A New Global Plastics Treaty Is Coming For Your Bags and Bottles - Slashdot
source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/12/07/2240248/a-new-global-plastics-treaty-is-coming-for-your-bags-and-bottles
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A New Global Plastics Treaty Is Coming For Your Bags and Bottles
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by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @10:42PM (#63112448)
It's easy to throw those grand ideas into the air without offering any solutions. The simplest example - the plastic bottle used for drinks. Say you eliminate it from the circulation completely. Now what? What do you replace it with that meets the same usability criteria - being cheap, lightweight and shatterproof?
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Aluminium!
You insensitive clod.
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That gets burned during recycling, so it's less of an issue. It won't end up as microplastics.
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Burning plastic tends not to produce the healthiest sort of byproducts.
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70% of aluminum cans are recycled.
The aluminum is used three times on average before someone throws it into the trash.
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Drink more water, less sugary diabeetus fuel. Public water fountains. Reusable bottles.
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Public fountains are the endless source of bacterias, viruses and related diseases. No one maintains them, while everyone keeps touching them.
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That's why you have an immune system.
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Some of us don't have a strong immune system. Some of us are immunocompromised, or just unwell or have a long term medical condition which affects their immunity. Some of us are just old, because - guess what - your immune response changes with age. Meanwhile, everyone needs a clean and safe source of water.
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It tastes like shit (generally bitter/metallic undertaste) and may still alter metabolism. Basically, the body thinks that it's consuming sugar... when it doesn't encounter the real thing, it prompts food cravings.
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People who drink diet soda are more likely to gain weight than people who drink the same amount of regular soda.
Although several studies have shown this correlation, none have yet shown causation.
To show causation would require test subjects to be randomly assigned to drink one or the other, and no study has done that.
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Around the time I turned 30 (but for other reasons than just turning 30) I decided to lose some weight. Cut out soda entire for a month or maybe month and a half, reduced lunch intake, swapped burger out for salads, basic things. But then I decided to let myself phase in diet soda. I didn't notice it at first, and it didn't happen fast enough to make a clear correlation but after about 2-3 months of daily diet soda consumption, I was having some seriously weird health effects. Fatigue, brain fog, forget
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I'd agree that the evidence is lacking. But I think it's important to note that it's not because of contradictory evidence. It's just that it hasn't been studied outside of those small projects. Other than that we've just got anecdotes. And the fact that I never see slim people drinking soda, diet or otherwise, is at least suggestive to me. I don't think it's a wild proposal to say that someone constantly drinking sweet things will maintain and even cultivate a taste for sweet foods. And yeah, it's tempting
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being cheap
Wanting cheap containers is what got us into this mess in the first place. The result is toxic litter. We, as a civilisation, have to grow past disposable goods. Disposing of plastics in our environment is even bad for the plastic industry, though they don't acknowledge it yet. The chemical bonds in plastics are high-energy enough to present a tempting target for bacterial metabolism, which has already started to evolve in the Pacific garbage patch. A future world where bacteria rot all plastics is not a good one!
For the specific problem of drinks, relying on aluminium (although plastic-lined [youtube.com]) already offers superior longevity for carbonated beverages; at my local grocer, it's about a 10-20% markup over plastic to get Coca-Cola beverages in cans instead of plastic bottles, depending on how generous The Man is feeling on a given day. If those prices are somehow subsidized by the insane cheapness of fully plastic containers, then by all means it's time to raise them higher.
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Glass is still better since it can be refilled and re-topped without melting it down. Once an aluminium can is opened, it can't be refilled.
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I remember the glass bottles before cans took over. We're not going back to that. Nah. Aluminum it is.
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Blah, blah, blah! What was so horrible about glass bottles? Some beverages are still sold in them, and they work fine.
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Glass is heavy, fragile, and lets light in. These factors cause additional shipping costs, breakage, and spoilage (depending on the contents).
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Then don't make the aluminium into cans, make it into bottles. There is no rule that states that all bottles must be made of only glass or plastic.
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Aluminum tends to need to be coated with (yes!) plastic to not impart a vile metallic taste to the beverage contained in it. How well does this plastic survive the pressure-washing and sterilization processes required to clean bottles?
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The coating that is applied to the inside of a aluminum can is insignificant compared what goes in to a plastic bottle. An as stated before that plastic is burned off when the can is recycled and does not enter the environment to form microplastics.
One more thing that we will need to accept is that we never be 100% free of plastics. We just need to use them more responsible.
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Here are some scenarios:
The best case. Humanity gallivants around the galaxy leaving landfills in our wake, with habitable worlds in a rim around a giant low-energy wasteland that's too expensive to travel through, like a phage plaque [sdsu.edu]. Eventually we end up in segregated pockets.
The second-best case. Humanity gets as far as colonizing the solar system. The poorest people never escape Earth. The second-poorest people live in Earth orbit, throwing their trash out an airlock. Eventually, an ablative cascade [wikipedia.org] is triggered, making it impossible for anyone to leave the surface.
The third-best case. China's reckless habit of dumping rockets [spacenews.com], an attitude that seems to have resulted from the rapid spread of abundance, and therefore what you might call "true civilization," causes an ablative cascade all on its own, and we never get into space in large numbers. Obsessed with extracting what resources we can still access (but still refusing to recycle anything), mining out the planet becomes our only option. The whole world eventually looks like BaoGang [youtube.com], which I can't stress enough is a real place that already exists.
The fourth-best case, if you think we'll slow global warming but not avert it. The ongoing ecological collapse (particularly in insects [pnas.org], predators [latimes.com], and biodiversity reservoirs [unep.org]) removes all barriers to rampant herbivory, leading to severe erosion, yet more heating, weather events so extreme that parts of the planet become uninhabitable. Eventually, the spread of plant and herbivore diseases brought on by migrations and loss of biodiversity might make it unsafe to grow crops outside or hunt, potentially starving billions of people.
The fifth-best case is textbook global warming, where the planet survives our recklessness but we have to spend a great deal of our precious abundance on fleeing from the consequences of our own actions, which very much include petroleum extraction. The equatorial regions become basically uninhabitable, large land animals survive only in domesticity, the real estate market in Canada continues to get more vexatious, New Zealand has more billionaires than citizens, et cetera. We could have just tightened our belts, but SuperKendall said any show of restraint is tantamount to going back to our caves, so the entire state of West Virginia collapses into a giant sinkhole following a fracking incident.
And even worse than all that is what happens if we continue treating plastics the way we currently do. As I said in my first post, there are already species of bacteria that can eat polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic in disposable water bottles, polyester fabric, and magnetic tape. Ideonella sakaiensis [wikipedia.org] was discovered in 2016 at a Japanese recycling plant, and at least two species have been identified [biomedcentral.com] in the Pacific garbage patch. These locations are both very much destinations for the flow of material—what evolves there probably doesn't travel far—but that only means the time bomb is ticking a little slower. Here's the breakdown:
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1. Humans are, at all times, covered in and filled with many thousands of species of bacteria, including members of the Bacillus genus.
2. A Bacillus strain was identified in the garbage patch
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How colossally wrong. How many people own a pencil? How many people own a private jet airplane?
If a gargantuan SUV cost the same as a pencil then many more people would own one. If it cost the same as a jet airplane then far fewer people would own one. But there are people who own private jets despite the cost. You are utterly wrong to say that no one would own a gargantuan SUV if making things more expensive stopped people from being polluting/wasteful.
I am very much in favor of stopping virtually all subs
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Meanwhile, all electric cars will in time become SUVs since small cars can't pack large battery cars due to the range vs weight tradeoff. Some manufacturers, like Ford, for example, already started removing small cars from the market (Focus, Fiesta).
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battery packs*
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Aluminum obviously. Exxon has nothing on those bauxite barons.
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It doesn't have to be cheap or shatterproof. Most injuries won't be fatal, and accepting a slightly higher risk of injury (or even death) for the greater environmental good is acceptable. Cheap? Who cares? Is it really a problem that people have to pay slightly more for their diabetes fuel of choice?
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by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Thursday December 08, 2022 @02:42AM (#63112734)
In Germany you rarely see those bottle thrown out. Why ? They cost something like 15 cents (reusable bottle) and 25 cent (one time use bottle). So people bring them back for the consign. A lot of supermarket have those consign machine you get a receipt which you can get money for. They do the same for aluminum and glass bottle. And those fit what you ask - and are as good as glass in ecological balance (weight versus re-usability). Still not perfect but better. -
As others have said - aluminum beverage bottles are an obvious option. Cans are already common, and they've been making comfortable scre-top aluminum bottles for years now.
Another is what we used to have - reusable glass bottles. They're not completely shatterproof, but an old-fashioned milk or Coke bottle was massively more durable than what we get today. And for that matter even modern beer bottles are pretty frigging tough when people don't intentionally break them - an issue that could be easily addr
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You picked the one plastic use that we have a solution for. Bottle/can recycling exists and works well. It works so well that homeless people 'steal' the profit that sanitation companies think is theirs.
The real problems with plastic is two fold:
1) Stupid recycling laws. People do things like outlaw one use plastic bags when one use plastic bags make perfect small (4-6 gallon) garbage bags. So now grocery delivery companies charge me $2 for grocery bags that the government thinks I will reuse, but I thr
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