Single-Use Plastic Production Rose Between 2019 and 2021 Despite Pledges 82
Polluting single-use plastic production rose globally by 6 million tons per year from 2019 to 2021 despite tougher worldwide regulations, with producers making "little progress" to tackle the problem and boost recycling, new research showed on Monday. Reuters reports: Single-use plastics have emerged as one of the world's most pressing environmental threats, with vast amounts of waste buried in landfills or dumped untreated in rivers and oceans. The manufacturing process is also a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas. But while growth has slowed recently, the production of single-use plastic from "virgin" fossil fuel sources is still nowhere near its peak, and the use of recycled feedstocks remains "at best a marginal activity," Australia's Minderoo Foundation said in its Plastic Waste Makers Index. "Make no mistake, the plastic waste crisis is going to get significantly worse before we see an absolute year-on-year decline in virgin single-use plastic consumption," it said.
Exxon Mobil was at the top of the list of global petrochemical companies producing virgin polymers used in single-use plastics, followed by China's Sinopec. Sinopec also leads the way when it comes to building new production facilities over the 2019-2027 period, the report said, with more than 5 million tons of annual capacity planned. Exxon Mobil was second with around 4 million tons. [...] Around 137 million tons of single-use plastics were produced from fossil fuels in 2021, and it is expected to rise by another 17 million tons by 2027, the researchers said.
Exxon Mobil was at the top of the list of global petrochemical companies producing virgin polymers used in single-use plastics, followed by China's Sinopec. Sinopec also leads the way when it comes to building new production facilities over the 2019-2027 period, the report said, with more than 5 million tons of annual capacity planned. Exxon Mobil was second with around 4 million tons. [...] Around 137 million tons of single-use plastics were produced from fossil fuels in 2021, and it is expected to rise by another 17 million tons by 2027, the researchers said.
Re: The future is plastics. (Score:2)
Put them in landfills, seal them up good, and collect the methane. Works on most stuff and a lot better than burning that shit as is. Let the microbes do the work....
Re: The future is plastics. (Score:5, Interesting)
To get people to use less plastic, means you are essentially going to ask refineries and oil companies to take their byproducts and warehouse them, throw them away, or burn them. That is not going to happen, because at any cost, it is cheaper to get rid of it, than hang onto it. That is to say, the volume of plastics produced is proportional to the volume of fuel refined from crude oil. Now, there are some variations to this. The "sweeter" crudes have better ratios of oxygen and hydrogen to carbon, which makes more of the finer grade fuels and oils, and less of the lower end stuff like the plastics we are talking about.
The recycling rate for plastic is easily predictable. If the global supply of plastic from refineries exceeds the demand, and the price the market will bear exceeds the cost to recycle it (determined by the separation of the plastics), then recyclers have a customer. If not, we are not going to refine extra oil just to meet plastic demand. Recycling is the buffer that allows plastic demand to float relative to oil refinery production. That is all.
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No, they aren't. You're thinking of naphtha.
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Re: The future is plastics. (Score:5, Informative)
You've got the right idea, but the wrong word. The word you want is "bunKer."
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Re: The future is plastics. (Score:5, Informative)
That's actually not true. You have chemistry partially right, but not the economics or the refinery design. In actuality the vast majority of refineries in the world do not have a petrochemical process attached and generate no plastics what so ever. We use orders of magnitude more oil for fuel than we do for plastics and chemicals. In fact a lot of the plastic production currently just takes crude oil, strips out the one component they need, hydroskimms a bit of cheap and easy to extract fuel off the top and sells the majority of what they bought back to a proper petroleum refinery at a discount.
Why at a discount? Well the majority of plastic production is not from a biproduct of refining, but rather shares a common chemical with high value refined products. You use the example of PET. The precursor to PET is PTA (Purified Terephthalic Acid). The main feedstock to making PTA is p-Xylene. And where do we get p-xylene from? Catalytic reforming of naphtha. Now naphtha plants are part of normal refineries but out of the BTX products they extract, the T and X can very much be mixed back into reformate to increase the octane of your gasoline with only really Benzene being considered a true "waste" product in this process.
Refineries are built and continuously modified over their lifetime to suit the economics of what they need to process. All products are convertible, all you need is a market to do so. If you're a lovely western refinery your kit is likely designed primarily for the production of fuel with only a few chemical stocks taken from the side. If you're SINOPEC well due to the overwhelming majority of the plastics market being in China you are more likely to have an integrated chemical park at the side of a refinery, or as I mentioned at the top the not-uncommon "pull out just the thing we need and sell the rest" plant.
By the way most precursors to chemicals are in the C5-C10 range. This is nothing like bunker fuel.
* Currently working at a refinery that is bunker fuel constrained. As a result a cracking unit is being installed to upgrade bunker fuel into something more valuable. Why now? Well economics change, and so do refineries with them.
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It's a supply and demand thing. There's no point producing lots of plastic in Europe if there's no market for plastics in Europe. The vast majority of plastic production itself is in China. The vast majority of plastic consumption (both direct single use, and as secondary in parts of manufacturing and even things like in cloths) is in China.
If you build a market that can sustain a positive profit the refiners will adapt.
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On the flip side, if and when we get past the peak demand for oil (due largely to electrification of transport), there'll be less of that byproduct available. Then hopefully virgin plastic becomes more expensive. I won't place any bets on *when* that'll happen, but one way or another we won't be burning oil forever.
Re: The future is plastics. (Score:2)
Mask up! Put on those faceshields! Gloves on! (Score:1, Interesting)
That, and the related and belated realization that single use items often present less of a biohazard problem than washing reusable items totally have nothing to do with it.
Pinky swear.
Massachusetts rescinding its single use grocery bag bans for a time was also just a coincidence.
Good thing there were grocery bags and straws and such to be had. Imagine if every jurisdiction banned the stuff and killed off the industry. Then we'd really have been up the shit creek when we suddenly realized we needed the shit
Re:Mask up! Put on those faceshields! Gloves on! (Score:4, Insightful)
To put things in perspective, World GDP was 10% higher in 2021 than in 2019, despite dipping in 2020 due to the pandemic. World plastic production is roughly 380 million tons per year, so a six million ton increase is les than 2%. So the plastic waste *per unit of GDP* has improved slightly.
It's easy to reduce pollution. Just contract the economy. But it's not sustainable. With a growing world population, the economy needs to grow, and we need to get more efficient with our use of the environment because that fixed or shrinking.
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Re:Mask up! Put on those faceshields! Gloves on! (Score:5, Informative)
It's customary to compare GDP years by scaling each year to a single year's dollar (e.g. in "current dollars"). So yes, world GDP did grow between 2019 and 2021, after dropping in 2020, even after accounting for inflation.
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If by "libtard" you mean "people who pay attention to actual data" and "lie" you mean "say things that won't fit in my tiny brain", and "suck socialist dick" you mean "hurt my fee-fees", yes. "Libtards" continually "lie" about the economy and "suck socialist dick".
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Evil Styrofoam == Good Insulation (Score:2)
Re: Evil Styrofoam == Good Insulation (Score:1)
Depends. The really good stuff is formed with argon in the cells for lower thermal conductivity. Also helps if it's a continuous sheet to provide an air seal. Can't just squish together old coffee cups and get the same result.
The Pandemic Factor (Score:1)
I bought a lot more restaurant to-go food in 2020-21 than pre-pandemic.
I'm sure I'm not alone.
It's almost as if (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: It's almost as if (Score:2)
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Re: It's almost as if (Score:2)
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You do realize that it lists 2019 to 2021 as the timeframe for the increase in use? My snark was intended to point out that the trend towards less single use plastic was completely reversed during this timeframe due to Covid response. During that time period stores would not touch let alone fill a reusable bag in many jurisdictions. In the last year that has changed again. I would think that any new study covering 2022 onwards would show a return to reduction in use. But, it will take time for that story to be told.
Worse, in California, they didn't suspend the bans, and instead made us buy new reusable bags over and over. I have approximately six *pounds* of those thick 4 mil reusable bags (probably low-density polyethylene), packed as densely as I could get them, and filling a super-sized black garbage bag. I have no idea what to do with them — I guess burn them for warmth when the big one comes.
California's plastic bag ban has been a bit of an ecological disaster from my perspective.
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Worse, in California, they didn't suspend the bans, and instead made us buy new reusable bags over and over. I have approximately six *pounds* of those thick 4 mil reusable bags (probably low-density polyethylene), packed as densely as I could get them, and filling a super-sized black garbage bag. I have no idea what to do with them; I guess burn them for warmth when the big one comes.
California's plastic bag ban has been a bit of an ecological disaster from my perspective.
Where I live, when the plastic bag legislation came in, the government proudly declared that the legislation had been "drafted in cooperation with the supermarkets." Therefore it was no surprise that the new laws meant that we had to pay money for something the supermarkets used to give away for free. And yeah, we have those thicker bags now too, because they're supposed to be "reusable." The old, thinner bags were just fine when re-used as bin liners, dog poo bags etc.
Not to mention that the supermarket-sp
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old, thinner bags were just fine when re-used as bin liners, dog poo bags etc.
Yeah, I don't just throw away cheap plastic bags unless they ripped on the way home. Litter box cleaning and trash-can liners, lunch carrier, convenient place to tie up some loose items. They took the place of *new* bags that would do the same thing.
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Industry loophole. They should have been $5, not $.10. Then people would get their crap together and bring bags.
Re: It's almost as if (Score:2)
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in California, they didn't suspend the bans, and instead made us buy new reusable bags over and over. I have approximately six *pounds* of those thick 4 mil reusable bags (probably low-density polyethylene), packed as densely as I could get them, and filling a super-sized black garbage bag. I have no idea what to do with them
An intelligent person would have taken them back to the store and reused them when they stopped banning bag reuse as a senseless pandemic precaution, or even put the groceries back in the cart and then bagged them as they put them into the vehicle. Pretend to be one of those people, and do what they would do. Barring that, they make pretty good packaging material when you sell shit on eBay.
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yeah not all of us like to live in shit hole surrounded by stocks of garbage or drive around with it in our cars all the time.
Reusable bags are a good thing, but when government after insisting on them turns around and forbids their use based on bad science (remember we learned covid does not live long on surfaces they changed policy BEFORE the facts were in) reasonable people have better things to do with their time and storage space than to hold on to a bunch of cheap but should have been cheaper plastic
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Worse, in California, they didn't suspend the bans, and instead made us buy new reusable bags over and over.
Cool story bro. Too bad it didn't happen.
When the stores stopped letting us bring in our own re-usable bags, the stores gave away FREE paper / plastic bags. They also allowed you to not have your items bagged, and bag them yourself outside of the store. Some stores set up tables outside for customers to use as "Bagging Stations" for you to pack your stuff into your re-usable bags.
We get it: You are filled with hate and want to "own the Libs", but lies don't help.
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Worse, in California, they didn't suspend the bans, and instead made us buy new reusable bags over and over.
Cool story bro. Too bad it didn't happen.
Uh... I have a six-pound bag of "reusable" bags to prove it. It happened. Sorry to burst your bubble.
When the stores stopped letting us bring in our own re-usable bags, the stores gave away FREE paper / plastic bags.
Maybe where you are.
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Nobody MADE YOU BUY six pounds of reusable bags to not reuse them.
And yes... where I am, IN CALIFORNIA (where you said we were forced to buy reusable bags over and over...), the stores gave away the single use bags when they wouldn't let us bring in and reuse our own bags.
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Nobody MADE YOU BUY six pounds of reusable bags to not reuse them.
And yes... where I am, IN CALIFORNIA (where you said we were forced to buy reusable bags over and over...), the stores gave away the single use bags when they wouldn't let us bring in and reuse our own bags.
Where I am, also in California (San Jose metro area), the stores I frequented did not have single-use bags. That's not saying that none did, but there was definitely not a consistent reprieve from the ban, or if there was, then the Walmart and Target stores certainly didn't take advantage of that reprieve, and instead chose to keep making a huge profit on the ten-cent bags.
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And making everything more expensive leads to high inflation which hurts the poor harder than anyone else. Government intervention raising prices always hits the poor and lower income brackets.
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It's all well and good to keep prices down until a hurricane destroys your whole neighborhood and you end up homeless. "Oh why did they make me use reusable bags?!?!?"
WINNING! (Score:1)
Bring back clean coal! We're #1!
And this is why international pacts are useless. (Score:2)
As teats on a bull.
Because the big players simply won't sign on.
And, even if they do, they're lying about conforming.
So all the virtue signalers are either lying, or damaging their economies as said liars beat them out in trade.
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International pacts can be useful:
That hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica seems to be getting better, or at least not getting bigger as fast as it would have.
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They're only useful if you gain broad and earnest support.
A thing that's becoming increasingly uncommon these days.
Recycling is not the fix (Score:5, Informative)
Recycling is not the fix. Recycling has never been the fix. It is not sustainable. It was put out there as a way for companies to push the problem back on consumers. They don't need to stop using plastic for everything because it saves them money, instead we should be recycling to fix the problem they are creating. And most single use plastic isn't really recyclable, at least not in any easy capacity. They just slap a arrow triangle on everything and people think it is good.
The only real solution is to force companies to stop using single use plastics.
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What do you propose is done with the by products of refineries then? Many of the plastics we have are a product of utilizing what was waste to make something. It's not as simple as a 3rd grader wanting to save the turtles from straws leading to stupid bans from virtue signaling politicians claiming to be "following the science". There's much more complexity to it.
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Bury it in an old quarry, cover it with dirt and call it carbon sequestration. At least that would keep it out of the rivers and oceans.
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Recycling has never been the fix. It is not sustainable.
The three Rs were put in an order for a reason. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Recycling was never meant as a first option, and it was never advertised to consumers as such.
But to your comment of it's never been a fix and is not sustainable, that very much is a textbook example of "we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas".
We don't know if recycling is sustainable. Much of the world has never done it. It's a word we throw around while putting absolutely pathetic levels of effort into its implementation (someth
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We can recycle all plastics through fluid bed pyrolysis, but it's not profitable so nobody does it.
If we made it unprofitable to not do it, say by instituting massive fines for any plastics company that doesn't do recycling, then it would be done.
Pretending that we don't have solutions to this problem is victim mentality behavior.
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This right here. There are so many 'easy' wins.
The easiest one for me is say laundry detergent. I switched to laundry strips which come in a paper/cardboard packaging. Works great. Now even if you want 'Tide' or something, why can't tide make a 'Tide' laundry strip. They do have Tide Pods. But again, why do Tide Pods come in a plastic container. Just throw it in a cardboard box.
Even say deodorant/anti antiperspirant. Many 'natural' brands come in paper push sticks. I can't figure out why antiperspirant can'
Recycling is not the fix & burning oil is dumb (Score:2)
Republicans got close, so very close, but as usual were dumb f**king morons who missed the obvious:
WE SHOULDN'T BE BURNING OIL / COAL / NATURAL GAS FOR FUEL BECAUSE WE NEED IT FOR OTHER THINGS!
Go green all you like, and we still need those non-renewable resources for the foreseeable future. I'm all for solar, wind, hydro, and I'll even approve of nuclear energy... but we need to stop burning the other stuff yesterday.
Force them to pay. (Score:2)
Force companies to pay for the cost of recycling their own packaging and you will see a fast transition to using thermoplastic starch, a bioplastic that dissolves in water. There aren't any good reasons that any plastic inside a box isn't thermoplastic starch.
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When you say force "THEM" to pay, you do realize what you are ultimately saying is make "US" pay? It's not as if the money that "THEY" would be paying is coming from their pockets, the cost just gets passed down to the consumer.
Thermoplastic starch $2-5 per Kg
PET $.08-1.5 per KG
Has anyone done any research on the chemicals released when thermoplastic starch decomposes? I'd imagine bacteria eating up all that starch would release something.
and what's the environmental cost of production?
It's one of those t
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When you say force "THEM" to pay, you do realize what you are ultimately saying is make "US" pay? It's not as if the money that "THEY" would be paying is coming from their pockets, the cost just gets passed down to the consumer.
Yes you might have to pay a negligible amount more so that plastic doesn't end up being burned and turned into pollution. So what exactly is the problem?
I'd like for recycling plants to be placed right beside dumps... garbage trucks come.. get sorted.. garbage is processed.. what can be used for bio fuel goes there.. what can be used for recycling, goes to a recycling plant adjacent and anything else goes into an incinerator for power generation with scrubbing to remove air pollution like some countries have done.
That's a far more expensive solution and is still unsustainable.
GOOD (Score:2)
Plastics are carbon sequestration. Bury it in a box in your backyard and that will prevent it from reaching the atmosphere as CO2. If we didn't have plastic, all that hydrocarbon would be used up as gasoline eventually.
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I was thinking along the lines of reusable bags being banned during Covid, increase in DoorDash, GrubHub deliveries, etc.
Grocery bags vs totes ... (Score:5, Informative)
I remember seeing a segment a little while ago -- perhaps, of all places, on The Daily Show -- comparing single-use plastic grocery bags vs various tote bags and found that you'd have to re-use the tote bags a LOT to offset their manufacturing footprint (environmental cost) vs the single-use plastic bag. Googling grocery bags reusable vs single use [google.com] and grocery totes vs plastic bags [google.com] yielded many articles of various ages.
This one, Should You Swap Plastic Bags For Tote Bags To Reduce Your Impact? [medium.com] noted a 2011 UK study:
The study estimated that a cotton tote bag’s total carbon footprint was 598.6lb of CO2e. This compared to 3.48lb of CO2e for a standard plastic bag. That means that you would need to use the tote bag 172 times for every 1 time you used the plastic bag.
While this one, Here’s how many times you need to reuse your reusable grocery bags [cnn.com] noted a 2018 Danish study:
A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggested that a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared to a classic supermarket plastic bag that’s reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. (If that cotton is organic, the figure is an eye-popping 20,000 times, with the report assuming a lower yield but the same input of raw materials.)
That report looked at 15 different environmental indicators, including climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, water use and land use. However, when focused solely on cotton’s climate impact, it suggested that a cotton tote would need to be reused at least 52 times — in line with the UNEP report.
Heavyweight plastic totes also have a higher creation impact and require a fairly high re-use count to offset their use compared to single-use plastic bags. Also from the CNN article (above):
A report produced for the United Nations Environmental Programme in 2020 found a thick and durable polypropylene (PP) bag (they often have a woven feel) must be used for an estimated 10 to 20 times compared to one single use plastic bag, while a slimmer but still reusable polyethylene (PE) bag five to 10 times.
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Did they look at the water impact as well? Cotton requires a lot of water to grow. Washing those bags every few uses also uses water. Bans are feel-good bandwagon gestures. Stores were happy to go along as the laws dictated customers pay for plastic bags at a fairly high margin so the stores both got to virtue signal to leftist shoppers and get a government mandated profit stream.
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Firstly stick to a theme. We're talking about plastic waste, not carbon emissions. Cotton bags absolutely solve the former and are a completely insignificant contributor to the latter.
Secondly as you pointed out in your post you don't need to make bags out of cotton, I like the example from the PP bag at the bottom. 10-20 times? Shit man I did that in the first 3 weeks and I've been using the same bag for over a year.
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Thanks, but I was mainly pointing out that there's no free lunch... :-)
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The reuse stats on the plastic ones aren't bad, and also don't forget that it's not just the amount of virgin plastic that matters, it's the landfill mass too.
For a regularly used shopping bad, 10-20 times is well within the expected lifespan of a sturdy plastic bag. If you go shopping every week then it's 3-5 months.
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The real problem with single use plastic grocery bags is not the mass of plastic it represents. It is that they end up where they shouldn't be. In nature, in the oceans, littering the cities, etc... It is not only an eyesore but it also cause all sorts of ecological trouble. If they were all properly trashed to end up in a properly managed landfill, that wouldn't be much of a problem, but unfortunately, it is not the case.
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Heard at the checkout line of a local store when asked which reusable bag a customer wanted:
"It doesn't matter. It's going into the garbage anyhow."
Speaking Truth to Glower (Score:2)
Hate to break it to those people out there that thought they could reduce the use of this, but single use plastics are incredibly useful and emerging markets are going to be making that segment of use grow way more in the future even as more advanced economies try to cut back...
And on top of that it's not at all fair to ask emerging markets to deny themselves the utility of this which is needed to growth their economy, and improve the health of residents. It's way too arrogant and elitist to even consideri
Comment removed (Score:3)
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I think all they offer now from the ten cent hidden storage are paper bags. You might get 4 or 5 uses assuming nothing ever leaks into them, and it never rai
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Instead I see them using the same amount of plastic bags as before just using 3x to 4x the plastic.
I'm pretty sure the standard plastic bags were about half a mil in thickness, or at least most single-use shopping bags typically are. The new bags are 4 mil. So conservatively 8x the plastic.
Except that these are also much larger than the old single-use bags, so probably more like 15 to 20x.
Yes, that law was an ecological disaster, even before you factor in the idiocy of everyone having to add loads of laundry during a statewide water crisis to wash the reusable cloth bags, and before the idiocy of citie
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Didn't they introduce a charge for plastic bags? In the UK they can't be free anymore, and even if they are only 5p or so it's enough that people will bring their own bags or use their pockets.
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California had a ten cent charge for bags before the SF single use ban, and most stores upgraded their bags when it happened, so the idea that the single use ban increased plastics use is foolish.
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I have no idea what the statistics on reuse is in supermarkets, but I have a suspicion it's a nice money spinner for them to sell all those "reusable" bags to people who didn't bring any or bring enough. I know I'm in the latter category, I bring two, need three. I bring three, need four... However as part of my job I have access to sales data in non-food based retail and let me tell you, effectively nobody is coming in prepared with a bag and they are simply eating the cost at the till. If the UK ban on fr
The "Jackpot"... (Score:2)
Is well underway. Watch "The Periferal" series. What's going to screw up the humanity is our self-centredness, not being able to see beyond ourselves and help the community thrive. Really, just look into yourselves. The solution to all this crap is simple but we've been trying to make things better since the 1980s and managed to achieve very little. We're also going about it in a wrong way - just to make some people profit from it. We're doomed with our selfishness.
let's take a step back (Score:1)
This is either people pretending to do som
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It's a religion. In many religions, there are rites you must perform to cleanse yourself of sin, and other rites of sacrifice to please the deity. Same old same old. Do this if you want to go to heaven.
90 percent of plastics are not recycled (Score:2)
Cold hard facts: if it's not a PET 1 or PET 2, it's not going to be recycled in North America, unless it's part of commercial or industrial recycling program.
Yes, they end up in the waterways, and don't "compost".
We can actually make replacements for plastics to actually biodegrade into food, and we can produce single use plastics that are recyclable, but that requires only using ONE type of plastic in a material, and having a recycling program run by commerce and industry.
Otherwise it's wishful thinking.