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20 years ago:
"We need to stop using paper bags! They're cutting down all the trees!” (a renewable resource)
"We should use plastic bags instead! They're recyclable!” (so is paper, and it's far more economically viable, but plastic is made from petroleum)
So now we use plastic bags made of a much heavier material, so we can reuse them, or cloth bags for a similar reason.
Cloth bags are made from cotton, like paper is made from trees.
Try 40 years ago. My dumbass sister was advocating for plastic bags, as if we were chopping down old growth forests for fucking paper.
Forestry is an awesome practice, and we're damned good at it. I'd advocate for waxed paper in place of plastic.
Zero plastic doesn’t need to be a goal. There has rarely if ever been a more versatile and useful material. Delivering food and medicine to humanity would be impossible if we all woke up tomorrow without plastic.
So it’s more a case of judicious use:
There will be many cases where “no feasible alternative exist” and that will mean “it is prohibitively costly to do it with glass and steel.” I think that is really your questions. The answer is yes, sometimes plastic is actually best.
But I’d feel much more comfortable deciding that for a given use case IF #2 actually existed. Under current conditions, there may be no reasonable use of plastic at all.
An oft-overlooked part of this is the fact that it is also a socioeconomic issue. Due to half a century of wage suppression, the diminished purchasing power of the majority of the population would not be able to handle the shift to more durable goods. Wealth/income inequality is a major hurdle for reducing single use plastics and disposable goods.
Ah. Nobody can afford un-enshittified products anymore.
It's progressive invisible poverty.
Exactly. The actual cost of durable goods tend to be pretty consistent, when corrected for inflation. It's just that wages are so terrible compared to what they should be, if they were not completely divorced from the value created by labor.
If you use reusable bags, bottles, and other containers, that’s way more sustainable than any single use product.
But using paper is still better than plastic, and yes, trees can be and are sustainably farmed in many parts of the world.
I have seen some shifts away from plastic. For example, Apple seems to have removed almost all if not all plastic from their packaging, replacing it with paper.
OK, with what would you replace the materials of LEGO bricks?
This is not a trick question, but one that LEGO has already spent millions on research on. They found an oil-free alternative to the soft plastic used for leaves and other plant parts, but are stuck on other types of plastic they use.
Okay we can make an exception for LEGOs... But it's illegal to dump them as regular trash!
I don't know if this is common, but in my family Legos are a common gift for children, and they never get thrown away. When kids age out (usually because they move out or go to uni) the bricks get tossed in a big mixed bag and handed down to the next round of youngsters. After at least 3 generations of this, the kids now inherit literal full sized trash barrels of mixed Lego. It's awesome!
When it was my turn I got a big bucket, but two of my cousins got all of the Technic stuff, I was very jealous.
If you would not mind, before you dump them, hand them to me.
Hah! Unfortunately I don't own any anymore. They didn't make the cut for the 60kg of essential stuff you can carry when moving to another country. But they're awesome.
The real trick to make this better is moving away from a consumerist mindset. Which isnt really possible in capitalism at its current stage.
And a small part of that I think is realizing that a ton of stuff we use plastic for is totally unnecessary. How many times have you opened something and thought “fuck that’s a lot of plastic?”
To me it’s unbearably frustrating how much companies use plastic.
Very much this, a lot of stuff is packed in plastic today where it doesn't need packaging at all. Packaging is becoming an industry where there is no added value very quickly.
Why are we still using so much fucking plastic?
Capitalism, gotta make that line go up.
Let's take clothing for example. It's way easier to say, make a polyester shirt that breaks in a few months in a sweatshop than make a linen shirt that lasts for 20 years.
Now, let's say that these two shirts have been made and now they are in a store. Someone goes there and chances are that they will take the polyester shirt because it's cheaper. (also: plastic fibers feel soft at first, but soon become rough and itchy, while natural fibers like linen or cotton are rough at first and become softer with time. For example, the linen clothing I'm wearing right now was very rough and kinda uncomfortable at first but now is soft.)
Another reason is that plastic can be made into nearly any form. Combined with the fact that plastic items are cheaper to make than longer-lasting and/or enviriomentally friendly items, this leads to companies making a lot of plastic items.
I presume costs for most products would creep up
Yes, they would. But the thing is that in a world where items weren't made of plastic, they would be more durable, especially if we made items to be actually used not just to be sold. Companies don't care if your new shirt breaks the very next day, all they care is that they got that sweet, sweet money.
And if there were only, say, well-made, durable linen shirts instead of polyester ones sewn up by a Vietnamese child in 50 minutes, they would be way more expensive, yes, but you would need to buy new shirts very rarely. If all shirts could last 20 years, you wouldn't have to buy that many shirts.
Last but not least, in order to achieve this kind of world, we'd need to let go of the "buy, buy, buy" consumer mentality and replace it with quality over quantity, because chances are that in a world like this, you would have less stuff than you do now. For example, if you look back a couple of centuries, clothing was very valuable. You'd have like, three shirts unless you were really rich, but those shirts would last you decades, assuming you or someone else would mend them and moths wouldn't find their way to your wardrobe. (of course, with modern farming technology and mechanised spinning and weaving, clothes would still be far less expensive)
So in conclusion: there's so much plastic shit because it's cheaper to make plastic shit than actually good products. And yes, prices would go up, and we would need to have less stuff over all, since the amount of stuff we have nowadays is ridiculously unsustainable. Humans have done just fine without single-use plastics for millenia.
The solution isn’t so much to replace plastic as it is to eliminate “single use” from our way of life, except as needed for emergencies (eg, situations where the only way to be sanitary is by destroying the object after use).
If you eliminate the majority of non-reusable stuff from your life, the rest becomes much easier. The volumes of plastics would be much lower such that much of it could actually be recycled at least once.
The second bit is to always incorporate end of life into a product’s lifecycle. Shrink what’s allowed to go in landfills. Provide a system to reclaim and often re-use damaged or worn out materials. Design things so they can be easily parted (broken up into parts) so that if a battery dies, you take the old ones in for servicing and either get them replaced or refreshed, instead of tossing the entire device.
Groceries? I no longer use bags; I get the store to give me the flats it gets its stuff in, and I fill those up with my groceries. General shopping? I have a set of cloth bags that stay in my car and another I can shove in my pocket when I’m walking.
I’ve got a metal water bottle I take with me when I go places.
Rejecting single use will get us much further than rejecting plastic.
Exactly. Outside of, medical supplies that have to be single-use and can't be made of any other material, there is nothing that has to be made of plastic.
It's doable. The world existed and functioned without plastic.
You would see glass for bottles, etc. We would adapt and be fine
Bamboo cutlery is honestly one of my favorite alternatives. Bamboo is cheap, strong, and grows crazy fast.
There's also this newfangled cutlery out of metal, which is pretty cool. You rub it with soap water and it's as good as new.
😋
What is this "soap water" you speak of? Is it a new magick spell?
I can eat anything with chopsticks. That's just wood!
Soup is a bit challenging with chopsticks.
The challenge makes it all the sweeter a victory.
The world before plastics also suffered more food scarcity. Cheap, easy, light, safe, food-safe, airtight containers won't find a replacement in old materials, the food will just go to waste faster.
Traditional construction also wastes incredible amounts of energy. Wooden crates are much heavier than plastic crates. Bent metal structures much heavier than molded plastic. Just compare the weight of a modern plasticised car to a steel one from 100 years ago.
We would adapt and we would be fine (in rich countries) but without inventing solid replacements, we'll be fucking ourselves and our planet over in new and exciting ways.
A big issue is the single use. Why do you need a plastic wrapping in the cookies ? if you get cookies at your local bakery, and give them your own bag, they'll put-it inside, no problem.
Note also, that a lot of things are already ongoing to ban single-use plastic. I am old enough to remember the late 90's early 00's when you would get a plastic bag from any shop, these have been outlawed a while ago and nobody miss them
There's also a balance to be struck with single use plastics. Many products don't last nearly as long without single use wrappers. For luxury products like cookies that doesn't matter as much, but for certain vegetables getting a plastic wrapping early on can give them much longer shelf lives. There are only so many cucumbers you can consume between harvest and consumption, and ditching plastic wrappings would reduce food availability and probably cause more food to go bad and get wasted.
The worst part is probably that rich countries getting rid of shelf-life-extending plastic will solve the problem by just importing food products from elsewhere when local harvest season is done and the supplies run out. Poorer countries with less purchasing power will find themselves with more aggressive competition. Even though rich countries have an abundance of food, reducing the accessible food supply will still have an impact on the world.
As for bringing your own containers: that may work for some places, but not all. No grocery store will let you show up with your ceramic container to carry one of those ready-made salads to the till. The risk of getting into trouble for food safety and the general theft risk is just too great. We can get rid of those single use plastics, but it'd also mean getting rid of pre-packaged meals like that. As for cookies, I don't get them from my bakery, those cookies are twice as expensive and last half as long. The closest bakery offers mostly-paper bags (though probably covered in PFAS) already.
Speaking of, for loads of single-use plastics, there aren't many good alternatives without spreading more PFAS around. Paper isn't all that great for storing anything that isn't dry (and it's still terrible when it rains). Glass can be an alternative, but making and recycling glass requires enough heat to melt it, adding to the CO2 problem. You also can't store carbonated beverages like soda above a certain volume in glass containers, or you'll end up with the glass grenades that made the world switch away from glass decades ago.
Here, plastic bags are still everywhere, but by law they now cost money. Certainly saves on plastic bag usage, but doesn't eliminate them either. That said, plastic bags aren't necessarily single use, you can just stuff them into your pocket and reuse them next time you go to the store unless they're made from especially terrible plastic.
Of course you don't need prepackaged individual slices of banana to have their own plastic wrappers, but a surprising amount of single use plastics is better than the alternative when taking other environmental factors into account.
This is a non-trivial problem. The best thing for the environment is for all of us to stop buying so much shit we don't need, but that would require a dramatic shift in how society works and the cultural values of pretty much everyone. Cookies coming in metal tins again would be way worse for the environment than plastic, but you also have to remember that when cookies came in metal tins, they were luxury items people would buy for holidays and special occasions. The only way to meaningfully improve things for the environment in terms of packaging is for all of us to buy less pre-packaged food in general.
Expanding access to goods is both good and bad, and plastic containers are a big part of that process. I think it's completely unrealistic to replace all single-use plastics with non-plastic alternatives, and I think that efforts to do so have largely backfired in unexpected ways. This problem is best solved by reducing the amount of useless shit we buy but in the meantime I think biodegradable polymers are a good bridge technology. We actually already know about a lot of biodegradable polymers because the earliest polymers were based on biopolymers such as cellulose, resin, and rubber, and these have remained commercially important enough to maintain a high degree of knowledge of their chemistries.
Another problem, of course, is that most people don't actually want truly biodegradable polymers. You don't want a ketchup bottle that starts breaking down while you're still using it or impacts the taste of the ketchup, but you also don't want to buy it in a thick, non-squeezable glass bottle. So from an engineering perspective we have to devise plastics that are biodegradable, but only when we want them to be. There are a lot of advancements in this field, but it's still not enough on its own to fix things. This issue also applies to paper, since almost all "paper" packaging products also include polymers as sealants to improve performance precisely because paper has all the same issues without it.
I get your point, but I gotta say: I do want to buy my ketchup in a glass bottle. And I do, mostly because the ketchup is 10 times better than then generic crap that is Heinz or whatever major name.
But I don't mind shaking the bottle, it's not hard.
Most things I don't want plastics for, and in the case of viscous fluids, why not jars?
It would be nice to drop off the jar with the local mustard maker and get a fresh one. Standardizing on glass sizes would help a lot, but then of course we gave water issues for cleaning all of them.
This is already being done in Europe to an extent. It is doable, but it requires a shift in thinking and more investment as well as planning. It's not really about getting rid of plastic. Just single-use plastic.
Plastic is not a climate problem. Ocean pollution is mainly fishing nets. There is a garbage problem that automation can help with recycling. Making fishing nets out of cotton instead of nylon would be a big improvment.
Wood and paper is a renewable resource that could be used more. Global warming is especially a threat to vast northern forests with fire that are paper sources, while also permitting more/bigger tree growth in the regions. Harvesting trees is a solution to fires, and more demand an incentive to prevent fires.
Manufacturing with compressed sawdust could be a cost competitive alternative to plastic, but the binder could make the wood product less recyclable.
This is less to do with single-use plastics, but plastic is often a really good option from a functional POV. It doesn't conduct heat like metal, it doesn't break like glass/ceramics and has better moisture resistance than timber. (Not saying plastic couldn't be replaced a lot of the time, but some times it's a frustratingly good option).
In terms of complete single-use plastic replacement, I'm not sure, but would also be interested. I'd hope it's mostly possible.
often a really good option from a functional POV
This right here. Electronic devices are full of plastics because they are often the best, or only, way to make those devices function and remain safe. You're not going to make a car that meets any modern crash safety standard without plastic materials. Your not going to replace medical tubing with paper or cloth. Etc., etc.
The world can certainly use less plastic, and should use less. But eliminating it completely will require either (a) developing some novel new replacement material, or (b) giving up a lot of useful things humans have developed in the past century.
Well, the more I think about it and the more I look into it, "better" is likely not the best term.
What it would achieve is a likely decrease in harms that aren't controlled.
The stuff that would replace plastics, where it's possible, all come with their own environmental impacts. But, they're easier to control, so are also easier to minimize or mitigate.
That comes with a price, though. Monetary mostly, but also in reshaping our expectations of things like food storage. Not that we could entirely do away with even single use plastics, much less longer term uses.
But, as an example of what I'm talking about with different more than better.
We switch everything we can from plastics to glass. Bottles, whatever. So, you're increasing the costs of transportation, right? It's heavier, you can't pack as much in the same space. That increases energy use, no matter if it's diesel in a truck tank, or via power. But, if we also switch even more to EV trucks and trains, that's still a net positive because now that energy can be better regulated, reducing pollution alongside the reduction in plastic pollution.
But, now you're going to need more bottles of glass. That's more energy to make per bottle (can't remember the numbers, and I'm too tired to go digging), though not a huge amount. You also can't perfectly recycle a bottle without some new materials, and you've also now got an increased demand in silicates for new and recycled. So now the sand is even more in demand, and there's a shortage of it. Luckily, the transportation costs of raw materials is roughly the same, on average.
But, again, at least the sand issue is tighter. Easier to control for than random plastic shit blowing everywhere.
So, it's a net positive in terms of reducing the impact of plastics on the environment because that impact is more dangerous as well as less predictable. But it isn't necessarily better just because it isn't plastic. It's a trade off weighted with that specific goal. If there was a magic wand to guarantee all used plastics be centralized and consolidated, the balance of things isn't a net positive, it's just a difference in what problems are occurring.
That ends up applying to pretty much every replacement material for a given use. Swapping out plastic films for waxed paper means you're now increasing paper production, and that needs more trees. Swapping plastics out for paper in shipping protection is the same. Swapping out to metals brings the same weight issues as glass, and adds mining problems.
There's always a price to pay. You can't have the benefits of a modern world without some cost to the environment.
But, yeah, we haven't started a serious switch because plastics are petroleum and there's a shit ton of money and power tied up with that. It's entirely doable, though it would take time and cost a shit ton. Eventually, we would cut plastics in the environment down to a level that's more acceptable, and maybe even low enough to be unimportant (not that anyone has figured out what that would be yet afaik; we just know the shit is everywhere and causing trouble). But it has to start at the top, not from the bottom. Trillions of dollars are involved, and that kind of money wins, period.
A 12 oz glass bottle takes roughly 1100 BTUs to melt the glass for. That is conveniently, roughly, 1.1 cubic ft of natural gas.
60,000 BTU/hr is a very common size for natural gas HVAC furnaces. That's basically a bottle a minute, just to give people an idea.
There are other inputs of course, but furnace net efficiency is around 2200 BTU/lb
In the case of glass bottles don't forget that they can be reused instead of recycled. Which reduces the amount of energy you use for them.
Yeah it's like 30% less heat input to melt cullet and you save raw materials. The problem is the quality impact. It's a similar problem with paper recycling. Part of that is the fault of consumer preference, and I think that's changing.
https://www.aigmf.com/docs/105/Cullet%20Sorting%20Technologies.pdf
Some info on the challenges
That is an awesome bit of info. I had never even thought about stuff like mirrors interfering in recycling glass
Yeah, I meant to put that in my comment and lost track. My brain was so fried, I'm surprised any of it was intelligible.
Is this actually doable?
Not at the same price.
Why are we still using so much fucking plastic?
Profit margins.
And the reason we still use so much plastic is that everything is driven by capitalism which only cares about maximizing profit
Yeah so you can't have environmental sustainability and capitalism. The logic of infinite growth demands that the cheapest route must eventually be taken in order to provide value to shareholders. Plastic is cheap in a way that nothing else is.