We don't have to get rid of plastics.
Get rid of cars (which emit the most micro-plastics), fishing nets (which cause the most plastic pollution in the ocean), plastics in clothing and packaging where it isn't needed.
Then use bio-degradable plastics for whatever's left. And single use plastics only for the tiny reminder of use cases where it's needed, like medicine.
Getting rid of cars is generations away in the US, at minimum.
Guess we'd better get started right away, then.
The best way to get people out of cars is to give them good alternatives, so I think you need to start by improving infrastructure and public transport.
Yep. The big issue is that the US landscape was designed for cars from the get go va Europe where cars were an afterthought. You don’t get rid of cars by making them forbidden or too expensive you get rid of them by making useless or less useful than alternative options a.
Some US cities came after the car, but anything on the eastern side existed well before cars. Those cities had walkable neighbourhoods, dense downtowns and public transit. A lot of that was bulldozed to make the roads wider and provide parking for the car. North American cities were not built for the car, they were bulldozed for it.
That’s my point.
American cities were designed before cars as well. The difference is that the car and fossil fuel industries lobbied for cities to be completely redesigned around cars in the 50s and 60s. And governments all across the US bulldozed their own cities to do it.
Getting rid of Internal combustion engined cars more reasonable. EVs aren't perfect, but they are much better than ICE cars as far as pollution goes.
In the context of micro plastics, it's the same. It comes from the rubber tires wearing out.
Then instead of roads let use tires made of metal and put them on some kind of road that also has metal. Let's make it electric too...
Maybe we could connect many cars together on this system, and make it so the front or the back car is a special one thats more powerful and pulls the other cars behind or pushes the ones in front of it that carries all the passengers. For convenience, we could make nice loading and unloading areas.
Right, but we're talking about microplastics here. Those mainly come from tires and braking systems, so the switch won't help this specific problem.
I don't trust biodegradable plastics anymore. The in between stage of biodegration is micro plaltics. This may be an issue even if it's from organic sources.
You don't have to get rid of cars, my dude, just tires.
Canada is in the process of "banning single-use plastics". Although you still see them everywhere, there are many places that have switched some stuff like plastic grocery bags, plastic straws and plastic utensils to cloth grocery bags, paper straws and wooden utensils.
The point OP is making still holds true in Canada though. I can’t go buy a plastic bag at my grocery store, but the store can use a ridiculous amount of wrap to sell produce, and there are tons of food products where you buy a bag full of smaller bags(and some full of even smaller bags. Pre-made salad is a big one) that I can buy easily and usually for fairly cheap.
Well for one: most of the things listed already have a solution:
Food? Glassware and Metal containers. Or Even reusable single type plastic containers, like a tupperware.
Sterile medical supplies already are packed in a paper bag. The ones that are in plastic actually aren't.
Medicine can also be packed into glass and metal containers.
Beverages can be put in cans or Reusable Glass bottles or you simply drink tap water. (I know in some countries that's not safe but it should be)
And honestly your cafeteria is the most ridiculous example. Get a dishwasher and use real cutlery. Or bring your own cutlery from home. (Is it actually a cafeteria or just a glorified break room?)
Sterile medical supplies already are packed in a paper bag. The ones that are in plastic actually aren't.
Uh... What? Sterile medical instruments are absolutely packed in plastic, paper is too permeable and will lead to contamination. Even if it looks like paper it's still lined with plastic. Have you ever worked in a medical setting before?
Me putting paper into the autoclave for the sake of the environment
I'm pretty sure it's wax lined paper they use
I loathe plastic waste, but here's a conundrum I read about.
Elementary school kids learned about environmentalism, wanted to do better. They got the school to dump plastic utensils and plates in favor of steel. No brainer, right?
Turns out the energy cost for making the steel meant they would have to wash those items 1,000+ times to make up for the plastic energy production. Still, no brainer, right?
Then they added in the energy costs for washing those items 1,000+ times. Not remotely worth doing. (Factor in loss, it's even worse.)
We got ourselves in a hella mess. Getting off plastic is going to mean cheap, clean and abundant energy. I mean shitloads of power. I'm all in for nuclear, at least as a stopgap.
The primary concern with single-use plastics is not energy consumption but plastic waste. That, of course raises the question of how to weigh one kind of environmental harm against another, and I do not have a good answer.
My instinct here is that not generating so much trash is the energy use in this case, but I can't prove that.
It's a balancing act for sure. You have to understand what's good for the climate isnt necessarily good for the environment. However I believe we have to understand that cleaning up the plastic in the world is imho harder than recapturing co2 since you can't just build a big machine wherever you want and it does it's job. Plastic you have to hunt down manually, and good luck doing that for micro plastics
But I don't think your example works as well as eg plastic Vs glas bottles. Your energy dilemma can be solved simply by having photovoltaic panels and/or hooking the dishwasher up to a renewably generated hot water supply.
Also even in your calculations which I assume are not optimised 2000+ wash cycles is only like 6 years of use. And I still think that's a no brainer.
Start with the easy wins and replace the others as options come available. We don't have to fix everything at once.
One way is to keep the plastic but make it out of something renewable instead of out of petroleum products. It can have the same short term properties but eventually disintigrate instead of turning into microplastics or releasing harmful particles when burned.
What does the source of the monomer have to do with disintegration, microplastics and harmfulness when burned? PE is the most commonly used plastic in the world. It's made out of ethylene, which is about as simple as a molecule can be. Nothing prevents you making renewable PE, except it's cheaper to make from fossil sources.
Bioplastic - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
The solution is not perfect though...
Life cycle analysis studies show that some bioplastics can be made with a lower carbon footprint than their fossil counterparts, for example when biomass is used as raw material and also for energy production. However, other bioplastics' processes are less efficient and result in a higher carbon footprint than fossil plastics.
the plastic problem is separate from the carbon problem though… we don’t ban plastics because we’re concerned about climate change; we ban them because we are worried that microplastics are causing significant health effects to both humans and most other animals
Obviously. I doubt bioplastic had even 1/100 of the money and research of their fossil counterparts.
Single use consumer plastics should be banned.
I don't think individual shrink wrapping of utensils is a necessary use, every time I pull that thin plastic off something I think we are all going to hell.
But as others have noted, we don't need to eliminate all use, we need to radically reduce use and find a technology to deal with the remaining amount.
It'd be better to come up with ways to efficiently break them down chemically so they can be remade into new plastic.
How can we get away from plastic as a safety layer?
We don't need to get away totally.
It will be good enough if we avoid most of it.
I’m probably going to hell for saying this, but… I’m not that worried about plastic pollution? Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize single use items and plastic ending up places it shouldn’t, but if it’s the best option for food / medical safety or cheaply producing something with a lower carbon footprint… we should probably just use it without too much guilt? The world is almost certainly better because of plastic in my opinion.
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