensation reaction to form ester linkages, releasing water. Esters are a very common and generally benign moiety found everywhere in nature, for example in cutin found in plants, forming the rigid exterior of cells exposed to the elements. [2]
I thought bio / water degradation of PLA was seen as a feature.
PLA and other acid co polymers are used in resorbable stitches and polymer medical devices where the biproducts are organic acids and carbon dioxide.
I second the ‘I don’t know’ for actual health effects of PLA but wanted to provide a counter point to comparing PTFE (indestructible C-F bond) to PLA (readily hydrolized C(=O)O- bonds)
Yeah, the problem is definitely that the recycling numbers on plastics aren't detailed enough... /s
Bonus points if you can tell me what each recycling number on plastic means without looking it up (it's the internet, so I have no way to enforce this).
Remind me why should we save the environment/planet? At this point its owned by big corporations and governments, so it should be them who need to save it.
Glad to see this is finally coming out in main stream media. Its been well known for decades among the so called "conspiracy theorists". Same thing with pesticide/herbicide being endocrine disrupting and cancer causing chemicals. Hopefully this type of thing start to get as much visibility and legislation as the so called "climate crisis" does.
I've never heard of anyone referring to this as a "conspiracy theory". The toxicity of many types of plastics has been common knowledge for a very long time. Same with pesticides/herbicides. This has been discussed in "main stream media" for years, probably decades. There have even been various legislative attempts to curb their usage or improve their safe disposal.
There are definitely people who land squarely in conspiracy theory land for this. For example, those who avoid literally all plastic, and won’t eat something that touched even the most stable forms of plastic, despite having little to no evidence of leaching at whatever temperature their bottle of water is at.
Diet is only one part of life, and it's a lot easier to just choose foods lacking added sugar than it is to avoid plastic. Especially if you just only consume raw foods not processed ones. Plastic is in the products you use, the tech you use, the clothing you're marketed, the vehicles you use, the infrastructure you use, the logistics systems of the non-plastics goods you buy, the housewares you use, the house you live in, the infrastructure you rely on, it's harder to point to things that don't involve plastics than things that do.
Personally I think there needs to be more studies on all the plastics shedding from clothing. Maybe there is? But I usually see the focus on ingestion. We all inhale plastic microfibers every day. Is it worse then ingestion? Is it mostly inert? Or are we slowly degrading certain functions in our bodies?
What is the best evidence out there for what behaviors, products etc are, at a personal level, more dangerous?
For example, I have a Breville Precision coffeemaker. How much plastic is getting leached into my daily cup of coffee? Should I go back to manual pourovers? What is the real hazard I'm risking? How does this compare to other behaviors I may have?
Are there other behaviors that I can moderate for high bang/buck ratio?
It all depends on global and legislative initiatives.
Only restrictions on the production of plastic and cardboard (!!!) work.
Personal initiatives are just romanticization and a philosophy that shifts the problem from the producer to the consumer (who has no choice).
Metal is an alternative to many things.
Plastic is only for containers and things with a long cycle of use. It has its advantages. It is more resistant to impact than metal (falls, bumps) and retains its shape.
Glass is not an alternative at all, it is not comfortable, it breaks, leaves fragments that you will not find on the ground or in your body. It is not resistant to falls, shocks, frequent temperature changes (just pour hot into a cold cup, or vice versa).
And it's not pleasant to the touch, with limited use where it really is the best choice.
But this is not a problem in itself, we need to localize food production more so that it doesn't have to be stored for a long time and therefore use a lot of packaging. We need it to travel quickly from the producer to the store to the consumer, without plastic packaging as much as possible.
Over the past 4 years, I have been horrified to see that the amount of plastic waste I generate has increased dramatically, without changing my consumption and habits.
>>Only restrictions on the production of plastic and cardboard (!!!) work.
Agreed. we need to price in the externalities into the cost of manufacturing, else it will always be a tragedy of the commons
Realize we literally cannot stop making plastic. If we did, modern civilization would collapse. All PCBs and electric devices have some type of plastic in them, including wires and plugs. The only way to read this comment is via plastic.
Plastics are incredibly useful and enable modern society as you correctly point out. In an ideal world, governments would at least phase out single use plastics.
In Germany, they introduced a system called "Grüner Punkt" (~green dot) in the 90s which was supposed to teach consumers how to separate different kinds of trash to be able to recycle the packaging plastic.
Now about 30 years later, the Germans are eager to sort their trash but the recycling quote is still laughably low. Less than 20% of sorted trash gets recycled for usage in plastic (and instead just burned, reusing the thermal energy) and people still have ridiculous habits (e.g. wrapping Bananas with plastic bags).
What we see is: It's all damn industry lies, one part of politicians susceptible for industry lobbying, the other part of politicians antagonized for "limiting consumer freedom", a lot of green-/whitewashing campaigns and consumers who refuse to change their habits.
GreenDot implementation as a business case for recycling economics was examined here in California when the Electronics Recycling was in formation. There were some structural problems with the way that money moved through the system, the product categories, the marking system and the handling systems. Improvements are possible, and the obstacles in the GreenDot system are real.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadAnd also, the clothes industry is massive and went from an already cheap source like cotton, to plastic.
Consider the forces here that push plastics - influensers, marketers and huge brands. It's hard to find consumers or manufacturers willing to pay several times more for the better alternative..
EDIT:
In the end, it's up to consumers. Personally, I'm using glass, it's infinitely re-usable. I use hemp clothes, it lasts many times longer and I don't own a car, I bike everywhere.
We already have this. It's called trash can. How would letting the producers handle this instead would change anything? The plastic was still produced and will end up in a landfill or the ocean.
I see no reason the same couldn't be true of most packaging, in addition to things like TV's. If you built it, you ought to be uniquely positioned to recycle it.
In addition to trying to get consumers to change their habits we should also be fining/billing manufacturers when their stuff end up as litter or in a landfill. If they don't like it, they can redesign their processes to avoid it.
If recycling is not an option, burning would at least solve the problem of microplastics, if a complete burn of these materials can be achieved. Controlled storage in a landfill would be another option, until there are better solutions to handle this type of trash.
My point was that there are some policy options to approach this problem and "all is lost" neither a constructive, nor factually correct point of view.
It’s going to take generations for it to be fixed, and it probably won’t happen until humans and other animals get much much sicker.
We can just go back to the material we used to use for shoes: leather. If there isn't enough cow skin for shoes for 8 billion people, we can just vastly increase the amount of cow farming we do. Oh wait...
My last pair of quality leather shoes held up nicely for about three years and it's now relegated to construction and garden work. My current pair is spotless after two years. The soles on these are synthetic, but they degrade about as quickly as the tops. Not sure where you draw your experience from, they don't match with mine.
EDITED TO ADD: Of course quality shoes can be refurbished with new soles, so even if a leather sole would only last a couple of years, you could simply get a new sole slapped on.
>Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be.
True, but there's tradeoffs here. For hiking boots, for instance, some people swear by "sturdy" hand-made leather boots, but the problem with these is they're much heavier than modern boots made with synthetic materials. For a lot of hiking, you don't want heavy weights on your feet, and the shorter-life tradeoff is worth the performance improvement. I'm sure the same goes for most other sports. Just look at the shoes that professional athletes wear: they're probably plastic-based, and it's not because of cost, it's because it's better to have something that's as lightweight as possible and performs as well as possible, even if that means throwing them away after one competition.
I've hiked quite a bit in various types of boots and yes, It's nice to have lighter shoes, but for most people most of the time a kg more or less won't make the damndest bit of difference. Only a fraction of all hikers are attempting trails under circumstances that require top-notch performance gear.
Anyway, I do agree about using synthetic material for the soles, and leather construction doesn't necessarily have to be super-heavy.
I'm not really worried about "the earth." The planet and nature will continue to exist and even if we fuck up the ecosystem we are dependent on and billions will die as a consequence, "nature" will simply continue to exist. Pretty insects and rainforests don't have an intrinsic value to me but I care about them deeply as the basis for human existence and prosperity.
Also: on the one hand you believe in a worldwide conspiracy to suppress "the truth" but on the other hand you argue that climate change (the addressing of which is a threat to entrenched business interests) is not real because if it were, it would have been solved by now? I mean, do you realize how wacky you sound?
Microplastic pollution in the Himalayas
I have travelled a fair bit and I think the days of describing the Himalayas as remote | pristine are long past.
The area suffers from blow in micro plastics to be sure .. but as your linked article notes:
The staging areas for an Everest ascent, for example, look like an open field rubbish dump with literal tonnes of waste that has been walked in and then abandoned.Southern Ocean coasts and beaches are far more remote in terms of fewer feet on the ground, they, of course, have volumes of washed up micro plastics.
https://www.curtin.edu.au/news/media-release/the-worlds-most...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-08/new-research-disturbi...
https://www.ccwa.org.au/microfibres
The house is really air tight but moisture can get out through the walls easily without causing rot. There are thermal bridges. Window frames are from oak. We have a bit of plastics-based insulation around the foundation and the roof is covered with an oil-based-rubber, but that's about it except for smaller items like cable insulations, switches, etc.
We did some of the interior stuff DIY but the major parts of the construction were done by various contractors.
Also, UK or Canada? Noticed the spelling difference.
We chose wood fibre because we wanted the house's CO2 footprint to be as low as possible. We are slightly above passive house levels in terms of ongoing energy use (mostly because the house has an inefficient shape = not a cube) and we produce more kw/h from solar power each year than we use despite having a relatively inefficient electricity-based heating system. But we also wanted to reduce the CO2 emitted during construction and cement/concrete is really bad in that regard.
The wood fibre insulation has a fraction of the embodied energy/CO2 emissions of concrete and fossil fuel based insulation and it is fully compostable. I could theoretically also be reused if the house is demolished at some point, as it doesn't deteriorate if it stays dry (or is allowed to dry quickly after getting wet), though I think that would be unlikely to happen. Also, wood fibre is an excellent insulator against heat, which is nice given that our summers can get quite hot.
The wood-only construction also eliminates all thermal bridges, as wood is itself an insulator and the required fasteners are small diameter and do not reach through the entire wall.
Professional contractors have professional equipment for this type of construction, though and can put it together really quickly. The basic framing of the house was constructed over a couple of months or so off site (with mostly two guys being involved, I think), transported in pieces to the build site and put together over the span of five days, including the roof construction. The insulation and OSB were added over the span of a few weeks.
No it's not. Please don't spread sinister pro industry falsities like this. Nothing has ever changed because of some symbolic drops in the ocean.
Regulation and collective action is the only thing that has ever worked, all personal lifestyle choices are romanticizations about personal effects that the industry loves because it has pushed responsibility to consumers, like much of the astroturfed recycling movement that is theatre hiding actual policy making.
If people want to do anything that makes any kind of actual difference they should get into anything that's anti the big industry lobbies or collective action and see through the jungle of astroturfing and "lifestyle signaling" greenwashing noise.
I'm hoping more of a technological revolution, like this: https://twitter.com/thebetterindia/status/167302084037433344...
Algae is abundant, easy to grow and completely compostable - the problem - again, is capitalism holding it hostage.
...to vote for politicians who will regulate this shit.
Pushing the responsibility to consumers is just BigCorp's messaging to externalize the responsibility.
This is the exact wrong conclusion to draw. The only way we've ever solved issues like this (CFCs, lead paint, leaded gas, etc.) is on the supply side through regulation. Yes, it's challenging and there are forces resisting these efforts, but it's certainly possible and has been done before.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/pfas-compostable-food-packag...
Now we get some "eco" "compostable" ones. To my untrained eye, aside from the different color, they look and feel exactly the same. They even have a drawing on them that I interpret as "we kill turtles". Not sure how these can be considered "green". I'm also curious how healthy it is to drink a hot beverage out of them.
Not to mention the fact a lot of these “eco” things need special equipment to process which isn’t available everywhere
Found this with some quick googling: https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1541-4337.12...
Seems like the risk comes from additives to PLA? Seems exhausting to try and stay informed.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
That is very surprising given that PLA can't support heat.
Does the cup get out of the machine in a complete different shape? Because if it's PLA, it should.
Of course, as George Carlin used to say, the planet is fine: it's us that are fucked. We'll see how bad the effects of plastics on the long term really are, but if anyone suffers, it'll be us, not the planet or life on it in the long term.
Only if there is an alternative, which doesn't exist at the moment. And no, plastics are way less dangerous than lead point or asbestos, its main problem is its sheer quantity.
And what are we supposed to do against this, raise in arms?
In my country we have two big parties but they are in cahoots (practically have the same progressive opinions on everything) so we can't even vote to have these authoritarian policies removed. There obviously are other parties but it would take something big, or reaching a tipping point, to break this cycle. It's not as easy as "no one cares". Many of us care but are powerless.
What did they replace takeout containers with? Where I live, they replaced them with "paper" containers that are lined with teflon...
But are a big net loss for any reason you can have to the ban.
If you make an awareness campaign, people will replace a lot of it with glass, metal, or plastic that actually gets reused. But they keep using a lot of single-use things. If you out-right ban them, people go directly to what can out-right replace them, and it's always those things.
So what is the food from the supermarket packaged in? I assume mostly in single use plastics.
Paper bags at the supermarket, food came in glass or butcher paper, that kind of thing. We got along fine.
We need to ban all materials that persist with poisonous degradation products. Most bottles should then transition back to glass or to enamel-lined (not BPA) cans. Glass persists for thousands of years but isn't much different from rock. There's no need to worry about glass pollution because fragments quickly weather.
the argument that glass is better in terms of decomposition when littered stands, but does not tell the whole story. (not unlike guns are good for self defense but the externalities paint a totally different picture)
If you don't have functioning eyes, I apologize, and imagine being blind and barefoot is a tricky combination.
all i wanted to say is that glass bottles are no silver bullet because they also have negative consequences.
Stainless steel containers are less likely to produce this scenario when dropped. (-:
Although…they may need some MagicEraser equivalent or a suitable soak to remove latent flavours and odors. /-:
I don't think this for a second.
I think the only way it will stop if equivalent biodegradable materials can be made to replace single use plastic.
There's always a reason to say you can't do it, but I do what I can and if it's important to you you can too. It's a change in habit and lifestyle, that's all. Live lighter and don't rely on comfort like you'll die without it.
While for some people it's a comfort issue there are lots of people that will literally die without cooling during heatwaves.
Besides that, you can't expect people to be productive (especially in jobs where you're supposed to make use of your brain) when they are slowly cooked in a hot office.
But everyone lived without air conditioning for all of human history until about a hundred years ago. The number of people who will die without it is much less than you'd think, and there are ways to keep cool without it that people used when they build houses, public buildings etc before air conditioning.
If it costs me $20k to get the solar panels + battery set up and they're good for ~15-20 years, its not really a $2/mo power bill. Amortizing the $20k over 20 years that's still just under $84/mo for the hardware. If it only lasts me 15 years its ~$111/mo.
And that's assuming I had all the cash on hand at the time to install the system and didn't need to take out a loan. If I had to finance half of that ($10k), at 6% APR over that 20 years that's $71/mo for just the financed half and adding that $10k amortized is another $41.66 for a total of ~$112/mo.
But hey my power bill is only $2/mo!
The batteries are so expensive that they pretty much throw cost savings out the window, but it’s very nice having the added resilience to power outages, as well as knowing we can run the A/C and charge the car (especially at night) without causing our local utility to burn more coal.
I’m not under any delusions that my solar panels are going to save the world, but at the same time I think it’s important that we all do what we can while we expend our efforts in other ways too (voting, petitioning local governments and utilities to allow and incentivize more solar, etc.) that will have a much bigger effect if successful. I also like setting an example for the people around me. Since adding solar, we’ve had several neighbors and family members ask about it, and two so far have added solar themselves. I of course don’t know, but I like to think I may have at least nudged them in the right direction when they decided to add solar to their own houses.
I use no solar or anything like that, but I do intend to, if I want to continue living light like this I would be able to do it all on modest solar.
It doesn't hurt that I live near the ocean, and in a pretty small space (albeit not well insulated at all; I prefer to spend my time outdoors so the space is for sleeping and showering and cooking and what not) so summers are not as extreme and winters too, but it does get hot/cold enough that I need something for the extreme parts of the year.
How do you do that? I can't get mine under 20EUR/month. Do you never cook at home?
Please share these handful of lifestyle changes.
Here is what i have been doing for a decade and would receommend
1. Reusing plastic bags (i love cotton bags but not ideal). Fold and keep one or two in your pocket before you leave home
2. Support and use light software so you dont need to upgrade your gadgets (12y laptop i use)
3. Prepare and eat home cooked meal (its 360d in my life). Good for your health and the environment
4. Plant Trees. i plant one every month on average
5. Collect rain water and/or use less water
4. Prefer walking over any other transporation
5. Dont fucking care about trends.
6. Sleep 8hrs. less waking hours means less consumation.. lol
7. Prefer quality over quantity everytime.
8. Carry a water bottle (copper ideal).
9. fuck sugary drinks.
Why is copper better than stainless steel?
(For some hints, see the sketches of the Dwarven Kama Sutra found in JRR Token’s estate)
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3067274/
You can usually tell if the water in your bottle is going bad / filled w bacteria..
If this is not possible, take in mind that your immune system can take care about bacteria. In 99% of the cases after a learning period, local bacteria will stop being a problem. Unless your live in areas with very unsafe water sources or particularly dangerous organisms this shouldn't be a main factor in the choice.
> If you have been drinking water that has been constantly stored in copper bottle or vessel, chances are high that you might be at the risk of copper toxicity. It can cause severe nausea, dizziness, abdominal pain and can result in liver and kidney failure.
No thank you. I get the struggle to not use plastics, I try to avoid it myself too (especially buying water in plastic bottles in shops is something I never do), but alternatives are subpar, either very heavy, fragile and overall impractical for outdoor sports (ie glass), or some other issues. What happened to stainless steel? Heavy but at least should be inert and nearly indestructible, no? I mean those without some crap BPA lining inside, like thermos but single walled.
Not sure about that -- With modern pollution rain water is not likely to be safe to drink (depends on your location)
> 9. fuck sugary drinks
Massive yes! Amazing for your own health too.
There are lots of "grey water" uses that don't require drinkable water, like watering plants, flushing toilets.
Yes. I've heard/read grey mentioned many times in permaculture articles.
I like the fact that permaculture takes a systems or holistic approach.
Another nice, small but useful example of permaculture design is the concept of guilds, when it comes to planting crops around a house.
They plant by category, in concentric bands called guilds, with the guild nearest to the house having most commonly used plants such as herbs, then vegetables, then grains, then fruit trees, etc.
So you have to walk less to tend to or harvest them.
Edit: I may have used the term "guild" incorrectly.
The Wikipedia article on permaculture uses it differently, under the section "Guilds".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_(ecology)
Guilds are about companion planting - they're combination of plants that form a small ecosystem where they provide benefit to each other. E.g. comfrey is often used around fruit trees to break up subsoil (it has very long taproots, to 10 feet or so), and as a prolific mulch producer (cut it back every couple months, and chop and drop the leaves in place). Nitrogen fixing plants are common, as a way of providing nutrients. Etc.
Water availability is also very different from country to country, region to region, and even town to town. How your water usage affects the environment depends on so many things.
Air pollution does change abruptly, but on most places it tends to not do that frequently.
Also washing, showering can be done with rainwater if you are really a minimalist.
Professional car wash places are required (depending on location) to collect and dispose of their waste water in a safe way. When you wash the car in the driveway, the waste water will either go into the ground or the storm drains, neither of which will ensure that the waster is cleaned before reentering the environment.
If the rain is falling on your car it will have the same issue, no?
So not really "free" at all, and rather expensive enough that nobody does it...
You can also skip that entirely with a composting toilet. Again depending on your local laws, gray water can often be drained directly outside, potentially through a leech field if required. Plenty of areas allow this for specific uses like washing machines, the only reason it can't be done with standard toilets is because of the solid waste.
Do you have land on your own, or is there some public land where you can plant trees?
Which is why I asked, what OP actually did.
I know folks who have planted trees on public land and on land owned by corporations, which seems cool but also kinda stressful.
It's toxic…
Copper pots are not copper on the inside because of this reason.
A bit less minimalistic: ride your (non e-) bike, scooter, skateboard, kayak, sled, basically anything non motorized. Use best tire quality so you don’t change then often.
A bite more minimalistic: prefer walking barefoot anytime you can. Shoes are tire that wear out.
King of related: still looking for shoe/soles that last. My grand mother used to wear wood clogs, not sure where to find some that fits me.
How are you going to transport heavy goods without some kind of motorized or motor-assist vehicle? Unless you want to keep horses or donkeys.
Ebikes are a godsend. Without one I'd have to get things delivered by van.
This is the problem with environmentalism-as-actually-practiced -- the conversation starts with plastic pollution, you look away for five seconds, and suddenly there are a bunch of ascetics one-upping each other in the "LARP as a third-world peasant" game. There is no social defense mechanism against it. Normal people look at this and think "no thanks". It's all about focus on minimizing downside and (implicitly) self-flagellation for the sin of living in a rich country; there is no focus on things with upside potential, like "how do we increase the supply of clean energy so we can have cheap material abundance".
I don't want to live in squalor. I want to enjoy a hot shower of crystal clear desalinated water, heated by electricity made in the searing heart of a nuclear reactor, and it all costs a fraction of a penny to run.
It’s not about copying thinks third world but about health, resource management and public space enjoyability.
There's guides for making huaraches with tire rubber.
And there's also barefoot sandals that claim to last a life time (but cost like 100 bucks).
https://ahinsashoes.com/
The most environmentally friendly would be used shoes if possible, even if they don't last that long.
I have a pair of ENIX Sandals I bought 6 years ago that I wear when it's really hot. They're also great.
1. Buy less stuff
2. Buy secondhand stuff
3. Ride a bicycle
4. Eat less meat, more local produce
3. 4. 5. 4. are barely positive if positive at all (considering environment, some are definitely healthy)
For most, it would require living in a smaller space, in a more urban area and is probably the most people can do to reduce that impact on the environment.
The energy spend that comes from living in detached single family home that multiplies all the distances mass has to travel back and forth from that home (and subsequent homes) dwarfs everything else.
But, for example, preferring walking to more energy efficient cycling means you need more calories => eat more => affect environment more.
Very often living healthy is at odds with being environment friendly. I do not say you should live unhealthy but lets not confuse those two things.
I guess a more accurate descriptor is “non car dependent living”.
And that’s just one event.
Being politically active and pushing for a carbon tax would do far more than any amount of individual lifestyle choices.
Would this not incentivize offshoring even more and artificially lengthening supply chains to "hide" emissions?
Sure, for walkable destinations. Having a bike is more efficient (calories per mile) and hugely increases the practical range. Commuting, even grocery shopping, and being social is hugely more practical on a bike then walking.
…and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Wilson’s disease is surprisingly common at 1 in 30,000.
You should reevaluate what you consider common. Schizophrenia, a condition you probably rarely witness in every day life, is around 1 in 100. You don't interact with 30,000 people even over the course of a year.
silica -> iron -> aluminum -> copper
With a logarithmic scale unit between each step or so. We ingest and tolerate much more aluminum than copper in our daily journey and we could drink water with much more iron oxide dissolved on it than aluminum oxide without suffering permanent problems
Fortunately, it is pretty much impossible to come in contact with pure titanium, because whenever it is exposed to air it becomes immediately covered with titanium dioxide.
The ratio between electric charge and radius of the titanium ions is such that titanium dioxide is one of the least soluble oxides. It is practically inert in water or blood.
This inertness of the titanium dioxide ensures that titanium is one of the safest materials for making implants that will have to stay forever in a human body or for making objects that will be in contact with food.
While glass remains the best food-contact material, titanium is a decent choice for applications where glass might break, e.g. spoons.
On that scale, titanium would be placed between silicon and iron. It should be kept in mind that the position on that scale actually refers to the behavior of the oxides, not of the pure elements, because all the elements mentioned are oxidized quickly in air and they are oxidized even faster in a living body.
Titanium dioxide is more inert than silicon dioxide, so less of it can become dissolved, but once the two oxides are dissolved, the silicon dioxide is safer, because most living cells have mechanisms to deal with it.
They both have issues, but the latter is still worse than the former.
Most homes have copper water pipes. That's probably more important to test as corrosion in water bottles should be easy to spot. There are test kits one can buy to test their water at home.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...
Especially when they come in plastic bottles and not glass ones.
I dont think cooking at home necessarily produces less plastics. Most (in Norway) veggies, meats, some spices, sauces, etc come in plasticcontainers.
This is good since it preserves the produce, so it has a longer shelf life. but the drawback is plastic.
Not being a fan of sugary drinks is fine, but as long as people buy water coffee, etc in pastic it is not a clear win for the environment. It is a win for a persons health.
10. Eat plants.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free an area as big as Africa for wildlife/reforesting) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Eat more plant-based foods https://www.un.org/en/actnow/food
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-...
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/1/8/5610806
Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car.
12. Less or no children.
All of the above, combined.
IMHO the best way to limit our negative impacts is
- stop exploiting other countries (there are almost no poor countries, only overexploited ones)
- urbanization ( https://i.redd.it/fl28yusb1r5b1.jpg )
- abandoning fossil fuels (so far we're not making a dent https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-growth-di... )
- stopping animal agriculture (destruction of the environment, biodiversity, pollution, overfishing ...)
Here is the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland, playing right into the hands of those authoritarian monsters.
> Good luck trying to convince Russia or China
Whataboutism. Best way to avoid doing anything.
> the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland
That's incredibly foolish.
There are two possible answers to climate change: avoidance and preparation. Avoidance means that the world reduces its CO₂-footprint to zero or less to limit global warming or even to revert it. Preparation means that, if global warming cannot be avoided, states prepare for the changes in weather, sea level, agriculture, etc.
Avoidance can only work if all nations worldwide do participate to reduce their CO₂-footprint. If some big nations do nothing, or even worse, if non-consumption of fossil fuels by western nations causes a price drop and a shift of fossil fuel consumption to the rest (instead of an overall reduction), avoidance by the west is pointless and a waste of resources. All the world has to participate for avoidance to be successful.
On the other hand, preparation mostly works on a more local level. Nations with coastlines invest to protect those, nations threatened by water shortages invest in countermeasures such as maybe desalination or storages, etc. Even if the rest of the world doesn't care, preparation will mostly work for the local community.
Both avoidance and preparation need a lot of resources. But allocation to avoidance is only sensible if every nation agrees to it, otherwise those resources are wasted and far better spent on preparation.
- keep packing more fellow on your homeland, our children with them. Don’t change anything but wish them good luck, the Science and Industry will solve everything as it always did anyway, right ? Guess what, it won’t make the two giants stop being authoritarian.
- not doing (much) more children in your homeland so no descents will suffer from the density. The “authoritarians monsters” will probably profit of that.
Do you really value democracy and freedom (I value it a lot, me too) so much that you continue gambling with descents’s home habitability?
It’s not about giving up but about recognizing that adding more soldiers won’t stop the war.
I want people to think big. Instead of carrying a water bottle and use paper bags focus on how you can help a whole country like India or China or even a whole continent like Africa.
Set goal of stopping Coca-Cola from dumping their plastic waste in Afrika. This would include much more effort than just carrying a water bottle or sleeping 8h.
…Said the Easter Island native
…Said the XX century boomers
Would you elaborate on your thought? Why questioning the demography is “enemy of mankind”? Is there other subjects/sciences we should avoid completely to be friends with mankind?
as do their human companions. I mean if you're going to Modest Proposal pets, why stop there?
And here's #13: turn off your phone, your laptop, your desktop computer. Read a book if you want edification. Go talk to someone in person if you want to express your opinion.
Don't try to blame the first group for the sins of the second.
I’ve spent a lot of money on numerous steel and plastic water bottles. They all break and good luck recycling them. Most likely they end up in landfill.
PET bottles use less raw resources, are cheap, lightweight, extremely durable, and when they reach end of life they’re easier to “recycle” (downcycle is probably more accurate).
Modern PET bottles shouldn’t leach into your water. You can at minimum use them until the expiry date on the bottle. If you’re concerned about leaching, don’t take my word and do your own research.
You _ may_ be able to take steel to a resource recovery centre. However if the travel uses oil or electricity that comes from coal, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being worse for the environment than a PET bottle.
With regards to leaching, the FDA has declared PET bottles safe for repeated use.
There's almost nothing worse than forever plastics at this point in time. They're everywhere, they're toxic, and we don't know how to fix it.
Steel is recycled as often as it's economically feasible to do. It's not hand selected by consumers because there's already a whole process for dealing with metals in general that's been in place for a hundred years. Which is ideal really, the less I have to select by hand the better.
Here it's scavengers stripping it out of refuse (and everything that's not bolted to the ground, really). In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
The FDA is also cool with BPA, pfas, teflon, etc. Don't rely too much on it. PET is safe, ish. As i wrote: use it, avoid buying new. It does leach microplastic but those are everywhere so it's "safe", and by that I mean it's unavoidable "background pollution" these days, as there's microplastic even inside produce.
True, but they're also good carbon sinks.
That’s not my point and I think you’re deliberately misinterpreting it.
> In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
This sounds like wishful thinking. Do you have any evidence to support this claim? “Don’t worry, just trash it and it’ll probably get sorted in Mexico” doesn’t inspire confidence.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-iron-steel...
PET is at 30%
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
Is your particular bottle going to be part of the 20%? IDK... but it's more likely by definition that the PET one is going to be part of the 70%, and is also more damaging in every possible way.
Except when dropping it on your foot.
PET is a horror show in the failure scenario.
https://www.wasser-aktuell.com/products/1-0l-trekkatanka%E2%...
small dents, but no no issues with lid or seal
There’s replacement parts on their website to get worn out pieces which is convenient.
Apparently I’m depressed too then, as I value my sleep.
without anyone changing their behavior, a massive collapse is guaranteed
with only a portion of people changing, eventually the world all switches over
even besides all that living healthy is to avoid disease, pain, low function, feeling like crap etc
I welcome you to propose a better solution than eco-fascism. I would be genuinely interested in hearing any other suggestions that could work.
Just saying "Let's all stop being nasty and live in peace" doesn't work, unfortunately.
These days, not so much. I believe in building communities via mutual aid and support, and that if people have their basic needs meet they will produce incredible results. People want to do good, but are often too tired or too afraid or too burnt out to do it.
1. Pour all your effort into becoming a kinder, wiser human, and watch as it rubs off on the people around you in surprising and far-ranging ways, amplifying itself into the world through "network effects." Allow this to become a virtuous cycle.
2. Become cynical and bitter, and watch the opposite happen.
In either case, the world will present you with all the evidence you need that your way is objectively correct and that everyone who sees it differently is clueless (though in the first case, probably not with so much disdain and contempt...).
This is such a insane way to look at it.
The constant fight for increased profit has offshored manufacturing and created a market for constant crap to buy. China isn't expanding industry in a vacuum, to suggest degrowth should only be for the third world, that historically was exploited for the growth of the first world, is honestly a crazy stance.
I like to tell people that eco-fascists are easy to spot, when someone says "we need less people", ask them who goes first.
The west has driven us to this current state for the sake of profit. We ship plastic bullshit across the oceans burning bunker fuel to shave 6 cents a unit off the margin.
The west has built a society so alienated and so dependent on endless, unsustainable growth. The perfect consumer is entirely dependent on capital for their every need. Yet you point out the issue is the third world looking for some dignity after a century of hyper extraction capital.
I saw a silly tweet today, it went "In a way, we're all in a rich dude's poorly designed submersible".
We're all dying for those bastards RPG min/maxing. The real path is anti-profit, durable long lasting items, and interconnected local economies.
Minor snag in your plan: "The West" cannot itself figure out itself "how to live". Witness Jan 6, 2020. And growing strength of Germany's AfD: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-far-right-afd-expands-politica...
The entire chain of things you listed are riddled with plastic. Tools in the manufacturing and shipping processes, to build the roads, insulation, millions of miles worth of pipes for fuel, insulation, water, all the packaging for the food and products, packaging for shipping the products, metric tons of single-use disposable things, large and small, used in all kinds of industry, in our air, food, water. Fucking everywhere.
Oh but thank God I planted a tree and reused a little plastic shopping bag. That'll really hedge against the hell wrought by the plastic-industrial leviathan that's coiled around every part of our lives.
In a rock band, you have a guitarist and a drummer and a singer and a bass player. Not everyone does the same thing. We all need to contribute in different ways at different times.
Plastics are indeed everywhere and have made some aspects of daily life better while making other aspects worse. Neither of the extremes of overemphasizing personal virtue and nihilism are useful.
I would look into the mass production of these plastics and try to change some things there.
(there are two 4. on the grandparent post)
A lot of the classic list of feel good things do little or come with giant asterisks and this is a good example.
Potable water shortages are a very serious problem... that affects particular areas at particular times.
A little town on a tributary of the amazon in the rainy season can use as much water as they want to water their lawns or bath in and it will cause no issues, while a drought striken area must preserve all their water.
Why am I not surprised.
They are also many times thicker than the cotton bags you can buy in stores, so they might very well need another couple generations before they are carbon neutral!
I'm trying to imagine how DoorDash would even work without single-use plastics? Maybe we'd have standardized reusable containers with deposits on them that could be returned to a central location for $1-2 refunds per container, where they'd get sanitized and re-distributed via restaurant supply companies.
0: https://concreteplayground.com/sydney/design-style/returnr-a...
Edited to remove a second link that I failed to double-check before posting.
But that's most of the population doing away with them and most of the population (by my in Australia networked experience) being pretty happy with that.
I'm not aware of any public health campaign either overt or guerilla to convince the public that they're bad healthwise .. your link is to the UK's Daily Mail which is well known for making big drama for click bait and loving to stir up contraversy.
The article linked, reduced to it's core, is reporting on the findings of Associate Professor Dr Mark Green from some years past:
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/individuals/dr-mark-green
which all looks very sound .. but it hasn't (yet ?) turned into any wide spread official public campaign to warn people away from microwaving food in plastic containers.
The Daily Heil [1] loves to manufacture faux outrage and hysteria.
[1] https://spartacus-educational.com/ExamRHU17.htm
As for the link, small potatoes, many get taken in by overly bombastic Daily Mail | Sky News headlines and copy - there's usually always some kernel of truth in them, but a lot has to scraped away to get there.
https://chemtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/PFAS-UK-food-packag...
A rule of thumb seems to be that oil drop test : PFAS make fibers grease-repelling.
Of course it could also just be from a very thin (and much less toxic I assume ?) layer of polyethylene that those non-recyclable "paper" cups seem to use ?
CC Climate change
OD Ozone depletion
HTc Human toxicity, cancer effects
HTnc Human toxicity, non-cancer effects
POF Photochemical ozone formation
IR Ionizing radiation
PM Particulate matter
TA Terrestrial acidification
TE Terrestrial eutrophication
ME Marine eutrophication
FE Freshwater eutrophication
ET Ecosystem toxicity
RDfos Resource depletion, fossil
RD Resource depletion, abiotic
Water Water resource depletion
They also come to the conclusion that it's always better to incinerate paper bags (at end of life) rather than recycling them, which is interesting? If you intend to recycle your paper bag, you need to reuse it 73 times before you do so, because recycling paper is bad (recycling the plastic bag: also bad!). Again, in terms of "total impact"; I think in terms of climate change they say recycling either is good.
And I'm not sure if the paper bags they looked at were themselves made from recycled paper, which they usually are in stores here and which presumably changes the calculation (in either direction). It's odd because they look at like 5 or 6 LDPE variations, including breaking them down as recycled/non-recycled, but I can't find any mention of the paper being recycled or not. Again, 144 pages, maybe I've overlooked it. They do distinguish bleached and non-bleached paper.
Last but not least, they assume you need two paper bags for each LDPE (reference) bag (not enough weight capacity). The same is, hilariously, true for the organic cotton bag (but not the non-organic one!), not because of weight but because of volume constraints. So if they had chosen a slightly smaller -- or larger! -- shopping trip, lots of numbers would go up or down by a factor of two.
I'm not saying the report is bad or anything -- I'm not qualified to say either way --, turns out lifecycle analyses are complicated and full of judgement calls which inevitably get compressed to single statements like the one in the fine article.
Here's the report: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
That reminds me of how much better to-go containers are in some other countries! I was blown away by the quality of to-go containers when I ordered delivery in Beijing, the containers could easily have been used more than once.
I actually would be interested in seeing what a world with zero disposable packaging would look like. Imagine if everything you bought at the grocery store used packaging that you had to return afterward. Think peanut butter put in jars that get returned and cleaned.
Related, I remember when Costco ketchup came in giant gallon sized aluminum cans.
For example, looking at only GHG emissions, you'd have to use a ceramic mug 500 times (without breaking it!) before the GHG emissions of creating the mug was less than the GHG emissions of creating 500 styrofoam cups. That's because a styrofoam cup is 99% air and merely contains 4.4 grams of plastic (about 4mL of volume before it's foamed up and pumped full of gas). Whereas a ceramic mug weighs 200-400 grams. Just kilning the 400g of the mug to dry the clay uses a lot of energy / creates a lot of GHG emissions, compared to processing 4 grams of plastic.
However, GHG emission is just one part of styrofoams environmental impact. The ceramic mug can be crushed up and essentially become part of clay again. The styrofoam just ... never decomposes. The styrofoam contains (and literally is itself) an endocrine disruptor -- so even as it does "decompose" it pollutes the environment with itself and other chemical additives in the polymer. The styrofoam is likely to contaminate your food as well, especially when restaurants put hot food in it and it melts small holes in the styrofoam box, or when kids chew on the styrofoam cups. But then, ceramic mugs may have various harmful metals in them or toxic chemicals/metals in its paint and glaze.
Basically, it's very, very important for us to start doing full hazard and lifecycle analyses of the materials we use at large scales. Overall, I think we're currently greatly underestimating the hazards of most of the newer modern materials. I also think the energy requirements to switch back to traditional materials would be untenable -- and still require ubiquitous quality control to minimize harmful heavy metals / etc in the raw materials.
But I think anyone who says "well it's just too hard then, forge ahead!" is terribly misguided or callous. And most people who say "we need to go back to metal/paper/wood/glass for everything!" needs to be fully prepared to describe to listeners/readers how that would affect daily habits -- you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups. I don't think everyone who pontificates on this is a hypocrite -- many of them do advocate for reducing consumption above all else. It's just a very hard sell.
But we don't have any roadmap at all for taking these contaminants out of the environment once they disperse throughout it.
Of the many things we need to change, this is NOT a hard sell, I have been doing it for several years now, and for the past few years I have even gotten a discount... there's a caveat though : it's a plastic cup (unlike their paper cups with what I assume is an extremely thin plastic layer), and I now realize that I haven't really done the kind of math they did there, neither did I double-check my university where I got it about just how harmful this cup was supposed to be.
Still, some countries (like Germany ?) successfully resisted the phasing out of the (unbroken) glass bottle deposit system, that plastic bottle sellers are trying to get rid of.
Tens of thousands of people already do this, if not more.
The relevant section is 6.3. The cited number is relative to a LDPE carrier bag (page 25 has pictures of what that is). When considering only climate impact, cotton bags are better after 52 times reusing them.
Note that those numbers, as I understand it, assume that the reference LDPE bag is reused as a garbage bag (EOL3), which is optimal but probably not what usually happens? But EOL3 only differs by a factor of about two (page 59) from the other two EOL options, incineration and recycling; I think landfill is not an EOL they looked at because it's not done in Denmark, nor did they consider the impact if the plastic bag is not properly disposed of, ie. it ends up in the environment.
Most people here now use these all the time.
The problem with these sort of equivocations is that they conveniently side-step the categorical argument. One something like; do not surround yourself with trash.
realshadow has rule 7, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503179, "quality over quantity". That is a value argument, not an efficiency argument. Only arguing from efficiency is essentially internalizing the logic of the machine. If everything is evaluated whether it minimized/maximizes one metric or another, quality of life will, inevitably, decline. In this case, surrounded by plastic trash, ingesting, drinking plastic trash.
Plastic bags must die. Why? Because they are trash. That's the value system I would love to see in this world.
Exactly this, I wish I could upvote you a thousand times.
If we stick with the plastic vs cotton bag example, we are considering two factors: some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n. If n=1, would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality? Isn't it also mostly trash in this case? What is trash? I'd argue it's a product that we cannot or do not squeeze any additional utility out of. How about n=10? n=20?
Actually, I would agree with that for sure. The real world is grey, and multiple things are true at once. I'm certainly guilty of leaning to the other extreme here.
> some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n
I believe I understand, and I appreciate the overall push back.
But starkly put, and to be a little flippant ..
> would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality?
.. absolutely yes. Certainly in this case. The reuse number is incredibly (incredibly) flexible. In no world n=1 will be a given. The only reason we have reuse of one for a bag, is out of habit, simply put. Habits change all the time. A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value. It may have a lot of other uses. Do we even need a bag? 80% of time, the store clerk gives you a bag out of muscle memory, not because you can't hold a couple of items in your hands or stuff in your pockets. The utility of a plastic bag might even be closer to 0 than 1.
> It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?
I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
I agree that on average, a cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. Some cotton bags absolutely will only be used once, however. Sometimes it's even predictable that a cotton bag will only be used once. Ideally, we would get people to use whatever product is best suited for the situation at hand on a quality-environmental impact pareto front. There is no catch all that's going to be the best solution in every situation. We shouldn't give out plastic bags like their going out of style, but I'm also not sure we should eliminate them completely.
> I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
Yes, I was trying to say that quality is hard to measure by calling it an ill-defined metric. You are still trying to maximise it, even if you cannot measure it. I get that, I'm with you most of the way, but I just don't think you can only look at quality. We could be creating the most high quality neighbourhood at the cost of increasing entropy outside of it. Nothing comes for free.
I have a lot of unpopular opinions about plastic. I personally think it's not that big of a deal. Benzine compounds are naaty, but they're in your drinking water. I don't like them. But most plastic is organic compounds since it comes from oil. There are already microbes metabolizing it in the wild, and it's a rich energy source that most organisms aren't using, you can expect that adapted niche to be filled very quickly by those organisms. Additionally, I think there's too much of an aversion to burning it. Whether its for disposal or for fuel via depolymerization, I think we need to be burning more plastic. If you're worried about CO2 bear in mind, this stuff is in the environment and will decompose eventually. Overall I'm not that concerned about it, besides some things like PFAS and benzine compounds.
And all that said, I'd bet money I dispose of significantly less plastic than the average European. First is water bottles. I don't do water bottles. I use those 5 gallon jugs and a hand pump dispenser on amazon, it works like a super soaker or a garden sprayer. That alone has me ahead of most Americans. Beyond that I prefer paper bags, and glass over plastic containers. It's just lifestyle decisions, I hardly care but I do it, it's not even effort at this point, it's just different habits. If you care and can't be bothered and I don't care and do it, do you really care? Avoiding single use plastic in your household is not really all that hard, things you can't avoid like linings in cans and what not aren't the problem, grocery bags and water bottles are the big ones, and you can do other things like never buy teflon, which I also do.
It being an organic compound doesn't mean it's safe or something we should ignore. Asbestos is an organic compound with wildly useful properties.
> Additionally, I think there's too much of an aversion to burning it.
At home, its a terrible idea - it's super duper toxic a d leave a horrific nasty waste to dispose of. In a commercial setting maybe, but I'm not convinced it's going to be handled correctly without serious regulation.
> And all that said, I'd bet money I dispose of significantly less plastic than the average European. First is water bottles. I don't do water bottles. I use those 5 gallon jugs and a hand pump dispenser on amazon, it works like a super soaker or a garden sprayer. That alone has me ahead of most Americans.
Eh, are you comparing to Europeans or Americans? I don't have stats handy but tap water is potable and suitable for a large number of uses. No need for any plastic.
> Avoiding single use plastic in your household is not really all that hard, things you can't avoid like linings in cans and what not aren't the problem, grocery bags and water bottles are the big ones, and you can do other things like never buy teflon, which I also do.
You can't just decide the plastics that you use aren't the problem. Avoiding single use plastics might not be hard for you, I live within shopping distance of 3 supermarkets all of whom package most of their fruit and veg in single use plastics. That's my number one source of plastics, and there's nothing I can do about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos
[0] https://defineinstruments.com/blog/epas-list-of-volatile-org...
In rural places a lot of people burn their trash in pits. Just don't stand over it while it's burning and you'll be fine. Id argue this is significantly less bad than it piling up in the ocean.
I'm comparing to Europeans and Americans. I don't drink tap water, I refill 5 gallon jugs.
We probably also don't want a microbe that is so effective at eating plastic, seeing how much we rely on it. At the first sight of a truly plastic eating microbe, manufacturers will start making plastic immune to organic degradation and the cycle starts again.
Same with burning, you can't say it'd end up as CO2 anyway as one is an immediate effect and the other theoretical and very long term. I do agree that "energy recovery" as it is often called is better than landfill disposal but it is the lesser of evils. It's not always clear that not using plastic is a net benefit as its use might be reducing other environmental effects. In which case I agree that using minimal plastic and then using it for power generation is an option.
Supermarkets, which were just coming into vogue, either didn't offer shopping bags or if they did they were made of paper.
Large items came in cardboard boxes and heavy items came in timber crates, fruit came packed in low grade wooden boxes which were later great for storing things in. Heavy machinery was often crated in large wooden containers.
Toys were made of either wood or metal plate or diecast. ...But rarely of plastic. Plastic LEGO wasn't available, instead we kids played with wonderful Meccano made of steel!
By comparison, plastics were few and far between and confined to a certain class of objects such as ballpoint pens, drawing set squares (often celluloid), radio cabinets (Bakelite), but TV sets cabinets were still fabricated from wood (3-ply and or Masonite) although the dials and knobs were plastic.
Despite the current whingeing, the introduction of certain plastics was a great benefit, for example, from the mid 1950s onwards when PVC replaced perishable vulcanized rubber as electrical insulation in household wiring, electrical fires became much less common. That was a great advance forward.
All this happened not that long ago. Things started to go really pear-shaped around the mid 1960s early '70s and by the 1980s it seemed that just about everything came in shrink-wrapped polyethylene or such.
Now I can no longer buy, say a galvanized bucket, instead I have to buy crappy plastic ones that do not last—not long ago I bought three at the supermarket and the handle fell off one even before I got it home. Large plastic bins I use to put things in are made of polyethylene or similar and after the plasticizer bleeds out they becomes brittle and crack then fall to bits—it really is a damn pain this stuff just doesn't last.
Plastics have their place. One of the great problems is that they are being abused in the ways we use them, back to those storage containers for a moment: if made of a good high grade durable plastic that's also thick enough not to break in normal use they'd last a lifetime after which they could be disposed of properly, instead they are deliberately designed to fail after little or no use. We've now reached the stage where these containers sold for domestic use are not fit for purpose.
I'm of the opinion we need to tax the shit of plastic when it's used in items that either don't have an appropriate lifespan (i.e. not made sufficiently durable), and or where suitable alternative material exist—for instance wood, metal and glass for bottles etc.
The argument that, say, glass is dangerous and plastic is safer doesn't hold water. Even in my lifetime I've seen a society that ran on glass and it ran OK! In cases where plastic has to be the preferred option then simply tax the shit out if it. People will either make do with cheaper glass or they'll pay a premium for plastic. Plastic drink bottles could have deposits on them so high that no one would ever think of disposing them other than to return them for the deposit.
The only real problem in bringing plastics under control is opposition from greedy corporations that have nothing other than profit in mind. The first thing we citizens must to do is to limit their ability to lobby government on such matters.
These are good uses for plastic—especially if bottles have an effective deposit on them. (Even if you own a refillable bottle and consider it a permanent fixture, it too will ultimately be returned for the deposit at the end of its useful life).
It's not a matter of banning plastics, it's all about implementing clever regulations that protect the environment. Trouble is corporate and vested interests will fight us every inch of the way to stop them from being introduced.
On the matter of alternatives to plastic (and glass), this is difficult if we want to get rid of plastics altogether as presently there's not much to choose from for liquids other than aluminum or steel cans but they're also a good choice being easily recyclable (and the deposit system works well with them too).
Drink containers, whilst a big problem, can easily be solved with the deposit system. A much harder issue is the inappropriate use of plastics and that mainly takes two forms, (a), using cheap or the wrong type of plastic in applications where it breaks and thus is disposed of inappropriately, and (b), its use in packaging. Most packaging can be made from other non-plastic materials (cardboard, etc.) which are very satisfactory and environmentally friendly (as was done in the past).
We are wasting hundreds of millions of tons per year, we eat it, drink it, we have been doing that for decades and we are still discussing statistical signifiance.
Sure, not completely harmless, but few things are. And considering the tremendous value plastics have brought to society, I'd say the downsides are comparatively small. What worries me more than human poisoning the article is about is the effect of microplastics on marine life, as it is less studied than people and there is some evidence that the physical (more than chemical) properties of plastic particle might be damaging.
It doesn't mean there isn't something to be done. Proper waste management is the obvious one, and I don't mean anything fancy, I mean "do not empty you trash in nature" thing that is unfortunately much too common, especially in developing countries. Properly managed landfills would probably solve 90% of the plastics problems. Reducing disposable plastic is, I think, generally a good thing, but not before making sure the alternative is not worse, and of course making sure that "disposable plastic", is not "throw it in nature plastic". We should also research better plastics: make sure the durable ones are actually durable, and that the disposable ones degrade properly, also consider the petrochemical industry that backs it up and maybe switch to more sustainable sources.
> The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic are pretty straightforward; they include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract. Animals that fill their guts with plastics eventually starve to death. The risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens. In addition to their main ingredients, plastics may contain any number of additives. Many of these—for example, polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, which confer water resistance—are also suspected carcinogens. Many of the others have never been adequately tested.
Honestly it’s not surprising that scientists are worried about the harmful effects of plastics to human health because the introduction of many substances non-native to the human body brings about some kind of long-term illness as a negative reaction. Just because you can’t detect it with your senses and within a short time frame doesn’t mean that a phenomenon is not happening.
People could really do more with questioning their opinions more than just jumping straight into availing of their freedom of speech.
My argument is essentially that while it is perfectly normal and expected that researchers study the health risks associated with plastics, and that it is just as expected that we address the issues we discover, we have to make sure the solution is not worse than the problem. And since plastics are what I believe to be relatively harmless for the massive and careless use we make of them, I think it is an important consideration.
Also, what are you saying that there’s no evidence? Even if it’s not in the article (which is an opinion piece, not a scientific journal), then you should have had the diligence to look up the claims before taking a stance? Plenty of objective sources cited in their Wikipedia articles alone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_chloride
In Asia especially it's crazy how plastic is often used - you go to a 7/11 to buy a cold drink, they put it in TWO flimsy plastic bags which you throw in the first trash can you come across. So the thing has a useful lifetime of under a minute. They also give you a plastic straw, wrapped in plastic which goes in the trash a few minutes later.
All that stuff is produced in a dirty process and will linger in the environment for way too long.
And what's the effect? We've been doing this for decades?
There's this belief that if something has an effect, it'll just show up magically on the news after the minimum amount of time, without taking into account all the hurdles people have to go through to research. Even if you didn't have powerful companies with interests against the research being published, it would be complicated.
If plastics are indeed poisoning us, the hazard ratio seems to be small enough that it would require significant research to quantify.
Compare to, say, the lung cancer skyrocket that happened in the 70s-90s from the 30-year smoking habits developed in the 40s-60s.
With plastics, either the lag time for effects is really long, the effects themselves are so spread out that any meaningful bump for a single one is hard to identify, or we are reducing other causes of the same issues in lock step.
Lead was used for millenia. Romans drank from lead goblets. It sweetened the wine.
And we didn’t know the full story of lead until 20 years after it was banned from gasoline, and the violent crime rates started to drop.
It was a public debate issue at the time, trying to solve trash problems. I don’t know where they are at with the problem now.
Not at this rate. And we're probably still many years away from peak microplastics in our food and water.
Yes Perhaps it’s not plastic itself but what plastic enables.
But it's not that we need plastics that urgently. Synthetic fibers in clothes, which generate microplastics household dust, could be largely replaced with cotton. Plastic food packaging could be replaced with a modern variant of cellophane. Car tires (which also generate major amounts of dust) could perhaps also be made to a higher percentage of biodegradable material.
Of course all these alternatives aren't free, but maybe they are worth it.
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Back when I wrote it, I suspected the industry intentionally worked with government to distract the public, and now in this article it is confirmed:
Under public pressure, a company like Coca-Cola or Nestlé pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. When the pressure eases, it quietly abandons its pledge. Meanwhile, it lobbies against any kind of legislation that would restrict the sale of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wallis quotes Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, who once said, “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”
Even Greenpeace now admits the obvious: recycling doesn’t work https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-second-thought-just-...
Europe’s circular economy is leaking https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2023/europes-circular-e...
How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change https://www.salon.com/2023/05/13/how-big-oil-is-manipulating...
Chemical industry used big tobacco’s tactics to conceal evidence of PFAS risks https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/pfas-3m-...
Companies Knew the Dangers of PFAS 'Forever Chemicals'—and Kept Them Secret https://time.com/6284266/pfas-forever-chemicals-manufacturer...
WHO's Proposed Limits on PFAS in Drinking Water Far Too Weak: Experts https://www.commondreams.org/news/who-pfas-drinking-water-pr...
Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly driven by fossil fuel interests and allies https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/rightwing-wa...
Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
Documenting the Hidden History of Chemical and Pesticide Hazards in the United States https://www.poisonpapers.org/
Teflon, PLA, ABS, resins, foams, etc... are all plastics, but they are so unrelated outside their long chains, its terrible to stereotype them all into one category.
You aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon, but rather the manufacturing process. You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine.
Eat something with BPA in it, you are probably going to have a bad time.
Maybe the solution is better labeling. I know its near impossible to have perfect consistency in plastic manufacturing(I worked in foam, mind boggling we consider testing these foams one time, and considered it the same foam for the next 8 years). However, knowing precursors, additives, and potentially process would make a huge difference in our ability to track problems.
EDIT: Someone called out PLA as potentially dangerous. After looking it up, I'm skeptical of the oxygen double bond attached to a carbon attached to an oxygen. The wikipedia article had no health concerns, but that carbon atom seems ripe for reaction. Let me change my answer on PLA to 'I don't know'.
What Microplastics Might Be Doing to Our Intestines https://now.tufts.edu/2023/06/09/what-microplastics-might-be...
Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/nanoplastic-inges...
Microplastics can stick in human airways, new study finds https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/microplastics...
Many BPA-Free Plastics Are Toxic. Some Are Worse Than BPA https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/many-bpa-free-plasti...
Plastic pollution is so bad for animals it now has a disease name — 'plasticosis' https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/research-ocean-plastic-birds...
Microplastics found in every sample of water taken during the Ocean Race https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/micropla...
Secret industry documents reveal that makers of PFAS 'forever chemicals' covered up their health dangers https://phys.org/news/2023-05-secret-industry-documents-reve...
Forever Toxic: The science on health threats from plastic recycling https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/forever-toxic/
Microplastics detected in meat, milk and blood of farm animals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/micropla...
Yet Another Problem With Recycling: It Spews Microplastics https://www.wired.com/story/yet-another-problem-with-recycli...
Tiny Polystyrene Particles Detected in the Brain Just Two Hours After Ingestion https://neurosciencenews.com/polystyrene-brain-23079/
60% of home ‘compostable’ plastic doesn’t fully break down, ending up in our soil https://blog.frontiersin.org/2022/11/03/60-of-home-compostab...
(... thousands others)
That said, it’s generally used as a coating rather than a structural element so there’s less of it in the environment.
PS: Toothpaste which you should mostly spit out generally contains less than 0.5% fluoride compounds such as sodium fluoride NaF or tin fluoride SnF2, the F in both being Florine.
Edit: Sorry, stupid question, was thinking of Fluoride.
Fluoride is the ion, but if you want to get pedantic, you're not adding the ion to toothpaste and drinking water - you're adding another fluorine compound which is dissociating in solution.
Ie, when you salt your food, you're not tossing in Cl- ions directly.
(sorry in advance for all who want to suggest iron skillets. I can't make them work in daily use.)
It's not that I don't believe you. It just doesn't work that way in my pan on my stove with my food at my skill level, at all. I gave up and buy nonstick pans and replace them every other year or so.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087UYR1S
This process went fine, but I always had to baby the pan (had to be very careful cleaning it with said chainmail, very careful with what/how I cooked in it) and had to re-do the initial seasoning several times when it got too troublesome.
This process would leave the pan at a dark brown, and for a while I blamed this on not removing rust well enough before seasoning or not babying it well enough for it to build up to a ~normal black coat.
At some point during the early pandemic I tired of this. I decided to do something similar on the stovetop where I could observe/iterate better. Apply a coat, wait for it to stop smoking, and repeat until it was black. (plus a few for good luck; I didn't keep track; this took maybe dozens of rounds?)
I've had a much better time since then. The most ~babying I've done is applying a few fresh coats if I don't use it for a while or water doesn't bead when I rinse it.
I suspect it has to do with electric vs gas and being able to get and maintain a stable temp with gas. But that could just be a poor craftsman blaming his tools.
I bought a nice new range right before I discovered the air-fryer, and it now functions mostly as a device for holding up the air-fryer.
Plus, many people who are learning do not have the privilege of an experienced teacher. Relying on instructions, videos, and trial & error takes more time and energy for most people. I agree with you that it's worth the effort though.
It's similar to how my partner has a stainless steel pan that I avoid using because I have not had the bandwidth to internalize the right ratio of heat, time, and oil to cook things on it without burning/sticking, whereas they have no issue with it. It's a good reminder not to take internalized skill for granted.
The trick to not sticking on steel pan is just preheating it properly. A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick. Just let it get hot enough.
In that case I'm not sure what the exact mechanism was. But I know that after others have used/cleaned a seemingly well-seasoned pan I've had to deal with chips, flakes, and/or rust and had to go back through the whole annoying seasoning process. And of course it's entirely possible that despite carefully following instructions that I've done the seasoning wrong -- chemistry is the only class I ever flunked.
> A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick.
My partner made a similar recommendation. It sounds trivially easy but for whatever reason I have not managed to make it work. Given that cast iron (generally) works fine for me I've had minimal motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of another material, though I would like to give it another shot at some point.
I've talked to multiple experienced and home chefs about this disconnect and they've admitted two things:
1) cooking on a screaming hot pan is possible of course. It's how all professional kitchens work. But it's way harder! You have to pay close attention & the timing for error is very small. Cooking at lower heat on Teflon lets you make more adjustments.
2) After doing everything perfectly, and seasoning perfectly, for the same heat you ABSOLUTELY still need more of some oil or butter on a cast iron or stainless steel then you would for an equivalent Teflon pan. This is non-negotiable.
I say that partially as a joke but also it does sort of sound a bit absurd, in the sense that your cooking techniques are just sort of wrong if you are repeatedly burning food to your non-non-stick pan. You need an oil or fat on your pan to provide a buffer or to bathe the food in liquid.
Again this might be a balancing act of the negative effects of teflon consumption and consuming too much fat via oil.
You can cook a lot of things on a "non stick" telfon pan without an oil or fat.
You can cook far fewer things on a "non stick" cast iron without an oil or fat.
But the cast iron crowd will gaslight the rest of us, and claim that we are just seasoning it wrong but otherwise it is indistinguishable and only superior.
It's like manual transmission.
Now, I do think some of them are coming coated in silicone-based coatings. The consensus I get asking "are these carcinogenic?" is "probably not?"
But the other problem is determining what a particular pan is coated with: I have not seen a single manufacturer label their pan with anything more informative than that it is coated in "magic science stuff".
Also, I only use 'plastic' utensils with the pan. The result, not a single scratch on the pan. The surface looks brand new, I've been using it over a year.
That said, even oxides do break down when heated. Like, that's what smelting is...
Hm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrafluoroethylene
It's about as strong as most of the molecules on your body.
But I don't think that fluoride moving around is the problem. Looks like the problem is exactly the stability, and some long foreign molecules installing themselves in your body.
Are you saying, then, that this claim [1] is false?
It states that PTFE is safe, whereas PFOA — what Teflon used to contain — was the component that made Teflon unsafe.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/is-teflon-coating-safe
> Now, since PFOA belongs to a large group of chemicals called PFAS, consisting of 4,700 similar substances, it might be tempting to just switch to one of the other PFAS chemicals that hasn’t been restricted yet. But that wouldn´t solve the problem, it would only postpone and perpetuate it. [1]
[1] https://marketplace.chemsec.org/articles/news/2020/04/01/the...
I.e. there's a whole zoo of similar compounds, and all those type specific safety claims are all at room temperature. The whole point of their use is often on heated surfaces, getting near and over the safety limit.
Your link does not contain a reference to PTFE and looking at the meaning of the acronyms should provide evidence fluorethylene is not a sulfonate or an octanoic acid.
The manufacture of PTFE may involve generating these as bio-hazardous byproducts and PTFE could be contaminated or even break down into them, but they are chemically not the same.
I'm not sure about the last claim: it isn't clear that all PFAS are equally bad, so replacing PFOA with a different PFAS might be worthwhile. It seems hard to study, but with Europe banning PFOA, perhaps we'll get some more insight.
Teflon is generally safe, but heating it to above 300 degrees Celsius or 570 degrees Fahrenheit poses a danger to your health.”
Note they didn’t say Teflon was safe at 299C, the risk is chemical breakdown not a phase transition like water which boils at a specific temperature and pressure. When used properly pans shouldn’t get anywhere close to that temperature range but it’s very possible to get to a dangerous temperature if there isn’t food in the pan.
Once you're frying, roasting, and grilling things at this temperature you are increasing cancer risk completely unrelated to any cooking materials involved. That's true of french-fries, bread, steaks and a zillion other things. It's why they're tasty (see Malliard reaction).
I certainly consider cast iron relatively safe, but it's polymerized unsaturated oil is likely to leach acrylamide and associated chemicals. It's just that compared to the food you're eating it's not relevant.
What frying pan when used properly doesn't get near 300 C? A pan surface temp of 200-250 C is nothing strange when frying a steak.
It’s the same gap was walking outside into 25f and 115f Aka below freezing to punch you in the face hot.
https://www.teflon.com/en/consumers/teflon-coatings-cookware...
its a thing
And table salt is made out of Sodium and Chlorine, one of which is explosive when mixed with water, and the other is used to gas soldiers in trenches if you're into committing war crimes.
What matters is what effect the particular chemical has when you put it through common household uses, not the effect of its constituent parts.
Anyway, uncommon household uses can also be a safety concern. People still do occasionally get poisoned by mixing ammonia and bleach even despite the repeated warnings.
Talking about the constituent parts is similarly relevant when you’re heating something to significant temperatures. Many reasonably safe substances really shouldn’t be tossed on a bond fire etc. For other things it’s not the substance itself that’s a concern but impurities from the manufacturing process. People often think of past recalls as companies doing something dumb, but I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get this stuff right.
I looked at the formula and that Oxygen double bond attached to a carbon with another oxygen bond... yikes!
I have no idea why this is stable. It appears stable, but you wonder about things like UV light, exposure to some cation, etc...
Well, seems like I have reading to do. (Chem engineer here, I feel like its my responsibility, similar to how programmers read open source code)
If you look into molecular orbital theory, the double bond causes overlap, which makes the bonds unstable. It can more easily jump off and create a new bond. If you want to see an even worse situation, look at Nitrogen triple bonds.
Further, the extra oxygen attached to the carbon makes the bond a bit polar since you have such a heavy electron clump on one side of the carbon.
That said, yeah, PLA is known to not be very stable, and that's part of the reason its biodegradable. It degrades into lactic-acid based large molecules that living beings have no problem on destroying. (But are toxic when you get several grams of it, so beware if you are doing strange chemical experiments with PLA.)
PLA is just going to break down into lactic acid. Big deal.
Breathing smoke and dust from PLA is bad, because breathing any type of smoke or dust is bad. Wildfire smoke is bad, but wood is not a harmful chemical.
We actually do understand the chemistry of plastics. And to a very large extent they are very safe, primarily because they are incredibly stable and non-degradable.
Even the studies of e.g. BPA health issues point to very weak effects. You need to do meta-analysis on tens of thousands of individuals to have statistically significant effects, and even then they are weak and it's not easy to say whether you have successfully eliminated confounding factors.
And "BPA-free" plastics just use BPF instead, with very similar chemistry. The consumer-facing BPA fuss is primarily driven by companies that want to sell products; health agencies are primarily concerned with occupational exposure, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger in terms of dose per body weight. BPA is metabolized in the kidneys to the benign BPA-G and excreted in urine; a dose 250 000 times the EU dose limit is cleared by the body in 24 hours.
PFAS is a similar story. Over long timescales with stupid disregard for basic PPE, like cross country ski waxing trailers where people were breathing C8-dust without masks for a thousand hours per year, there has been clear health concerns identified. So people are saying "there is no safe lower dose limit" and companies are switching to chemicals that haven't been used in the same context so there is little to no data on exposure safety, and saying "this will be safer".
I'm not asking to play 'gotcha' with your comment, but because when I've attempted to do my own research on this, I find it easy to get information on the polymer itself, but the polymer is never used by itself in a product. As far as I can tell, most polymers are not actually useful without a cocktail of additional chemicals added to them to change their physical characteristics. From my research, raw polymers tend to be extremely brittle and frangible, completely unrecognizable when compared to the products we use made from them.
And those additional chemicals are extremely difficult to find information on. Like when they're used, what they are, etc.
I guess my mind is instinctively reaching for the ways FDA attempts to ensure food safety by compelling manufacturers to publish ingredient lists, and by maintaining registries [0] of hopefully-well-understood additives (and banning the rest, in historically dangerous categories like colorants).
Sure from time to time agitators take that information out of context to whip up a scare about one ingredient or another, and sure some of the food that comes in from overseas has after-the-fact labeling that’s a little sus. But at least there’s an expectation that the information must exist and be legible.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/determin...
I disagree, because, that's like me telling you "The word 'Cancer' needs to die." etc.
That would imply you'd be required to tell me the specific cancer you refer to when you say "you aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon" etc.
General terms exist for a reason.
To stay with your example, it would be like discouraging the media from saying "cancer is cured" when they actually might mean "this specific type of lung cancer has a cure". To bring it back to "plastic", the media could focus on saying things like "teflon coating encourages these negative reactions..." as opposed to "plastics are poisoning us" which is way too vague to matter.
And on the case of plastics, that reason is that they are molded by the same processes.
It's about as relevant as talking about "metal contamination" of food when you are measuring mercury.
Can we? Have these been tested? Alone and/or while interacting with other such things in the wild? Or have these chemicals/plastics been introduced because they can be (i.e., no regulation or oversight), not because they are safe and have been proven to be so.
The default of "they're safe" is not the default we should be using.
It's not useful to nitpick over their long chains or oxygen double bonds. That rhetoric contributes nothing but deflective nerdery and confusion to the conversation.
> deflective nerdery
FWIW, the point about carbon bonds was actually a response to nerdery that's already present here, in a forum intended for digging into the nerdy details of various subjects.
Not all "plastics" cause harm (at least, not any more than the skin you shed every day).
I've seen countless disagreements on numerous topics caused by people thinking they both have the same definition of a term and even more instances of confusion because the intuitive implicit definition that came from the example usages they'd seen of a term was a non-representative subset of the things matched by the explicit definition.
Nuance and clarity of language matters, otherwise you'll ban "chemicals" and discover you actually have no sane definition of it and are inflicting a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Many “compostable” paper food and drink containers are lined with a ptfe film, which does get into the food.
Okay sure maybe it’s all leftover pfas reagents, (or maybe some break down but ignore that) it’s impossible for anyone to know that this particular instance of ptfe doesn’t have residual pfas.
No, we are awash in labels already and I am sick of everything having a legal treatise attached to it. Labels just throw the problem back in the laps of consumers, an approach which clearly does not work.
Some labels are good and informative. Some labels are just a way for corporations to blame consumers for what consumers cannot do anything about.
Falsehood: - "Consumers are purchasing toxic products, so that is what we make."
Reality: - "Consumers buy what is available and they can afford."
It's one way industry has scammed the public by convincing them much of the waste generated by low-cost (to the manufacturer) packaging was recyclable.
Is actually better for the planet that you just burn it yourself instead of wasting diesel on transport to nowhere.
And guess which one of these groups has actual influence on government policy? Yup, its the poor who get screwed.
If you let consumers decide, what you end up with is upper class suburban mums eating healthy bananas, while the homeless dude eats bananas that were grown in a superfund site.
Even if you disagree with my particular examples of the above three classes I think you'll be able to come up with something for each of them.
You might not think much about having specific types of labels, but its basically impossible for a chemist to know anything beyond ~8 generic types of plastic in the US.
They have a chemical policy[1] that is moving in the right direction, and labels like Oeko-Tex 100, Oeko-Tex Made in Green, Clean Beauty, BPA Free, Paraben Free and Recycled. The changes they are making as a part of their chemical policy (eliminating PFAS and other concerning chemicals from cleaning and baby items) are benefiting everyone, and consumers who have specific concerns can quickly get more information about what they are buying. Most consumers are increasingly aware of risks, but most do not have the desire or time to look into the manufacturing process for everything they buy.
1. https://corporate.target.com/sustainability-ESG/environment/...
If we banned everything that increases the risk of some sort of bad thing we'd probably end up banning everything (or more realistically, everything we'd do studies on).
Is walking "actually dangerous"? Is cycling? Is driving? Is swimming? Is hang gliding? Different people will give different answers to these questions and I've even kept them all to the domain of transportation!
Once you get to the realm of all chemistry things get very murky. E.g. Is sugar dangerous?
In practice we're evolved creatures full of hacks that work well enough to mostly not die before we've had kids, I would be very surprised if there was a single substance we consume (both intentionally and not) that doesn't damage something.
I think we either need to appreciate that the industrial world is poisoned and take that as the cost of doing business OR stop poisoning ourselves at the cost of substantial technological progress.
As far as polyesters go, the main cause for concern is the endocrine disrupting effect of polyethylene terephthalate[1] and the inability of PET to be broken down completely, leading to microplastic pollution. By contrast, PLA can be broken down by heat or a select number of micro-organisms, and the lactic acid monomer used to produce it is non-toxic. The polymer is formed by a simple condensation reaction to form ester linkages, releasing water. Esters are a very common and generally benign moiety found everywhere in nature, for example in cutin found in plants, forming the rigid exterior of cells exposed to the elements. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11217409/
PLA and other acid co polymers are used in resorbable stitches and polymer medical devices where the biproducts are organic acids and carbon dioxide.
I second the ‘I don’t know’ for actual health effects of PLA but wanted to provide a counter point to comparing PTFE (indestructible C-F bond) to PLA (readily hydrolized C(=O)O- bonds)
Bonus points if you can tell me what each recycling number on plastic means without looking it up (it's the internet, so I have no way to enforce this).
Ester groups are quite innocuous. The most it will do is hydrolyze to oligomers of lactic acid.
I hope to be breathing tomorrow. Therefore I care about what we put in the air today.
I hope to be eating next year. Therefore I care about what we put in the soil this year.
I hope to be drinking next decade. Therefore I care about what goes into the groundwater this decade.
What I eat, drink, and breathe becomes my body. If those things are garbage (or worse, poison), my health will suffer.
[Edit: And to answer the actual thrust of your question, because the corporations aren't going to.]
Corporations may "own" that stuff (I disagree, but let that pass). But my body is mine, and corporations aren't going to take care of it for me.
This planet has seen cataclysms, mass extinctions and destruction on planetary scale, it'll be fine. Not us.
For example, I have a Breville Precision coffeemaker. How much plastic is getting leached into my daily cup of coffee? Should I go back to manual pourovers? What is the real hazard I'm risking? How does this compare to other behaviors I may have?
Are there other behaviors that I can moderate for high bang/buck ratio?
Personal initiatives are just romanticization and a philosophy that shifts the problem from the producer to the consumer (who has no choice).
Metal is an alternative to many things. Plastic is only for containers and things with a long cycle of use. It has its advantages. It is more resistant to impact than metal (falls, bumps) and retains its shape.
Glass is not an alternative at all, it is not comfortable, it breaks, leaves fragments that you will not find on the ground or in your body. It is not resistant to falls, shocks, frequent temperature changes (just pour hot into a cold cup, or vice versa). And it's not pleasant to the touch, with limited use where it really is the best choice.
But this is not a problem in itself, we need to localize food production more so that it doesn't have to be stored for a long time and therefore use a lot of packaging. We need it to travel quickly from the producer to the store to the consumer, without plastic packaging as much as possible.
Over the past 4 years, I have been horrified to see that the amount of plastic waste I generate has increased dramatically, without changing my consumption and habits.
Now about 30 years later, the Germans are eager to sort their trash but the recycling quote is still laughably low. Less than 20% of sorted trash gets recycled for usage in plastic (and instead just burned, reusing the thermal energy) and people still have ridiculous habits (e.g. wrapping Bananas with plastic bags).
What we see is: It's all damn industry lies, one part of politicians susceptible for industry lobbying, the other part of politicians antagonized for "limiting consumer freedom", a lot of green-/whitewashing campaigns and consumers who refuse to change their habits.
Do you see a pattern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Electronic_Waste_Re...