Are Single-Use Plastics Also Contributing to Climate Change? (cnn.com) 143
Made from fossil fuels refined with "extreme temperatures and significant amount of water and energy," plastics are also a climate problem, warns CNN. So "by the time we start talking about recycling, the damage is already done."
One former regional administrator for America's Environmental Protection Agency is now even calling plastics "the new coal." The process of making plastic is so energy intensive that if the plastics industry were a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to a 2021 report from Beyond Plastics.... The plastic industry is responsible for at least 232 million tons of planet-warming emissions each year, according to the Beyond Plastics report. That's the same amount as the average emissions released by 116 coal-fired power plants in 2020, according to the report's authors. It's also the same annual emissions as around 50 million cars, according to the EPA. And more plastic-making facilities continue to come online....
[P]lastic recycling doesn't work, Enck said, because most of what we think we're recycling just ends up in the landfill. It also doesn't address the planet-warming emissions that comes from making it in the first place....
Ultimately, the world needs large-scale change to address the climate impact of the fossil fuel and plastics industries, said Jacqueline Savitz [chief policy officer for the conservation non-profit Oceana]. Oceana, for example, is working with local volunteers from cities and counties around the country to help pass new laws to reduce single-use plastics, in hopes of sparking change at the national level. "We think that if we could start to reduce single-use plastics at the local level with local ordinances, that can start to become more of the norm," she said. "Then we can start taking it to higher levels of government, even getting to the point of getting national policies that will drive reductions in plastic use."
Ultimately, Savitz said consumers need to continue urging major corporations to provide plastic-free solutions and help support refill and reuse programs to encourage society to shy away from plastic use and stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis. "Our country is burning and flooding and hurricanes are coming earlier and earlier," she told CNN. "I really think it's shocking that one of the things that's really leading to that is plastics, and it's hurting us in other ways, too. So if we could find a way to reduce our production of plastics as a country and as a global society, we'd be taking a bite out of climate change."
CNN suggests ways you can reduce your own plastic consumption, including:
One former regional administrator for America's Environmental Protection Agency is now even calling plastics "the new coal." The process of making plastic is so energy intensive that if the plastics industry were a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to a 2021 report from Beyond Plastics.... The plastic industry is responsible for at least 232 million tons of planet-warming emissions each year, according to the Beyond Plastics report. That's the same amount as the average emissions released by 116 coal-fired power plants in 2020, according to the report's authors. It's also the same annual emissions as around 50 million cars, according to the EPA. And more plastic-making facilities continue to come online....
[P]lastic recycling doesn't work, Enck said, because most of what we think we're recycling just ends up in the landfill. It also doesn't address the planet-warming emissions that comes from making it in the first place....
Ultimately, the world needs large-scale change to address the climate impact of the fossil fuel and plastics industries, said Jacqueline Savitz [chief policy officer for the conservation non-profit Oceana]. Oceana, for example, is working with local volunteers from cities and counties around the country to help pass new laws to reduce single-use plastics, in hopes of sparking change at the national level. "We think that if we could start to reduce single-use plastics at the local level with local ordinances, that can start to become more of the norm," she said. "Then we can start taking it to higher levels of government, even getting to the point of getting national policies that will drive reductions in plastic use."
Ultimately, Savitz said consumers need to continue urging major corporations to provide plastic-free solutions and help support refill and reuse programs to encourage society to shy away from plastic use and stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis. "Our country is burning and flooding and hurricanes are coming earlier and earlier," she told CNN. "I really think it's shocking that one of the things that's really leading to that is plastics, and it's hurting us in other ways, too. So if we could find a way to reduce our production of plastics as a country and as a global society, we'd be taking a bite out of climate change."
CNN suggests ways you can reduce your own plastic consumption, including:
- Saying no to bottled water. "Get a couple of canteens and cut a major source of plastic out of your life."
- Going beyond just reusable grocery bags. "You can easily go a step further by not using the plastic produce bags the store provides for your apples and broccoli..."
- And when shopping, try to choose products packaged in paper over those packaged in plastic.
No shit Sherlock. (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Replace plastic with wood. There go your Brazilian rosewood forests.
Re:The alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)
The kind of paper used in grocery bags is highly recyclable and is renewable.
Re:The alternatives? (Score:5, Interesting)
And costs you a hundred bucks a year in dropped groceries because the bags tear. Single-use plastic didn't become popular because it was cheap. It became popular because it was better than the alternative. Want to get consumers to switch willingly? Make something that's better, or at least as good, without the environmental impact. Otherwise, you're just asking consumers to suffer for the environment, and frankly, most people won't.
Besides, the entire question is bulls**t. Does burning fossil fuels to refine oil damage the environment? Yeah, slightly. But so does burning fossil fuels to refine the oil to turn into the gasoline that you then burn in the chainsaws that cut down the trees to make paper bags, the trucks that deliver them to the paper mill, the power plants that produce the electricity for those paper mills, the additional trucks required to deliver those bags because of the higher weight and volume per bag compared with single-use plastic, etc. Add it up, and you almost certainly burn way less fossil fuels making and distributing plastic bags than paper bags.
IMO, single-use plastic manufacturing represents such a tiny fraction of the world's greenhouse gas emissions compared with general power production, automobiles, smelting, etc. that it is ridiculous even talking about it right now while a majority of the world's electricity still comes from fossil fuels and nearly all transportation is done with fossil fuels.
The way you make actual progress is to fix the big stuff first, and don't sweat the small stuff, not to seek out tiny savings that cause the maximum amount of pain for consumers just so it will look like you're doing something. But that doesn't get politicians reelected....
Re:The alternatives? (Score:5, Interesting)
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And costs you a hundred bucks a year in dropped groceries because the bags tear. Single-use plastic didn't become popular because it was cheap. It became popular because it was better than the alternative. Want to get consumers to switch willingly? Make something that's better, or at least as good, without the environmental impact.
Single use plastic became popular because it's cheap, otherwise it wouldn't be here. If you make it non-free, people won't use them. Just tax it, like the EU.
To claim there's nothing wrong with these kind of plastic bags and that numbers aren't significant is BS; the EU alone had 100 billion plastic bags in 2019. An astonishing reduction afterwards rather than growth. This is big stuff.
And there is something better, like reusable plastic or natural fiber bags, but they aren't as cheap.
For every piece of pla
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I used to double-bag my plastic bags because they tore. They aren't better than paper in that regard.
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Or instead of long-winded, bizarre rationalisations as to why one narrowly conceived alternative is hypothetically as damaging, you could just buy decent, durable shopping bags & water bottles that last for years.
Yeah. Keep telling yourself that. Then remember what happened during the pandemic, when they wouldn't let people reuse bags. California's bag ban was an ecological nightmare, creating mountains of waste from the thick reusable plastic bags that people weren't allowed to reuse.
Cloth shopping bags have to be frequently washed to prevent the spread of disease, and every time you do, unless they're 100% cotton, you're putting large quantities of microplastics into the water supply. And cotton stains easily,
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For my next response, please re-read my previous response.
You still haven't put forth a realistic alternative that doesn't cause problems that are at least as bad as what you're objecting to. So please reread my original post:
"Want to get consumers to switch willingly? Make something that's better, or at least as good, without the environmental impact. Otherwise, you're just asking consumers to suffer for the environment, and frankly, most people won't."
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The way you make actual progress is to fix the big stuff first, and don't sweat the small stuff, not to seek out tiny savings that cause the maximum amount of pain for consumers just so it will look like you're doing something. But that doesn't get politicians reelected....
Uh... No.. Not just "No" but.. what the holy fuck are you smoking?
You've managed to get it exactly ass-backwards. I hope to hell you're not in management.
The INTELLIGENT way to attack / solve a problem is in small increments so you can more easily UNDO A FUCK-UP. i.e. You make small & reversible changes. You don't dive head-on at the entire goddamn situation...
You're misunderstanding what I said. I didn't say you make large changes. I said you start with areas where small changes can have a big impact. Cars and electricity use the most fuel, so even a small change in either of those areas makes a disproportionately large impact in greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing the emissions of processes that in total probably make up less than one hundredth of one percent of greenhouse gas emissions is a colossal waste of effort until you've taken care of the low-hanging
Re:The alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fun part: some of us are old enough to remember when the Green trenders were doing the same campaign against paper bags and moving to plastic bags for exact same reasons they're now pushing to move back.
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Fun part: some of us are old enough to remember when the Green trenders were doing the same campaign against paper bags and moving to plastic bags for exact same reasons they're now pushing to move back.
This is because there is no such thing as an acceptable alternative.
Paper - cutting trees
Plastic - in any form - often oil based, and energy used in making.
Glass - a lot of energy used in making - and recycling.
Metal - mining, smelting, forming. Re-use only eliminates the mining.
Everything we do uses materials created or worked with carbon emitting processes. The real problem is we are attempting to have more and more people use less and less carbon.
Imagine - if we have people reduce their c
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The difference is that many other materials are more durable & so can be washed & re-used hundreds, if not, thousands of times. That's 100s - 1,000s of times less pollution & energy. Not everything we use has to be disposable.
Then we need thousand's more of them. I trust that you are plastic free?
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Qué? Are you cognitively challenged? That's 100s - 1,000s fewer containers, not more.
Why I sure am! You apparently think that 1 thing that costs a million tot make is cheaper than a thousand things that cost a dollar to make.
My point is that Glass and metal products are not free of carbon dioxide release. No, it takes quite a bit of energy to make them in the first place, and energy to clean them out.
Work your troll game better my friend, because as a person who is obviously a lot smarter than me, you're a tad slow on the pickup, you know? Don't want people to think that a superior b
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You apparently think that 1 thing that costs a million tot make is cheaper than a thousand things that cost a dollar to make.
Keep taking the "happy pills" my friend. Nurse will be along with your blankie soon.
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If the plastic was properly recycled, it would be a no brainer. It is only because it is often not that you now are faced with two not particularly environmental friendly choices.
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And all that washing uses fresh water, something which is becoming scarce in some major population centers. Everything is a trade off.
Cleaning that water, pumping that water, heating that water, cleaning the returned sewage all use energy as well. There are no freebies.
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So human life that isn't full of strife and misery is unacceptable. You didn't need to type out that many lines to make that claim. Just stating that you hate human success and would prefer misery and strife is sufficient. This is a common view of those in the Green cult, as its roots are firmly in the "everyone carries the guilt of original sin, everyone who doesn't repent will burn" Christianity.
My only contention with people who have your views is that you are never the types to have actually experienced
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Can't beat environmentalists in the intellectual arena so you're just demonizing them with a bunch of shit you just made up. Pretty pathetic.
Believe it or not the world isn't made up of "good guys" and "bad guys" like some shitty movie. Get your shit together and stop conceptualizing the world as a child does.
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Can't beat environmentalists in the intellectual arena so you're just demonizing them with a bunch of shit you just made up. Pretty pathetic.
Believe it or not the world isn't made up of "good guys" and "bad guys" like some shitty movie. Get your shit together and stop conceptualizing the world as a child does.
Assuming you are writing to me - try some quoting, homie - give us exactly what I "made up".
If it is me you are writing to, I'll also ask for you to point out the things that I wrote that are incorrect. I gave citations in another post that support what I wrote before.
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Why the hell would you think I was writing to you? If I was replying to you my post would be under yours and not Luckyo's.
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Why the hell would you think I was writing to you? If I was replying to you my post would be under yours and not Luckyo's.
Doesn't always work that way. I've had people replying to myself or someone else a couple posts back at time.
You know how I know? Because they quoted text.
It's what separates us from Facebook and twitter. Do as thou wilt, mon ami,
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So human life that isn't full of strife and misery is unacceptable. You didn't need to type out that many lines to make that claim. Just stating that you hate human success and would prefer misery and strife is sufficient. This is a common view of those in the Green cult, as its roots are firmly in the "everyone carries the guilt of original sin, everyone who doesn't repent will burn" Christianity.
Umm, dood!
First off - relax, homie. Have an adult beverage or herb of your choice. My post that triggered you so badly was intended to show people that while they might think they are doing a wonderful thing by rejecting plastics, their hands are not as clean as they think they are. I'm not even proposing some sort of back to the basics lifestyle. I'm telling people we are here, and we need to be smart.
Any form of energy production today releases CO2 into the air. Even nuclear, even solar, even wind
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We're just not ready to have a calm, reasoned discussion about how to prevent population overshoot. This means it will sneak up on us, and then we won't be able to have lives free of misery with or without our plastics.
"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
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We're just not ready to have a calm, reasoned discussion about how to prevent population overshoot. This means it will sneak up on us, and then we won't be able to have lives free of misery with or without our plastics.
"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
Ain't that the truth. a Carrying capacity is obviously not infinite. The world is not infinite. And Mars is a fool's dream, that quick fix that ignorant people dream up, that fails miserably when actual numbers are involved. It's like MAGA for science.
We will sneak right up on that, even if we get rid of all the K-Cups.
The point, and it is a simple one, is that humans have long left the ability to have the same impact that they had when we were hunter gatherers.
And I for one don't want to go to that
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Yes, and suggested solutions are well known. For example, you advocate for plastic reduction, which is a key ingredient to why we reduced crippling illness and death to food poisoning by something between 95 and 99%.
This is my point above. You genuinely believe that you have found a big problem for which you have good solutions.And you are suggesting radical solutions that would cause massive, widespread harm to humanity as a whole, such as moving away from plastic packaging.
The worst thing about the whole
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Yes, and suggested solutions are well known. For example, you advocate for plastic reduction, which is a key ingredient to why we reduced crippling illness and death to food poisoning by something between 95 and 99%.
This is my point above. You genuinely believe that you have found a big problem for which you have good solutions.
You need to start making sense. There is no solution I offer no solutions at all. Not one There is no solution.
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The solution which is provided through elimination of the factors you mention above is to go back to the originals. Packaging from flora.
Do you not realize that elimination of modern forms of packaging still leaves the packaging we used to use. Bladders for liquids, woven baskets and such for solids.
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>So either we impose birth-limits on the developing world or we get to work on that power generation problem.
Either targeted genocide or castle in the sky. There are no other solutions.
Re: The alternatives? (Score:3)
Re:The alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one use expensive wood to make paper. They use expensive wood to make expensive furniture for rich people.
For paper you're better off with quickly growing trees you can just keep replanting so you can keep your operation nearby and have your machines optimized for only one kind of tree.
Of course, in some cases you may want to remove the existing flora from the location to do your tree farm and end up removing a precious native forest etc..
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No one use expensive wood to make paper. They use expensive wood to make expensive furniture for rich people.
And it makes a lot of money for poor people. I doubt those evil people will be traveling to the rain forests, cutting down those trees, and making the furniture themselves.
An expensive wood is capable of being replanted to sustain itself. It even makes sense to do so.
For paper you're better off with quickly growing trees you can just keep replanting so you can keep your operation nearby and have your machines optimized for only one kind of tree.
True enough.
Of course, in some cases you may want to remove the existing flora from the location to do your tree farm and end up removing a precious native forest etc..
There is one big issue with the monoculture lumber plantation. If a disease comes along, it can kill every tree on the plantation. This can lead to big erosion problems, as well as spreading centers.
Locally, we had a lot of
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Of course, in some cases you may want to remove the existing flora from the location to do your tree farm and end up removing a precious native forest etc..
Exactly. You people aren't happy with any effing solution. You will find fault right down to a single grain of sand moved by human action.
"Don't cut down old-growth forests for wood!"
"Don't you dare plant quick-grow trees if it means disturbing the local flora!"
Where, exactly, should we plant these forests then? Middle of the desert? Or is the real problem that we're using wood and you don't like that?
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Or is the real problem that we're using wood and you don't like that?
That is the main reason we switched to plastic. You may not be old enough to remember that.
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Universal, unquantitative, lacking context. (Score:3, Informative)
Some single-use items have ready replacements that are either durable/reusable or readily recyclable. Other things don't, at least not without incurring energy use penalties equivalent to those of buying another single use item.
I'm thinking mainly of things like straws, beverage containers, and the like, which must be cleaned thoroughly between uses. And in the case of beverage containers for things like milk or water or juice* the obvious alternative (glass) is also energy intensive to produce and to recycle, as well as to transport and is more fragile reducing overall yield from production to the end of the supply chain when higher spoilage from broken bottles is accounted for.
*Paper milk cartons and juice boxes have plastic liners inside. For lower temperature goods that can be replaced with waxes, most of which also come from petroleum products, but for higher temperature stuff like coffee cups or even juice boxes that don't require refrigeration, wax melts and some kind of synthetic plastic is needed.
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That's just the first thing that sprang to mind. There are prob
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bottled water (Score:5, Insightful)
amazing how many morons are convinced they *need* bottled water
one of the greatest marketing hoodwinks of the last 50 years
Re: bottled water (Score:2)
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The more shit you put in it the more likely something will interact with the bottle. Acidic beverages are known to leach more from plastic bottles, like citrus juices.
Flint (Score:2)
Sure came in handy in Flint for a year or two. And New Orleans for a summer. And Jackson.
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hook line and sinker
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if you can get bottled water to a place by truck, you can get water in container trucks to a place by truck the idea that you need bottled water "ready to distribute to keep people alive" in the case of an emergency is weapons level stupid
it's impressive that every time you post something, you somehow manage to make yourself sound even dumber to me
plastics in the ocean or landfill (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastics in our oceans or in a landfill is better than CO2 in the air when it comes to global warming. Of course not pumping carbon out of the ground to make plastics and fuel is better still. And generally it is better to skip manufacturing things that we don't need, as the energy to make glass bottles, aluminum cans, and even plastic bottles is significant when done on the scales that human civilization demand. Single-use glass bottles are worse than plastic when it comes to the energy required, even if you are comparing 100% recycled glass versus virgin plastic.
In short, consumption is the root of the problem. Technological differences between different material industries won't save us.
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Also, aluminum (and for that matter steel) cans are coated with either plastic or epoxy internally. Otherwise they would have to be oxidized before use so that they didn't interact with the contents. But it's reasonable to assume that the plastics interact with the contents anyway, e.g. all plastic bottles used for beverages leak toxic compounds into their contents in some quantity.
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Indeed, most soda cans are lined with bisphenol A (BPA) containing plastic, it's used to harden a spray on liquid polymer in a two-part epoxy process. Public health agencies consider BPA to be safe at low exposure levels. On the other hand I know dudes that drink 10 cans of Diet Pepsi a day, which I suspect is outside of the assumptions studies had of low levels of exposure. Acidic contents stored in raw aluminum is not that great for your body either, and more importantly to the manufacturer degrades on th
Plastics recycling *can* work (Score:3)
I'm so tired of hearing Americans say that "plastic recycling doesn't work".
You can recycle plastics if the plastics items are made to be recycled in the first place, with is a system in place for it.
Recycling of plastic bottles in is a success story - where it has been implemented right, such as in most Western European countries. But if you set up the system to fail, then it will (of course) fail.
Plastics are such wonderful materials, in the way that they can be moulded into any shape, molten down and reused. But the raw material: fossil oil, is a finite resource. Therefore, we need to recycle more, not less. We should recycle plastics used in computer equipment when it has been outdated; we should recycle car interiors, among other things.
I also think that packaging in too many cases have been badly designed. They need to be made of recyclable plastic, or recyclable/compostable paper, but not both glued, stapled or laminated together.
Re:Plastics recycling *can* work (Score:5, Informative)
The investigation into plastic recycling that pretty much sealed the deal as it being an unsustainable nightmare was made in Europe.
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I mostly use a Berkey filter, but on occasion I need bottled water for reasons, and I buy Crystal Geyser which is in 50% post-consumer recycled bottles. They claim to be shooting for 100%, which is probably BS, but it sounds nice. It also has the virtue of showing up cheap at the Grocery Outlet.
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It's definitely a way to cut down on single use containers. I'm sure Americans would
There is not such thing ... (Score:2)
Also good for wastebasket liners. I've always suspected that the bans on single use grocery bags were driven by the specialty bag industry. Who make far more money if you buy dog poop bags and garbage can liners. The greenies just got led along that path by big business. It's no wonder. Most of them already wear nose rings.
paper straws (Score:3)
If you are concerned about the environmental effects of plastic straws, you can use paper straws. I get mine from Aardvark [aardvarkstraws.com] but I expect there are many others. I have a bag of paper straws in my car, and when I enter a fast food place I carry one in my pocket to use in place of the plastic straw they offered.
I got the idea from a McDonalds in Vermont. They offered a paper rather than a plastic straw. I don't know if they did it because their customers preferred it or if they were required to do it by some regulation.
Re:paper straws (Score:4, Insightful)
Tone-deaf solutions (Score:2)
Once again, the blame goes not to the manufacturers who choose plastic for convenience, price, and shelf life, but to consumers, who mostly have the choice of one plastic or another.
Climate change, environmental pollution, and the water crisis won't be solved by berating individual consumers and households, asking them to pay unreasonably high prices for sustainable products. This only changes the actions of a small percentage of consumers -- the highly motivated ones who have the privilege to be able to pa
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Reuse plastic bags (Score:2)
real problem (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem is that the fossil fuels industry has the energy economy by the balls and politician's can't afford to sacrifice their political careers to be advocates for the environment without the literally dirty money screwing them out of their campaign funds.
Plastic isn't meant to be recycled, it's meant to make durable goods that last a good while, like credit cards, keyboards, electronics.
Using oil as fuel is a last resort but at least it gets it burned up into a state where the existing biomas
Before you impact the food supply deal with this. (Score:2)
Plastic Recycling Doesn't work? (Score:2)
[quote]Plastic recycling doesn't work, Enck said, because most of what we think we're recycling just ends up in the landfill.[/quote]
Uh... why? Any chance for an explanation of this extremely vague and unsatisfying comment?
Problem is Type 3+, not single use (Score:5, Informative)
On almost every piece of plastic in America there is a recycle symbol with a number on it.
1 is Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET or PETE)
2 is High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE)
3 is Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC or Vinyl)
4 is Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE)
5 is Polypropylene (PP)
6 is Polystyrene (PS or Styrofoam)
7 is "other"
For all practical purposes, only Type 1 (PET) is recycled. Type 2 can be recycled, but the percentage is low (under 10% last time I checked)
Type 3 (PVC) is easy to sterilize, so is often used for medical equipment. It is also the most deadly plastic as it leaches toxins out. Might be why bacteria don't grow on it. But PVC plastic has no known recycling method.
Type 4-7 could theoretically be recycled at least some time, but almost never is.
The simplest solution, in my mind, is to tax the crap out of it. Type 1 gets no tax. Type 2 gets a 50% tax because it could be recycled. Tell the corps that if they can get it down to being recycled at least 25% of the time, their tax will go down.
Type 3+ should all be taxed at 100% tax rate. Double that price to pay for the problems they are making. Perhaps some of them will switch to type 1 or type 2.
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PVC plastic has no known recycling method.
Maybe not into more PVC directly, but all plastics can be "recycled" through fluid bed pyrolysis.
More expensive food ... (Score:3)
Whichever way you try to look at this, there's a loss somewhere.
Single use plastics have absolutely lowered the price of food, simply because it extends the life of the product.
There is no other product, currently, that can do the same.
Biodegradable plastic is considerably more expensive that "regular?" plastic.
So, the bottom line here, we could indeed massively cut down on single use plastic - but would see the price of food increase as a result.
Sure, cutting the amount of wasted food _could_ make up for that - wealthier nations throw out probably as much as they consume.
It would also require a complete overhaul of logistics - because the food doesn't keep as long, it impacts the entire supply chain.
It is very hard to put this genie back in its bottle.
When we try to think back to a time before single use place was everywhere, it probably requires someone in their 60's to remember - roll back to the 1960's.
The global population was half what it is now.
Traditional food markets were more prevalent that supermarkets.
More people grew their own vegetables - and kept livestock!
Seasonal food was more or less all people had, imported food being desperately expensive.
People ate less and wasted less.
Food was more expensive.
So, how to get that genie back in the bottle?
I don't think we can.
Needs laws, not suggestions (Score:3)
To change behaviour requires laws and regulation, preferably on businesses - ban or heavily tax the thing that shouldn't be using so they use a more environmentally friendly alternative. Plastic straws / coffee stirrers / utensils can be replaced with paper, wood or bamboo. Disposable cups should be at least compostable, but compostable cups have their own issues (you can't compost them in a backyard or throw them in with recycling) so really there should be a tax on the cup to encourage people to bring their own.
Well there is usefull Job for Elon. (Score:2)
Grocery bags are not single-use... (Score:2)
...If you're a dog owner. If you're not, go get a dog.
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I don't need a dog. I have neighbors with cats.
How to tell (Score:2)
How to tell whether something contributes to climate change:
1. Do I hate it?
2. If yes, it contributes to climate change. Exit.
3. Do I like it? If no, it contributes to climate change. Exit.
4. Am I not sure ? If yes, it contributes to climate change. Exit.
5. Throw error, program should not have reached this point.
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K-cups, Tide pods, and bottled water everywhere. It's like people don't know how to measure something out of a container anymore. Heaven forbid they would have to clean a canteen or mug.
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You forgot to mention paperboard straws that are wrapped in plastic.
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You can probably make a difference just by considering whether you really need that straw you're offered.
Re: Any industry that uses oil does (Score:2)
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You forgot to mention paperboard straws that are wrapped in plastic.
Or worse. Redesigning a lid to work like a sippy cup to eliminate the straw. But you Increase the weight of the lid by a gram when a straw you are trying to cut out only weighs a half a gram* and you end up using MORE plastic by mistake.
*(weights for illustrative purposes only)
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True.
And what I forgot to mention was economies of scale. half a gram doesnt sound like much. But multiply that by the estimated 4.87 million cups of coffee per day Starbucks sells, and you are looking at an ADDITIONAL 979 TONS of plastic a year. JUST from Starbucks.
LIttle things add up quick.
So now we have the ecowarriors cancelling out the gains of the greenies trying to reduce plastic consumption overall.
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That's missing the point.
A lot of the single-use items, are "correctly measured" products that prevent other problems like burning coffee, overfilling/underfilling detergent and keeping children and pets from eating the forbidden sugar/syrup. A container full of tide pods is easier to put out of reach than an open box of soap flakes or a liquid detergent that has a convenient button for the kid to press.
What largely needs to change is how things are organized, so the actual logistics are managed better, and
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Learn to measure, you only make a mistake once then you learn from it.
WTF does a measurement system have to do with this? More useless blabbering.
Not many people want to live in a commune. Apartment buildings are as close as you will get. Ask them how happy they are to share the utility services like laundry.
Maybe you moved away from dishes and cutlery, not everyone has, so speak for yourself.
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I want to mod you up, but at the same time I want to comment in support of your comment.
The biggest issue with sleek futuristic towers is the strain on resources (like here in the sf bay area, and everything south of it) There becomes a tipping point where the resource demand outpaces the lands ability to support it, so you have to start doing things like building 500 mile aquaducts, essentially re-routing rivers to support that population. LA cannot exist without it.
There's also logistical issues of conc
Re: Any industry that uses oil does (Score:2)
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Cite some sources for your made up points, asshat
Even if you can't make a civil reply - Ask and ye shall receive! From the first citation:
"The glass industry is a cornerstone of the US economy, with nearly $30 billion in products shipped annually and close to 150,000 employees. It is also an energy-intensive industry, consuming an estimated 250 trillion Btu a year, at a cost of $1.7 billion (Pellegrino 2002)."
Source: https://www.aceee.org/files/pr... [aceee.org]
Here's a nice paper from Stanford that outlines energy use of different processes.
http://large.sta [stanford.edu]
Re: Any industry that uses oil does (Score:2)
You're using plastic right now, you greedy selfish asshole
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Most of us cannot afford to use a computer once and discard it, and in any case, that hardly seems like long enough to twiddle all the preferences
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Plastic recycling only works in very, very, narrow categories because it's cheaper to just make new plastic.
You know those recycle logos? Only items with a 1 (PETE) are ever recycled in any meaningful way. This is what your water, soda and other bottles use. Even then, we would be better off switching back to glass bottles because they are better insulators, and don't leech chemicals into the drink. Even cans are "better" in this regard because at least cans can be melted down, however the plastic coatings
Re: Any industry that uses oil does (Score:2)
I see single use plastic as being similar to if I gathered firewood, built a fire, carved a stick into a spoon, ate with the spoon, and then burned the spoon to stay warm. The only problem is that we aren't burning our plastic waste for energy.
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The best thing to do with used plastic is to burn it. You save on new extracted hydrocarbons as you just burn those already extracted and manufactured into plastics instead. You save on energy needed to do the recycling, last I checked, it takes about five to seven times the energy to recycle plastic bags compared to making new ones.
Problem with modern Green movement (as opposed to environmentalist movement which it killed off by replacing it) is that it doesn't care about environmentalism. It cares about p
Re:"hurricanes are coming earlier and earlier" (Score:5, Informative)
i know this is not only beside the point but also completely pointless but ... yes, they are:
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Except a lot of the data they are basing their research on is conjecture. Hurricanes and severe tropical storms were only recorded when they made landfall until approximately 1955-60 when the National Weather Service and US Air Force started flying long-range hurricane sweeps. Atlantic hurricane history [wikipedia.org]
Early data about hurricanes that formed and stayed in the Atlantic is unrecorded. Unless they made landfall in the Bahamas or US coast, claiming the data from 1900-2020 proves their conjecture based on "Qu
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on "Quantile regression analysis" and seems as if they are creating missing data to prove their hypothesis
it seems as if they use known statistical methods to find trends with the data they do have available, which is what i would expect in such a case. do you spot any error or bias in their approach or process?
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Anytime you start analyzing statistics, you have to be very sure your data is complete, consistent, and normalized.
Exactly. This is just the flip side of Inhofe's theatrical stunt where he brought a snowball into Congress and claimed it was "proof against global warming." There have been as many years with below-normal hurricane activity as there have been with above-normal activity.
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Ps Iâ(TM)m using - instead of â because slashdot canâ(TM)t bother to make a text filter for posts from iOS after all these years
just so you know, the workaround isn't working very well :-)
to your point, i concur this is poor and cheap editorial which is now ubiquitous in media, but i think this case is a notorious exception of betteridge's law of headlines
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)