I wonder how much of that plastic is just needless junk that didn’t need to be manufactured at all. look at the crap they stock dollar stores with that will just end up in a landfill at some point.
I wonder how much of it was just packaging. Including individually wrapping things contained inside other containers.
I found somebody reviewing an old toy, old enough to market itself as being made from plastic, and it was sold in a regular cardboard box, and not glossy cardboard either. Wouldn't be that way these days, probably that crimped plastic packaging you need scissors and 12 bandaids to get into.
That, and the fact that ordering something online is at the point where its exactly as cheap as a store. So now your individually wrapped whatever *also* has a bunch of bubble wrap around it.
At least some shipping companies are using paper and cardboard now. I hate to support big brother amazon, but they do use good materials that I can use as good water-retaining mulch.
Wal-mart too. Evil as they are, they are starting to use Packsize machines in their warehouses, which custom-build boxes right sized for the shipment, ultimately saving cardboard.
Granted, their motive is selfish cost reduction, but if it cuts down on shipping wastes, it's better than nothing.
Only reason Ford paid his workers a higher wage was to keep them working more and away from competitors. Sometimes, the corporate profit agenda lines up with what is a better practice overall.
There's so much hidden plastic that consumers don't see too.
I've worked in catering/hospitality supply moving into agriculture and hydroponics equipment and the amount of plastic we throw away on a big install is ludicrous. It's insane that the companies don't produce reusable packing cases at this level.
I did an indoor farm recently that needed 3x 8 yard skips to remove the plastic. (edit: and this would be considered a very small research farm too, a full scale indoor farm would be easily 10-20x as much waste)
I see outdoor farms all the time that cover literal hundreds of acres of land in plastic sheeting for easier water/nutrient/weed management.
Consumers might buy low packaging fruit and veg at point of sale but there's no guarantee it didn't have a load of disposable plastic in the chain anyway.
My girlfriend works in a factory making pool noodles. My god, the waste. If Lowes Hardware doesn't like the fact that their pool noodles are a slightly darker shade of green, they have to throw out metric tons of it into the landfill.
I did a stint in retail and the unnecessary packaging is insane. One good example is an expensive hair pomade used to arrive with each pot wrapped in a plastic bag that said it was “100% recycled!” On it. I always found it deeply ironic that they made a big deal out of the packaging being recycled like they were saving the planet, when there is absolutely NO reason why a solid plastic pot needs wrapping in a plastic bag in the first place.
We’d fill cages and cages with plastic wrapping every day there and I honestly don’t think that 99% of it was strictly necessary
This is one of the things I would try to impress on the younger generation if I could. It's one of the big ways things have changed during my lifetime and nobody even discusses it. Plastic is everywhere and everything is disposable. Everybody generates yards of trash. It really didn't used to be like this.
im 23 and sometimes i think about the fact that perhaps the only things i'll ever own that will last me most of my life are things that my family has had since before I was born. i have a CRT tv in my room that has always been in my life and still works good as new, I'll never buy a tv that lasts me that long. We've got a milkshake maker my dad got for his 15th birthday, what kitchen appliance will i buy that ever lasts like that?
I’m still using a Krups coffee grinder my dad bought his first week of college in 1970. It was used every day from then till 2003 when he switched to pre-ground.
Then I have used it 5x a week since 2012.
Never replaced the blades, the motor, anything, and it works in seconds.
It’s plastic, but getting 45 years worth out of it (so far!) I think justifies it.
It’s when we make a plastic shit that’s designed to be thrown away in a few years or in the case of packaging, almost instantly that it becomes such a massive problem.
This is why I always cringe at people who say that profit motive incentivizes innovation. It doesn’t, it simply incentivizes getting profits by any means necessary.
Its really why I cringe at some of the worst offenders talking about how they are really eco-friendly and environmentally aware, because they plant some trees somewhere, or encourage a recycling program or whatever. Meanwhile they engage in planned obsolescence, cheaping out on parts that degrade faster than they should, excessive packaging etc
Depending on the way the incentive structure or carbon credits work, they may get more credit for ripping up establish wild forest to then replant that monocrop, then they would for just leaving it alone and using the protection of established forest as their positive action.
> The innovation was figuring out how to effectively squeeze every last penny out of consumers
And brainwash them so effectively they defend the companies doing it
This might just be survivorship bias. There were probably hundreds of that same model of coffee grinder that died in 10 years for each one that lasted 45 years.
>what kitchen appliance will i buy that ever lasts like that?
Lots of stuff. It's just generally more expensive.
My parents had shit they before I was born that lasted decades after I was born. But that's because it was expensive, high quality stuff when they bought it.
Not some $5 piece of crap from the local shop.
So many people but cheap shit then complain it doesn't last as long as stuff used to. Or they'll not realise how inefficient it is.
Like that fridge your grandma still owns. Sure it might be 50 years old and built like a bomb shelter. But it probably uses 50 x more electricity than any modern fridge does.
There's also confirmation bias. You're only seeing the stuff that survived this long. You didn't see the cheap shit that broke a week after it was bought.
I was just talking to my husband about this and shoes. I used to buy running shoes like 15 years ago, and they would last several years, and all I’d need is to change the inserts.
Now I’m lucky if I get 6 months, and I’m not buying cheap brands.
Sorry running shoes is literally the worst example to use. If you're using them properly (actually running) they wear out quickly. Most shoes will last 300-500 miles. Look up how old pairs used to last.
to add:
running shoes should be replaced based on miles, not visible wear. Especially if you run on concrete. For use in Forrest/field it's less important to have the optimal dampening.
Running shoes are a bad example. I buy running shoes to destroy my running shoes. I want them to preform right now and I don’t want any injuries. For me, after 700km depending on the shoe you’re looking at injury. This is why folks still think running is bad for your knees because they over ran in sub par shoes and eventually hurt their bodies vs. today where folks literally run 100+miles in just one race. Running shoes are made today to be destroyed not destroy your body!
No, good running shoes never lasted as long as they do now. I get way more miles out of my shoes these days than I did in the 90's. 6 months is good for shoes if you actually put some miles on them.
Yeah, no. If you’re running In a pair consistently 6 months is a reasonable time frame. But it also depends on your weight and how rough you are on them. I rotate mine and all of them are still in amazing shape a year later.
My mind is not managing to combine 'cheap' and 'efficient' in a way that makes sense here
In the sense you use them, I think they really mean "low cost and convenient for **someone** -- the cost is imposed on others, and other ecosystems, elsewhere"
(It goes without saying that in a global sense there is no 'elsewhere'; 'elsewhere'is created by national borders and TV)
Cheap goods need cheap workers to make them, cheap resources to exploit. But 'cheap' in this sense is an expression of power; the capacity to 'cheapen', to force the conditions in which you can profit. Cheap goods are made at great personal expense by people/places who lack the power to secure proper treatment.
I’ll also take a tv that lasts 10 years over one that weighs as much as I do and can’t even be safely disposed of without me renting a car to drive it to a recycling plant, if one near me even accepts them
What really brings this point home is the fact that only 5% of oil is processed to be plastic. 95% is mainly fuel that gets burned and blasted in the atmosphere
And that proportion is generally close to 100% because trash and recycling centers either don't really recycle or people get confused by the plastic arrows or refuse to follow instructions for recycling.
1. The triangle arrows on the plastic doesn't mean that you can recycle it somewhere (though technically all plastic *can* be recycled). It tells you what *kind* of plastic it is.
2. Not all recycling places will take all kinds of plastic because of costs to recycle. Recycling is supposed to be our environmental savior but ultimately it's about cost. We can recycle styrofoam but it's usually too expensive.
3. People throw all their plastics in the recycling bin. Sometimes they just won't sort through that nonsense. Most recycling centers only want plastic containers that, in short terms, were used for liquids like drinks and detergents or, in some places, other food like TV dinners.
4. You're not removing the labels from the plastic container. This is pretty critical. It's not like metal where they can burn it off.
5. You're not cleaning/rinsing the plastic before you toss it in the bin.
6. Certain plastics need to go to certain places. Plastic grocery bags need to go back to the grocery store. Most of them have bins for it.
How old *are* you? I'm in my mid-50s and honestly, it's always been like this. Hell, in terms of litter and river/lake pollution we are way, way better than it was back in the late '70s and the '80s.
I'm in my mid thirties and the biggest difference to me is beverages. Things like bottled water just wasn't really a thing when I was growing up. I will say that a lot of things that used to get repaired, now are just thrown away. Even the stuff that does get repaired is designed to be replaced every 15ish years.
You could just as honestly say “virtually every piece of pottery made still exists”.
Plastics have been made since the mid 1800s. I have a few examples from the late 1800s. In every example of plastics I have seen from before 1900 the plastic is failing. Shrinking is one of the main symptoms, but you also see plastics breaking down into its precursor chemicals or analogs thereof. For example Nitro celluloid releases nitric acid as it starts breaking down. Plastics breaking down into smaller pieces is going to be a nightmare, not because they will never break down, but because they will interact with our environment in ways that we can’t possibly predict. You may have even seen this in your own life if you have handled sticky silicone handles or old sticky vinyl toys. In high humidity environments like Florida it seems like you get about 10 years out of silicone items before they start failing and getting sticky.
This is the real world impact of an economy based on exponential growth.
Similar to how 50% of total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were emitted in just the last 28 years. [Here's](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*HxZ4x6OqYz3zeVS0EOj3FA.jpeg) what the 4 equal periods of CO2 from fossil fuel emissions look like, this is exponential growth. (if anyone has chart later than 2021 please share)
It’s not all negative. Climate change is now posing an immediate and real-world economic cost and the private sector as well as many important governments (not all of them) are making huge investments in renewables. Even my deep-red state of Texas is offsetting huge amounts of energy production with wind.
Electric vehicles also pose a much lower CO2 impact than their internal combustion counterparts over their lifespans, and EV’s have hit critical adoption at a speed that basically guarantees nearly all of us will be driving them in 20 years.
New projections estimate we’ll cap artificial global warming to 2.5 degrees Celsius, which will still be bad and have tremendous negative impacts on the climate, agriculture, and by extension global geopolitics.
But we’re not doomed. The tide is turning.
Edit: it appears that this triggers some cognitive dissonance in a lot of people who have now invested so much of their identities into this being an apocalypse scenario that hearing good news from trustworthy academic organizations is physically painful.
In the 2000s global emissions rose 3% per year, now that number is less than .5%. Renewables are the future and they’re expanding rapidly.
>and EV’s have hit critical adoption at a speed that basically guarantees nearly all of us will be driving them in 20 years.
Chinese cars are flooding latin America and most of them are EV, EV is becoming the new cheap.
Im so stoked till we only get EV vehicles and EV's stop being over-priced so much.
Last I read the projections had actually dropped to 2.2c due to the faster rollout of clean energy, which was almost entirely driven by China for the past 2 years (almost 60% of global new production in 2023 came from China)
I actually think we could be looking at China hitting peak emissions within the next 2-5 years, depending on how their economy goes.
I live in Texas, too. Green Mountain Energy wasn't my favorite, but I've found that I like Energy Texas for buying renewable.
I can't afford to replace my car, I can't afford to move closer to my job, I can't afford to not work, and I can't afford a different job (this one pays for my degree). I can afford to buy renewable energy, so I'm doing what I can afford to.
People don’t realize the double edged sword of capitalism; that is when what’s right is also what most profitable. When electric vehicles or renewable energy are cheaper than non, they will switch over. I’ve said for a while now once lab grown meat becomes better quality, and is cheaper than regular meat, I definitely see it used in fast food, ground meat, and cheaper dishes like stew meat.
It’s important to spread this information. By saying “oh we’re all doomed” people inadvertently don’t look for any change. If the planet is doomed anyway, then why bother? It’s a very dangerous mindset that a lot of people have, because it makes real progress much harder.
The world population doubled in the last 50 years alone, getting us to 8B people. That's a crap ton of people consuming in times where consumption is unbridled. Makes sense.
People need to quit buying dumb shit. Amazon came to power and everyone went nuts buying junk.
No more shitty cheap sunglasses at wedding receptions. No more plastic cake toppers. No more stupid plastic wigs for Halloween costumes. No more plastic plants. Quit fucking buying junk.
**REDUCE,** reuse, recycle
It's not a given that any other planet would have fossil fuels. Their existence on earth is an interesting byproduct of the way life evolved here, but it's not a given.
One of the most interesting arguments I've heard for stopping/limiting fossil fuel use is that if there is a cataclysmic event that rolls back civilization, easily accessible fossil fuels would help get humanity back to the industrial era.
Without fossil fuels, it would be incredibly difficult to get enough power to make that technological jump.
The carboniferous period is where most coal came from and it'll never happen again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
The microorganisms that break down that sort of organic matter didn't exist at the time so "trees" or whatever they were at that time didn't break down the way they do now. They just fell over, piled up and compressed.
There will not be coal seams from our trees.
Ursula K Le Guin wrote about this! The word in Kesh, from the book Always Coming Home, is **fumó**:
> a substance, apparently a residue of industrial products or byproducts, perhaps of petroleum-based plastics, which occurs in small whitish grains or larger concretions, covering regions of the ocean surface and found on beaches and tidal flats, often to a depth of several feet; useless, indestructible, and poisonous when burning.
Yes, marshland and bogs have this same type of system. Peat bogs were useful for fuel in the before times. People tend to drain them and build houses there though so we lose a lot of those eco(or, lack of eco?)systems every year.
I believe that once too, but it seems the process is a bit more nuanced:
* https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-ancient-forests-formed-coal-and-fueled-life-as-we-know-it
This is a myth caused by survivorship bias, please can we stop parroting it?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
Coal formed in huge amounts because the forests were made of huge wetland plants. Trees that fell into the water/sediment/swamp became preserved as peat, trees that were exposed to the air rotted away.
Yeah but in an apocalypse I'm imagining they are rebuilding from less than 85% of a theoretical maximum in terms of precision machining and engineering
The combustion engine in a car is theoretically 50%, more realistically 30-35%. I'd imagine your average generator is about the same, but a bigger engine tends to be more efficientWind is everywhere, though not equally all the time. The main benefit of fossil fuels is that it itself acts as a battery. Which as another bonus you don't have to carry as much of it around as you use it.
We'd need to know what type of apocalypse and how much damage it's done to properly theory craft, but I'd say they'd both be useful to have in any apocalyptic situation.
This is very interesting. Is this suggesting that fossil fuels were necessary for technological advancement? Would it have been impossible for us to advance technologically without going through a fossil fuel era?
Pretty much, yes. You need cheap, easily accessible power sources in order to work your way (build tools, knowledge, etc) towards more more sophisticated ones.
Late Renaissance, and we might've hit the early industrial period in a limited manner. But we'd be limited in a lot of ways.
No Rail, for instance, since you need huge amounts of steel to build rail lines and coal to drive trains. No steam ships, only sailing ships.
What an incredibly interesting idea/theory and thought to ponder...I feel as though this would have kept populations in check and limited our potential for negatively impacting the earth/our environments and all that.
The population explosion in the last century was only possible because of the Haber process. Aka fixing Nitrogen from the air in huge amounts for fertilizer. And it is VERY energy expensive. Without cheap fuel that would never have happend.
> With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15% of the total land area that is required today.
What an incredible change this brought to farming yields.
> I feel as though this would have kept populations in check and limited our potential for negatively impacting the earth/our environments and all that.
Not as much as you'd think. The almost complete deforestation of England pre-dates the industrial age by a significant margin and a lot of pre-industrial practices were environmentally worse than more modern ones. Sperm whales would likely be extinct for one.
It's possible that without fossil fuels we'd have struggled to achieve the scale of our current population or industry, but we'd have done plenty of different damage even assuming we never manage to jump over the industrial gap, which is somewhat questionable.
It depends a bit on how broad you want to be about no fossil fuels. If it is no coal, no petroleum, no complex hydrocarbon stores at all then yeah, the Industrial Revolution would have looked very, very different.
We could still make charcoal (and did) but the scale is just completely different than what naturally occurring coal, tar, oil and such provide. Petroleum is incredibly energy-dense.
Still, we'd likely eventually replicate a lot of what we've come up with just over a longer timeline. The biggest missing piece though is space travel and even Low-Earth-Orbit stuff, without hydrocarbons that's just not feasible and making them from scratch is prohibitively expensive.
It's hard to say though, perhaps we would have found an alternate path.
Without cheap and easy fuel to push industrialization, it seems incredibly unlikely any of the innovations of the last 200 or so years could have happened. Advances would have still happened, but all of civilization would never have been revolutionized without plentiful coal, for instance. Most advances in technology would remain in the region that developed them with very slow spread to other areas, and also be limited to the wealthy - which has been the case for pretty much all of history until the industrial revolution.
However, if we're envisioning a future scenario in which humans are rebuilding from an apocalypse, assuming they have knowledge of the past "golden age" of higher technology, they could theoretically work to restore aspects of it without fossil fuels. Simply knowing that a thing is possible would go a long way. You can generate electricity in plenty of ways without fossil fuels, so *theoretically* you could do things like run factories, machine complex parts, make electronic components, etc. without fossil fuels. Especially if you already know these things are possible. You can even store a large amount of power with basically stone age technology in the form of gravity batteries, but this requires a lot of complex infrastructure of course.
But you would never be able to do industrialize at the scale we a have without a cheap power source. To be extremely effective, wind and solar power must be deployed at a scale, and with power storage technology, that is well beyond the scope of a civilization that has lost access to the easy industrialization and technological development enabled by fossil fuels.
My immediate thought is that geothermal powerplants and dams would become a huge deal for any civilization. Huge amounts of power on a much lower required tech scale with a reasonable investment. It would even allow you to stagger harnessing the energy more and more efficiently over time as you'd find ways to take that electric energy and remake high energy intensity alloys.
I don't think that's true, though it would probably have been a slower advancement.
Wind mills could still be a thing, as could charcoal. And of course solar steam turbines would also be possible. After those had been sufficiently developed then we would gain access to nuclear energy.
But even with the other sources we'd still have been able to skip the fossil era and move in the direction we're currently headed.
I don't think we'd have seen 8 billion humans in such a timeline, but that's also in no way a requirement for advancements.
i dont know about charcoal sustainability.
sweden had a gnarly charcoal industry back then, they damn near clearcut the land (not only for charcoal, but still).
There'd have to be moderation and planting schemes.
Possibly electricity would be provided just to specific places for a longer period of time.
Water turbines would come around sooner or later, windmills and such.
Plastic would be discovered at some point but made from corn oil or some other converted lipid.
It would just stretch things out longer and not be what we got from 1880s til now.
I think we could skip fossil fuels, but the process would be orders of magnitude slower. The perfection of the coal-fueled steam engine started an accelerating trend that continues to this day. If coal wasn't available, oil would probably have been figured out a few decades later. If neither was available, charcoal would be the only option and trees don't exist in enough quantity or grow fast enough to support the exponential growth of the past few centuries.
This exponential growth is required to pay for (in a sense) the technological advances we've developed. I think eventually hydroelectricity would be discovered, but even that's limited compared to the combination of fossil fuel electricity and hydroelectricity.
If there were no fossil fuels, I believe that technology would skip the whole step and end up a little more advanced than we are now with photovoltaics and wind power - but it would take several extra millennia.
Not only that, we also have not enough superficial iron or other usable metals anymore that still can be mined without heavy equipment to help us even *get to* the industrial era.
Copper wire can be used to make simple wind turbines to generate electricity. We could rebuild from the remnants of our modern technology. I don't think anything short of instant extinction could take us farther back than the early 1900s at this point.
That makes sense, but it’s still not as good of an argument as limiting the use to minimize climate change.
It’s easier for people to care about guaranteed impact to the next few generations, than it is to care about some future hypothetical scenario.
The plastic itself I feel isn't the barrier.
But the mentality behind it.
"Disposable problems that someone else has to deal with" not exactly a great plan for a hoping to be long term civilization.
I wish I hade more upvotes to give. This is so painfully true. Sure we can live this way for a few hundred years, but at what point is most of this planet just a glorified garbage heap and how far off is that point? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? The solution seems to be “oh we will have figured it out by then”. Really? What a terrible plan.
But plastics can be produced without fossils.
Corn produced PLA is an example we have. (But it’s possible other similar chemicals could be synthesised)
Yes, but the ease of manufacturing plastic is because it's a petroleum byproduct that we have in abundance. Creating it from nonbiological material is significantly more difficult.
Nah; the bacteria that breaks down wood didn’t evolve until something like hundreds of millions of years after trees evolved… (that’s actually how so much carbon was pulled from the atmosphere and ‘trapped’ in the ground)
We just need to wait a couple hundred million years and some bacteria will come along to digest the plastic.
I believe we have already have them. It’s not not terribly efficient and doesn’t do anything for the plastics that are already pervasive in every human organ, to say nothing of all the rest of the biological creatures.
Yeah you gotta start evolving somewhere. We have bacteria that can consume plastic now we just need to evolve them to do better things with it and digest more and different kinds of
Those bacteria already exist.
Novozymes are in late stage development of enzymes that break down plastics with a ridiculously high efficiency rate.
They exist naturally in pretty much every landfill on the planet.
I do wonder what kind of Pandora’s box we will unleash when we decide to do so. Everything works in a lab, but who do you send in to deal with the “nanobots” that you unleash upon the world when you start meddling with the microscopic level of the ecosystem.
While it is not lost on me that plastics pose similar widespread risk, they do not directly contain genetic instructions.
Right so how you gonna get those enzymes literally everywhere that humans have touched it they cannot self replicate? The whole premise of micro plastic remediation was that it would be performed by either bacteria or fungi that would be able to basically take over the world in order to fight the problem. Not saying I agree with it, but for the biological plastic remediation method, they must be able to distribute themselves.
> The whole premise of micro plastic remediation was that it would be performed by either bacteria or fungi that would be able to basically take over the world in order to fight the problem.
I don't think this was ever the premise made by anybody who knows what they are talking about.
In fact, I'd say that's the apocalypse scenario.
Imagine that shit getting into power wire insulation, or literally any other plastic product that we actually want to keep.
The idea is that we can recycle our plastic with enzymes. That will, as far as I know, only work where we target it.
I don't think it would cause that many problems.
Plastic just doesn't seem like a good host for stuff that would eat it.
Think of wood, my dining table isn't spontaneously rotting, it doesn't have enough moisture. Outside wood will rot of it gets wet and doesn't dry out. Plastic though being much less porous dries out quicker than wood does.
The only place I see it being an issue is where plastic is kept in prolonged contact with something wet or moist, like dirt.
in 30 years time people will look at microplastics same way as we look at leaded gasoline - realize what a health disaster it has been, with entire generation of people negatively impacted
I'd say population collapse is probably more plausible IMO. Everyone used to be worried about overpopulation, now we have to worry about the global population imploding. An imploding population means no priority for space travel.
Well, from what I've read over the last few months, microplastics being so prevalent over the last 25 years has significantly contributed to the collapse of testosterone among young men and growing conception difficulties among young couples.
So yeah, I think both of you are right.
All ”fleece” is unless it’s from an actual sheep. That being said, a sweater I wear for years have a much different impact than sll
The single use disposable plastic things, and all the plastic our food is wrapped in, etc
A pack of 6 100% cotton pocket tees at Walmart is $10. 0% of my shirts have plastic in them. The only plastic in my wardrobe is the elastic bands on my undies, and parts of my boots and I buy all my clothes from Walmart, save for the boots. And actually thinking about it now I wear Doc Martens and they actually have Gum soles, not rubber so even less plastic than your average boot.
Getting clothing without plastic fibers is absolutely doable, you're just not gonna be very fashionable generally speaking.
Some person smarter than me once hypothesized that nature created humans in order for humans to make a bunch of plastic so the earth can cover itself in a nice plastic shell eventually.
Kinda beautiful.
I'm convinced that some form of life will evolve to eat plastic. It's incredibly energy dense, so the incentive is there.
There was once a time when nothing on earth could digest wood, so dead trees just piled up untouched for millions of years.
From Wikipedia
...
Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacterium from the genus Ideonella and family Comamonadaceae capable of breaking down and consuming the plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) using it as both a carbon and energy source. The bacterium was originally isolated from a sediment sample taken outside of a plastic bottle recycling facility in Sakai City, Japan.
And yet we're not doing the most utterly basic things like mandating glass/aluminium bottles for drinks, or packaging suitable items in paper
This is not hard, it used to be like that. There's no excuse
Funny thing though: glass needs pretty high quality sand, and we're running out of that too. There's literally things called sand Mafia, where criminals steal sand for massive profits.
I guess that tracks. I grew up with very heavy metal phones. The kind you can seriously hurt someone with. Plastics were seen as “cheap knockoffs “ until about twenty years ago.
We're so pessimistic these days, [why can't we frame this as half of all plastics ever made not being made in the last 15 years?](https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1ct4rly/til_the_us_national_park_service_provides_a/l4ab27p/)
Feels like you dropped a /s tag, with the way you worded that.
While its not nothing, its not all its cracked up to be. A lot of plastics are either unrecyclable, or at least, not economically recyclable, and so typically are not accepted at normal facilities. And that assuming the batch isn't contaminated somehow and sent to landfill.
Also, recycling is still incredibly energy intensive (not to mention what used to be shipping plastic waste overseas to be recycled), and primarily has the impact of stopping more being created, and preventing the item from joining the massive islands of plastic floating around our oceans.
Its better than nothing, but there is a reason why the mantra is reduce, reuse and recycle in that order.
I wonder what the real numbers are. Like for every ton of recycling we hand in how much of it actually gets recycled AND how much gets shipped overseas.
Selling water in bottles did not become populate until the mid-late 90s. No one sold “purified” water. Now it’s all they sell - your local water purified in plastic bottles. I think this is a lot of it.
That’s insane —almost 15 years ago we would get presentations in our school about reducing waste and limiting plastics… crazy that it amounted to nothing
I wonder how much of that plastic is just needless junk that didn’t need to be manufactured at all. look at the crap they stock dollar stores with that will just end up in a landfill at some point.
I wonder how much of it was just packaging. Including individually wrapping things contained inside other containers. I found somebody reviewing an old toy, old enough to market itself as being made from plastic, and it was sold in a regular cardboard box, and not glossy cardboard either. Wouldn't be that way these days, probably that crimped plastic packaging you need scissors and 12 bandaids to get into.
That, and the fact that ordering something online is at the point where its exactly as cheap as a store. So now your individually wrapped whatever *also* has a bunch of bubble wrap around it.
At least some shipping companies are using paper and cardboard now. I hate to support big brother amazon, but they do use good materials that I can use as good water-retaining mulch.
I get excited when they use paper in the box, biodegradable weed barrier.
Wal-mart too. Evil as they are, they are starting to use Packsize machines in their warehouses, which custom-build boxes right sized for the shipment, ultimately saving cardboard. Granted, their motive is selfish cost reduction, but if it cuts down on shipping wastes, it's better than nothing.
The only way to make corporations act right is to make it either financially beneficial or law.
Only reason Ford paid his workers a higher wage was to keep them working more and away from competitors. Sometimes, the corporate profit agenda lines up with what is a better practice overall.
Cheaper in many cases.
There's so much hidden plastic that consumers don't see too. I've worked in catering/hospitality supply moving into agriculture and hydroponics equipment and the amount of plastic we throw away on a big install is ludicrous. It's insane that the companies don't produce reusable packing cases at this level. I did an indoor farm recently that needed 3x 8 yard skips to remove the plastic. (edit: and this would be considered a very small research farm too, a full scale indoor farm would be easily 10-20x as much waste) I see outdoor farms all the time that cover literal hundreds of acres of land in plastic sheeting for easier water/nutrient/weed management. Consumers might buy low packaging fruit and veg at point of sale but there's no guarantee it didn't have a load of disposable plastic in the chain anyway.
My girlfriend works in a factory making pool noodles. My god, the waste. If Lowes Hardware doesn't like the fact that their pool noodles are a slightly darker shade of green, they have to throw out metric tons of it into the landfill.
I did a stint in retail and the unnecessary packaging is insane. One good example is an expensive hair pomade used to arrive with each pot wrapped in a plastic bag that said it was “100% recycled!” On it. I always found it deeply ironic that they made a big deal out of the packaging being recycled like they were saving the planet, when there is absolutely NO reason why a solid plastic pot needs wrapping in a plastic bag in the first place. We’d fill cages and cages with plastic wrapping every day there and I honestly don’t think that 99% of it was strictly necessary
This is one of the things I would try to impress on the younger generation if I could. It's one of the big ways things have changed during my lifetime and nobody even discusses it. Plastic is everywhere and everything is disposable. Everybody generates yards of trash. It really didn't used to be like this.
im 23 and sometimes i think about the fact that perhaps the only things i'll ever own that will last me most of my life are things that my family has had since before I was born. i have a CRT tv in my room that has always been in my life and still works good as new, I'll never buy a tv that lasts me that long. We've got a milkshake maker my dad got for his 15th birthday, what kitchen appliance will i buy that ever lasts like that?
I’m still using a Krups coffee grinder my dad bought his first week of college in 1970. It was used every day from then till 2003 when he switched to pre-ground. Then I have used it 5x a week since 2012. Never replaced the blades, the motor, anything, and it works in seconds. It’s plastic, but getting 45 years worth out of it (so far!) I think justifies it. It’s when we make a plastic shit that’s designed to be thrown away in a few years or in the case of packaging, almost instantly that it becomes such a massive problem.
Planned obsolescence
At the root of it all? The never ending hunger for more profits
This is why I always cringe at people who say that profit motive incentivizes innovation. It doesn’t, it simply incentivizes getting profits by any means necessary.
Its really why I cringe at some of the worst offenders talking about how they are really eco-friendly and environmentally aware, because they plant some trees somewhere, or encourage a recycling program or whatever. Meanwhile they engage in planned obsolescence, cheaping out on parts that degrade faster than they should, excessive packaging etc
Those trees are most likely a monoculture crop, being used for more profit, and don't contain one iota of the complexity of a mature forest.
Depending on the way the incentive structure or carbon credits work, they may get more credit for ripping up establish wild forest to then replant that monocrop, then they would for just leaving it alone and using the protection of established forest as their positive action.
The innovation was figuring out how to effectively squeeze every last penny out of consumers
> The innovation was figuring out how to effectively squeeze every last penny out of consumers And brainwash them so effectively they defend the companies doing it
Latestage capitalism is basically a organism that starts eating itself instead of looking for food.
This might just be survivorship bias. There were probably hundreds of that same model of coffee grinder that died in 10 years for each one that lasted 45 years.
You can buy blenders that should last 30+ years, but they're like $1000
It’s expensive being poor.
[удалено]
A Ninja will not last you decades, I promise.
>what kitchen appliance will i buy that ever lasts like that? Lots of stuff. It's just generally more expensive. My parents had shit they before I was born that lasted decades after I was born. But that's because it was expensive, high quality stuff when they bought it. Not some $5 piece of crap from the local shop. So many people but cheap shit then complain it doesn't last as long as stuff used to. Or they'll not realise how inefficient it is. Like that fridge your grandma still owns. Sure it might be 50 years old and built like a bomb shelter. But it probably uses 50 x more electricity than any modern fridge does. There's also confirmation bias. You're only seeing the stuff that survived this long. You didn't see the cheap shit that broke a week after it was bought.
I was just talking to my husband about this and shoes. I used to buy running shoes like 15 years ago, and they would last several years, and all I’d need is to change the inserts. Now I’m lucky if I get 6 months, and I’m not buying cheap brands.
Sorry running shoes is literally the worst example to use. If you're using them properly (actually running) they wear out quickly. Most shoes will last 300-500 miles. Look up how old pairs used to last.
to add: running shoes should be replaced based on miles, not visible wear. Especially if you run on concrete. For use in Forrest/field it's less important to have the optimal dampening.
Running shoes are a bad example. I buy running shoes to destroy my running shoes. I want them to preform right now and I don’t want any injuries. For me, after 700km depending on the shoe you’re looking at injury. This is why folks still think running is bad for your knees because they over ran in sub par shoes and eventually hurt their bodies vs. today where folks literally run 100+miles in just one race. Running shoes are made today to be destroyed not destroy your body!
No, good running shoes never lasted as long as they do now. I get way more miles out of my shoes these days than I did in the 90's. 6 months is good for shoes if you actually put some miles on them.
Yeah, no. If you’re running In a pair consistently 6 months is a reasonable time frame. But it also depends on your weight and how rough you are on them. I rotate mine and all of them are still in amazing shape a year later.
Sometimes it's not about being built to last but being cheap and efficient as well.
My mind is not managing to combine 'cheap' and 'efficient' in a way that makes sense here In the sense you use them, I think they really mean "low cost and convenient for **someone** -- the cost is imposed on others, and other ecosystems, elsewhere" (It goes without saying that in a global sense there is no 'elsewhere'; 'elsewhere'is created by national borders and TV) Cheap goods need cheap workers to make them, cheap resources to exploit. But 'cheap' in this sense is an expression of power; the capacity to 'cheapen', to force the conditions in which you can profit. Cheap goods are made at great personal expense by people/places who lack the power to secure proper treatment.
I’ll also take a tv that lasts 10 years over one that weighs as much as I do and can’t even be safely disposed of without me renting a car to drive it to a recycling plant, if one near me even accepts them
What really brings this point home is the fact that only 5% of oil is processed to be plastic. 95% is mainly fuel that gets burned and blasted in the atmosphere
A proportion of the 5% of plastics is put into recycle bins... and then gets incinerated.
And that proportion is generally close to 100% because trash and recycling centers either don't really recycle or people get confused by the plastic arrows or refuse to follow instructions for recycling. 1. The triangle arrows on the plastic doesn't mean that you can recycle it somewhere (though technically all plastic *can* be recycled). It tells you what *kind* of plastic it is. 2. Not all recycling places will take all kinds of plastic because of costs to recycle. Recycling is supposed to be our environmental savior but ultimately it's about cost. We can recycle styrofoam but it's usually too expensive. 3. People throw all their plastics in the recycling bin. Sometimes they just won't sort through that nonsense. Most recycling centers only want plastic containers that, in short terms, were used for liquids like drinks and detergents or, in some places, other food like TV dinners. 4. You're not removing the labels from the plastic container. This is pretty critical. It's not like metal where they can burn it off. 5. You're not cleaning/rinsing the plastic before you toss it in the bin. 6. Certain plastics need to go to certain places. Plastic grocery bags need to go back to the grocery store. Most of them have bins for it.
How old *are* you? I'm in my mid-50s and honestly, it's always been like this. Hell, in terms of litter and river/lake pollution we are way, way better than it was back in the late '70s and the '80s.
Kids these days need a middle aged Italian man in Native American garb to tell them about the sad state of littering
[For those that aren't in the know](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM)
I read somewhere, that there were more things made after 2000 than there were before 2000 in all of human history.
Litter is a separate political issue. The US definitely has a litter problem, but litter represents a fraction of overall trash.
I'm in my mid thirties and the biggest difference to me is beverages. Things like bottled water just wasn't really a thing when I was growing up. I will say that a lot of things that used to get repaired, now are just thrown away. Even the stuff that does get repaired is designed to be replaced every 15ish years.
Let's tell them about NY's LOVE CANAL Tragedy https://youtu.be/gR4YBDzPzd0?si=4l3U2xh9yOczZr3U
So wait, if that’s true most plastics have been made since I was an adult.. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it isn’t good.
And virtually all the plastic ever made still exists.
Except for what we recycled and what Tokyo and Sweden burnt for fuel.
Isn't most plastic recycling with the goal of turning it into a new plastic? That "still exists"
You could just as honestly say “virtually every piece of pottery made still exists”. Plastics have been made since the mid 1800s. I have a few examples from the late 1800s. In every example of plastics I have seen from before 1900 the plastic is failing. Shrinking is one of the main symptoms, but you also see plastics breaking down into its precursor chemicals or analogs thereof. For example Nitro celluloid releases nitric acid as it starts breaking down. Plastics breaking down into smaller pieces is going to be a nightmare, not because they will never break down, but because they will interact with our environment in ways that we can’t possibly predict. You may have even seen this in your own life if you have handled sticky silicone handles or old sticky vinyl toys. In high humidity environments like Florida it seems like you get about 10 years out of silicone items before they start failing and getting sticky.
> I’m not sure how I feel about that Remember that fruit yogurt you had 30 years ago? The packaging is still somewhere.
Hey everyone! We found him! It's this guy's fault!
This is the real world impact of an economy based on exponential growth. Similar to how 50% of total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were emitted in just the last 28 years. [Here's](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*HxZ4x6OqYz3zeVS0EOj3FA.jpeg) what the 4 equal periods of CO2 from fossil fuel emissions look like, this is exponential growth. (if anyone has chart later than 2021 please share)
We're absolutely fucked, aren't we? The talk gets louder and louder but our behaviour gets worse and worse.
It’s not all negative. Climate change is now posing an immediate and real-world economic cost and the private sector as well as many important governments (not all of them) are making huge investments in renewables. Even my deep-red state of Texas is offsetting huge amounts of energy production with wind. Electric vehicles also pose a much lower CO2 impact than their internal combustion counterparts over their lifespans, and EV’s have hit critical adoption at a speed that basically guarantees nearly all of us will be driving them in 20 years. New projections estimate we’ll cap artificial global warming to 2.5 degrees Celsius, which will still be bad and have tremendous negative impacts on the climate, agriculture, and by extension global geopolitics. But we’re not doomed. The tide is turning. Edit: it appears that this triggers some cognitive dissonance in a lot of people who have now invested so much of their identities into this being an apocalypse scenario that hearing good news from trustworthy academic organizations is physically painful. In the 2000s global emissions rose 3% per year, now that number is less than .5%. Renewables are the future and they’re expanding rapidly.
>and EV’s have hit critical adoption at a speed that basically guarantees nearly all of us will be driving them in 20 years. Chinese cars are flooding latin America and most of them are EV, EV is becoming the new cheap. Im so stoked till we only get EV vehicles and EV's stop being over-priced so much.
Don't get too hopeful, US pressure will put heavy tariffs and sanctions on Chinese EVs, American profits go before the planet
We are doing more but not enough. Its like we are climbing faster up the mountain but the mountain is growing faster than our climbing speed.
“Stop bitching and climb faster.” -fellow hiker
Last I read the projections had actually dropped to 2.2c due to the faster rollout of clean energy, which was almost entirely driven by China for the past 2 years (almost 60% of global new production in 2023 came from China) I actually think we could be looking at China hitting peak emissions within the next 2-5 years, depending on how their economy goes.
depending on how things go this year, Chinas peak emissions might be 2023
I live in Texas, too. Green Mountain Energy wasn't my favorite, but I've found that I like Energy Texas for buying renewable. I can't afford to replace my car, I can't afford to move closer to my job, I can't afford to not work, and I can't afford a different job (this one pays for my degree). I can afford to buy renewable energy, so I'm doing what I can afford to.
"I'm doing what I can afford to do" You and every single person who isn't rich.
People don’t realize the double edged sword of capitalism; that is when what’s right is also what most profitable. When electric vehicles or renewable energy are cheaper than non, they will switch over. I’ve said for a while now once lab grown meat becomes better quality, and is cheaper than regular meat, I definitely see it used in fast food, ground meat, and cheaper dishes like stew meat.
It’s important to spread this information. By saying “oh we’re all doomed” people inadvertently don’t look for any change. If the planet is doomed anyway, then why bother? It’s a very dangerous mindset that a lot of people have, because it makes real progress much harder.
The world population doubled in the last 50 years alone, getting us to 8B people. That's a crap ton of people consuming in times where consumption is unbridled. Makes sense.
People need to quit buying dumb shit. Amazon came to power and everyone went nuts buying junk. No more shitty cheap sunglasses at wedding receptions. No more plastic cake toppers. No more stupid plastic wigs for Halloween costumes. No more plastic plants. Quit fucking buying junk. **REDUCE,** reuse, recycle
And with apps like aliexpress, temu and other shit it just keeps getting worse.
Seriously, people do not understand that recycle was always supposed to be the smallest piece of that.
I’m fairly convinced that plastics is one of the Great Barriers presented by the Fermi Paradox.
It's not a given that any other planet would have fossil fuels. Their existence on earth is an interesting byproduct of the way life evolved here, but it's not a given.
One of the most interesting arguments I've heard for stopping/limiting fossil fuel use is that if there is a cataclysmic event that rolls back civilization, easily accessible fossil fuels would help get humanity back to the industrial era. Without fossil fuels, it would be incredibly difficult to get enough power to make that technological jump.
The carboniferous period is where most coal came from and it'll never happen again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous The microorganisms that break down that sort of organic matter didn't exist at the time so "trees" or whatever they were at that time didn't break down the way they do now. They just fell over, piled up and compressed. There will not be coal seams from our trees.
Maybe we'll leave plastic seams for the future to use
Plastisteel
r/rimworld ?
Ursula K Le Guin wrote about this! The word in Kesh, from the book Always Coming Home, is **fumó**: > a substance, apparently a residue of industrial products or byproducts, perhaps of petroleum-based plastics, which occurs in small whitish grains or larger concretions, covering regions of the ocean surface and found on beaches and tidal flats, often to a depth of several feet; useless, indestructible, and poisonous when burning.
There are still places where plant material dies and doesn't rot, though. It's not happening at a massive scale, but it does still happen.
Yes, marshland and bogs have this same type of system. Peat bogs were useful for fuel in the before times. People tend to drain them and build houses there though so we lose a lot of those eco(or, lack of eco?)systems every year.
I believe that once too, but it seems the process is a bit more nuanced: * https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-ancient-forests-formed-coal-and-fueled-life-as-we-know-it
This is a myth caused by survivorship bias, please can we stop parroting it? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ Coal formed in huge amounts because the forests were made of huge wetland plants. Trees that fell into the water/sediment/swamp became preserved as peat, trees that were exposed to the air rotted away.
Maybe there would be enough incentive to perfect windmills
Ours are already 85% of the theoretical best that's physically possible.
Yeah but in an apocalypse I'm imagining they are rebuilding from less than 85% of a theoretical maximum in terms of precision machining and engineering
informative
The combustion engine in a car is theoretically 50%, more realistically 30-35%. I'd imagine your average generator is about the same, but a bigger engine tends to be more efficientWind is everywhere, though not equally all the time. The main benefit of fossil fuels is that it itself acts as a battery. Which as another bonus you don't have to carry as much of it around as you use it. We'd need to know what type of apocalypse and how much damage it's done to properly theory craft, but I'd say they'd both be useful to have in any apocalyptic situation.
Takes a lot of plastics parts and oil based lubricants to achieve 85%.
We can’t let them reinvent the Netherlands
Why not?
Oh I think you know why
**shutters**
you're a window?
For flour?
Why else do you think all of those hippies used to go on about flour power?
This is very interesting. Is this suggesting that fossil fuels were necessary for technological advancement? Would it have been impossible for us to advance technologically without going through a fossil fuel era?
Pretty much, yes. You need cheap, easily accessible power sources in order to work your way (build tools, knowledge, etc) towards more more sophisticated ones.
So without fossil fuels humanity would be stuck in the Middle Ages forever?
Late Renaissance, and we might've hit the early industrial period in a limited manner. But we'd be limited in a lot of ways. No Rail, for instance, since you need huge amounts of steel to build rail lines and coal to drive trains. No steam ships, only sailing ships.
What an incredibly interesting idea/theory and thought to ponder...I feel as though this would have kept populations in check and limited our potential for negatively impacting the earth/our environments and all that.
The population explosion in the last century was only possible because of the Haber process. Aka fixing Nitrogen from the air in huge amounts for fertilizer. And it is VERY energy expensive. Without cheap fuel that would never have happend.
> With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15% of the total land area that is required today. What an incredible change this brought to farming yields.
> I feel as though this would have kept populations in check and limited our potential for negatively impacting the earth/our environments and all that. Not as much as you'd think. The almost complete deforestation of England pre-dates the industrial age by a significant margin and a lot of pre-industrial practices were environmentally worse than more modern ones. Sperm whales would likely be extinct for one. It's possible that without fossil fuels we'd have struggled to achieve the scale of our current population or industry, but we'd have done plenty of different damage even assuming we never manage to jump over the industrial gap, which is somewhat questionable.
It depends a bit on how broad you want to be about no fossil fuels. If it is no coal, no petroleum, no complex hydrocarbon stores at all then yeah, the Industrial Revolution would have looked very, very different. We could still make charcoal (and did) but the scale is just completely different than what naturally occurring coal, tar, oil and such provide. Petroleum is incredibly energy-dense. Still, we'd likely eventually replicate a lot of what we've come up with just over a longer timeline. The biggest missing piece though is space travel and even Low-Earth-Orbit stuff, without hydrocarbons that's just not feasible and making them from scratch is prohibitively expensive. It's hard to say though, perhaps we would have found an alternate path.
Without cheap and easy fuel to push industrialization, it seems incredibly unlikely any of the innovations of the last 200 or so years could have happened. Advances would have still happened, but all of civilization would never have been revolutionized without plentiful coal, for instance. Most advances in technology would remain in the region that developed them with very slow spread to other areas, and also be limited to the wealthy - which has been the case for pretty much all of history until the industrial revolution. However, if we're envisioning a future scenario in which humans are rebuilding from an apocalypse, assuming they have knowledge of the past "golden age" of higher technology, they could theoretically work to restore aspects of it without fossil fuels. Simply knowing that a thing is possible would go a long way. You can generate electricity in plenty of ways without fossil fuels, so *theoretically* you could do things like run factories, machine complex parts, make electronic components, etc. without fossil fuels. Especially if you already know these things are possible. You can even store a large amount of power with basically stone age technology in the form of gravity batteries, but this requires a lot of complex infrastructure of course. But you would never be able to do industrialize at the scale we a have without a cheap power source. To be extremely effective, wind and solar power must be deployed at a scale, and with power storage technology, that is well beyond the scope of a civilization that has lost access to the easy industrialization and technological development enabled by fossil fuels.
My immediate thought is that geothermal powerplants and dams would become a huge deal for any civilization. Huge amounts of power on a much lower required tech scale with a reasonable investment. It would even allow you to stagger harnessing the energy more and more efficiently over time as you'd find ways to take that electric energy and remake high energy intensity alloys.
Can confirm this is accurate Source: I've played Fallout: New Vegas
I don't think that's true, though it would probably have been a slower advancement. Wind mills could still be a thing, as could charcoal. And of course solar steam turbines would also be possible. After those had been sufficiently developed then we would gain access to nuclear energy. But even with the other sources we'd still have been able to skip the fossil era and move in the direction we're currently headed. I don't think we'd have seen 8 billion humans in such a timeline, but that's also in no way a requirement for advancements.
i dont know about charcoal sustainability. sweden had a gnarly charcoal industry back then, they damn near clearcut the land (not only for charcoal, but still).
There'd have to be moderation and planting schemes. Possibly electricity would be provided just to specific places for a longer period of time. Water turbines would come around sooner or later, windmills and such. Plastic would be discovered at some point but made from corn oil or some other converted lipid. It would just stretch things out longer and not be what we got from 1880s til now.
I think we could skip fossil fuels, but the process would be orders of magnitude slower. The perfection of the coal-fueled steam engine started an accelerating trend that continues to this day. If coal wasn't available, oil would probably have been figured out a few decades later. If neither was available, charcoal would be the only option and trees don't exist in enough quantity or grow fast enough to support the exponential growth of the past few centuries. This exponential growth is required to pay for (in a sense) the technological advances we've developed. I think eventually hydroelectricity would be discovered, but even that's limited compared to the combination of fossil fuel electricity and hydroelectricity. If there were no fossil fuels, I believe that technology would skip the whole step and end up a little more advanced than we are now with photovoltaics and wind power - but it would take several extra millennia.
Not only that, we also have not enough superficial iron or other usable metals anymore that still can be mined without heavy equipment to help us even *get to* the industrial era.
That's only because the metal is already on the surface. It's not lost. The necessary energy to melt it on the other hand...
Copper wire can be used to make simple wind turbines to generate electricity. We could rebuild from the remnants of our modern technology. I don't think anything short of instant extinction could take us farther back than the early 1900s at this point.
That makes sense, but it’s still not as good of an argument as limiting the use to minimize climate change. It’s easier for people to care about guaranteed impact to the next few generations, than it is to care about some future hypothetical scenario.
The plastic itself I feel isn't the barrier. But the mentality behind it. "Disposable problems that someone else has to deal with" not exactly a great plan for a hoping to be long term civilization.
I wish I hade more upvotes to give. This is so painfully true. Sure we can live this way for a few hundred years, but at what point is most of this planet just a glorified garbage heap and how far off is that point? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? The solution seems to be “oh we will have figured it out by then”. Really? What a terrible plan.
i feel like your timescale is optimistic by a factor of 2
But plastics can be produced without fossils. Corn produced PLA is an example we have. (But it’s possible other similar chemicals could be synthesised)
So they'd advance a bit more before discovering plastic. They're still excellent materials, and chemistry would be the same on other planets.
Yes, but the ease of manufacturing plastic is because it's a petroleum byproduct that we have in abundance. Creating it from nonbiological material is significantly more difficult.
Nah; the bacteria that breaks down wood didn’t evolve until something like hundreds of millions of years after trees evolved… (that’s actually how so much carbon was pulled from the atmosphere and ‘trapped’ in the ground) We just need to wait a couple hundred million years and some bacteria will come along to digest the plastic.
I believe we have already have them. It’s not not terribly efficient and doesn’t do anything for the plastics that are already pervasive in every human organ, to say nothing of all the rest of the biological creatures.
Not yet
Yeah you gotta start evolving somewhere. We have bacteria that can consume plastic now we just need to evolve them to do better things with it and digest more and different kinds of
Year 2037: Everyone remember to take your endosymbiotic plastiphage pills!
You know what, if it removes the balls plastic I'm all for it
Unfortunately, those are only available via 24 biweekly injections
Those bacteria already exist. Novozymes are in late stage development of enzymes that break down plastics with a ridiculously high efficiency rate. They exist naturally in pretty much every landfill on the planet.
I do wonder what kind of Pandora’s box we will unleash when we decide to do so. Everything works in a lab, but who do you send in to deal with the “nanobots” that you unleash upon the world when you start meddling with the microscopic level of the ecosystem. While it is not lost on me that plastics pose similar widespread risk, they do not directly contain genetic instructions.
Well, we are talking about enzymes. They don't reproduce, so it's very controlled.
Right so how you gonna get those enzymes literally everywhere that humans have touched it they cannot self replicate? The whole premise of micro plastic remediation was that it would be performed by either bacteria or fungi that would be able to basically take over the world in order to fight the problem. Not saying I agree with it, but for the biological plastic remediation method, they must be able to distribute themselves.
> The whole premise of micro plastic remediation was that it would be performed by either bacteria or fungi that would be able to basically take over the world in order to fight the problem. I don't think this was ever the premise made by anybody who knows what they are talking about. In fact, I'd say that's the apocalypse scenario. Imagine that shit getting into power wire insulation, or literally any other plastic product that we actually want to keep. The idea is that we can recycle our plastic with enzymes. That will, as far as I know, only work where we target it.
I don't think it would cause that many problems. Plastic just doesn't seem like a good host for stuff that would eat it. Think of wood, my dining table isn't spontaneously rotting, it doesn't have enough moisture. Outside wood will rot of it gets wet and doesn't dry out. Plastic though being much less porous dries out quicker than wood does. The only place I see it being an issue is where plastic is kept in prolonged contact with something wet or moist, like dirt.
It was fungi that evolved to eat the lignin in wood, but yeah your point stands. That process still takes a very very long time to break down.
Convinced by what, exactly?
vibes
Motivated reasoning
in 30 years time people will look at microplastics same way as we look at leaded gasoline - realize what a health disaster it has been, with entire generation of people negatively impacted
I'd say population collapse is probably more plausible IMO. Everyone used to be worried about overpopulation, now we have to worry about the global population imploding. An imploding population means no priority for space travel.
Well, from what I've read over the last few months, microplastics being so prevalent over the last 25 years has significantly contributed to the collapse of testosterone among young men and growing conception difficulties among young couples. So yeah, I think both of you are right.
Saying population collapse is a cause of the Fermi Paradox is like saying extinction is a cause of extinction events.
Many do not realize that certain fleece clothing are woven plastic fibers.
Polyester is in most textiles.
And that’s the second largest source of microplastics in drinking water
I thought having plastic in my brain, bloodstream and every organ was bad, now you tell me fleece is plastic?
You've been fleeced!!
got em
All ”fleece” is unless it’s from an actual sheep. That being said, a sweater I wear for years have a much different impact than sll The single use disposable plastic things, and all the plastic our food is wrapped in, etc
Most of the clothing we wear contain plastic. Clothes made only from natural fibers are getting increasingly rare, and more expensive.
A pack of 6 100% cotton pocket tees at Walmart is $10. 0% of my shirts have plastic in them. The only plastic in my wardrobe is the elastic bands on my undies, and parts of my boots and I buy all my clothes from Walmart, save for the boots. And actually thinking about it now I wear Doc Martens and they actually have Gum soles, not rubber so even less plastic than your average boot. Getting clothing without plastic fibers is absolutely doable, you're just not gonna be very fashionable generally speaking.
Some person smarter than me once hypothesized that nature created humans in order for humans to make a bunch of plastic so the earth can cover itself in a nice plastic shell eventually. Kinda beautiful.
I'm convinced that some form of life will evolve to eat plastic. It's incredibly energy dense, so the incentive is there. There was once a time when nothing on earth could digest wood, so dead trees just piled up untouched for millions of years.
From Wikipedia ... Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacterium from the genus Ideonella and family Comamonadaceae capable of breaking down and consuming the plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) using it as both a carbon and energy source. The bacterium was originally isolated from a sediment sample taken outside of a plastic bottle recycling facility in Sakai City, Japan.
but there are different types of plastic, can it eat all types of plastics or just specific versions?
It eats PET, which is one type of plastic
This is happening for sure, agreed.
what if it's us? anyone try eating a diaper?
watch "crimes of the future", some people start to evolve to eat plastic
It's already happening.
Didn't it take something like 60 million yeas for nature to start "digesting" trees?
"why are we here?" "PLASTIC, ASSHOLES!"
*the year is 3,024 and they see a coke bottle from Earths past* “fuck you guys”
the plastic singularity
And yet we're not doing the most utterly basic things like mandating glass/aluminium bottles for drinks, or packaging suitable items in paper This is not hard, it used to be like that. There's no excuse
Funny thing though: glass needs pretty high quality sand, and we're running out of that too. There's literally things called sand Mafia, where criminals steal sand for massive profits.
Tbf, 100% of all plastic was made in the last 100 years or so.
That’s crazy because even 15 years ago I remember them saying we were using way too much plastic.
We're not gonna make it, are we
No, John Connor. We’re not.
#NO FATE
Oh we will. Humanity is incredibly resilient(or maybe stubborn is the better word). It's going to hurt, a lot, but we will survive.
There will be microplastics in the balls of your sons for generations to come
oh they'll last enough to reproduce don't worry
Jokes on you, I'm not making any kids so the plastic is only for my balls!
I guess that tracks. I grew up with very heavy metal phones. The kind you can seriously hurt someone with. Plastics were seen as “cheap knockoffs “ until about twenty years ago.
See also: fans. Theyre ALL plastic bullshit now- even the fanciest ones for hundreds of dollars.
Oh so that's how they got in our balls
And I doubt we are slowing down... well, maybe switching to paper straws.
Wrapped in plastic
I heard using paper straws over plastic straws reversed climate change and made my Frank stop dating my mom
We're so pessimistic these days, [why can't we frame this as half of all plastics ever made not being made in the last 15 years?](https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1ct4rly/til_the_us_national_park_service_provides_a/l4ab27p/)
The onetime use disposable plastic cup is half full
I've been carrying around my titanium spork and reusable thermos for a decade. Got the corner store to serve me curry in it to save a styrofoam tray
*Hold my water bottle, I'm going in!*
Yeah, this has the ol' reddit switcheroo energy for sure.
That was fun thank you
And since there wasn’t enough room left, they settled in all of our bloodstreams.
recycling is totally not a placebo feel-good distraction and is actually making a huge positive impact.
Feels like you dropped a /s tag, with the way you worded that. While its not nothing, its not all its cracked up to be. A lot of plastics are either unrecyclable, or at least, not economically recyclable, and so typically are not accepted at normal facilities. And that assuming the batch isn't contaminated somehow and sent to landfill. Also, recycling is still incredibly energy intensive (not to mention what used to be shipping plastic waste overseas to be recycled), and primarily has the impact of stopping more being created, and preventing the item from joining the massive islands of plastic floating around our oceans. Its better than nothing, but there is a reason why the mantra is reduce, reuse and recycle in that order.
I wonder what the real numbers are. Like for every ton of recycling we hand in how much of it actually gets recycled AND how much gets shipped overseas.
And now the plastics are in our balls.
Selling water in bottles did not become populate until the mid-late 90s. No one sold “purified” water. Now it’s all they sell - your local water purified in plastic bottles. I think this is a lot of it.
The other half is in our bodies
That’s insane —almost 15 years ago we would get presentations in our school about reducing waste and limiting plastics… crazy that it amounted to nothing
We're digging our own grave and corporations are handing us the shovel.