Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950
theguardian.comMissing from most environmental conversation is how much you can improve your life avoiding polluting things. What you replace packaged food, flying, and such with is fresh fruits and vegetables and local community. You learn that while one flight will bring you closer to a distant loved one, flying in general is what led to your "community" living where you can't see each other.
When I point out that you, the reader, can make a difference, this community usually responds that you can't, that only government action will make a difference or something like that. That's where government action comes from. Besides, if it improves your life, you personally benefit from reducing your consumption anyway.
The article's most important point I saw was that recycling hasn't shown to reduce production of virgin material. Without reducing production, reusing and recycling only shuffle plastic around. Burning it creates dioxin and other pollution. My podcast episode 183 describes how reusing and recycling are only tactical. Reduction is strategic http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume....
However snarky and cynical people here can be -- I'm sure they consider themselves practical and realist -- if avoiding buying plastic will improve your life and reduce demand, why not do it anyway. Besides it will lead others to change and can lead to politicians realizing voters want regulation. Legislators and heads of companies are people too and will change when people around them do, which is you and me.
Western society may be a large consumer, but you are educating the wrong crowd if you want to make a difference. Higher income countries tend to do a much better job of recycling. This illustrates the problem:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inadequately-managed-plas...
Two thoughts. The GP was talking about reducing not only because it’s better for the environment but because it’ll make you better off. Recycling was downplayed in the comment.
The comment was not addressed to westerners specifically. I’d be willing to bet a lot of the travel that is increasingly occurring is happening in the developing world as people leave their communities to find work.
No they don't they export all their plastic crap to 3rd world countries and feel smug about it. See problem is managed and under control.
I'm responding to a post, not choosing a crowd to educate, but in any case, your link in your post below shows that per capita the US and UK (probably most HN readers) rank high. Quoting your source,
> plastic waste generation tends to increase as we get richer. Per capita plastic waste at low incomes tends to be notably smaller.
As pointed out in the parent, recycling is emphatically less important than reduction of production.
If you are interested in stats, this is a great piece that expands on the overall issue.
Can you help me to understand why flying is a part of the plastic waste conversation here? Outside of business travel I can't imagine many people are flying around on a consistent basis.
Avoiding commercial flight, and pushing for the public to do the same, seems more ostentatious than practical. Why not push for carbon offsets instead?
I generalized from plastic to pollution in general in how reducing improves lives.
I'm not sure why so many people interpret suggestions on acting in one area as exclusive of others. I expect that people/voters acting on their values will lead others to follow.
Regarding carbon offsets, I've seen no evidence they reduce emissions and believe they increase them by motivating people to fly more.
Taxing carbon emissions as well as extraction, I think would help. I think individual behavior changes will contribute to them passing, so I promote individual reduction to help promote them (I've learned I have to clarify not only individual reduction every time to avoid misinterpretation).
I do hope this doesn't come across as just a cynical rant you can dismiss on my snark and cynicism... I have to admit it's difficult to completely avoid cynicism having seen the world transform from what I remember of the seventies...
Whilst I agree in good part with the theme of having little impact on the world, we should be good guardians after all, I have to say you completely miss the right target. You even mention a good part of why - the community that we once depended on, and gave leverage, is mostly not there any more. Not there as a matter of policy.
40 years of neoliberal Thatcherite, low regulation reform has given you more freedom of choice, or the illusion of choice, without individual or communal power. Markets value the behemoths wrought by globalisation, and trade agreements that place the corporate above the government. The individual whether individual householder and shopper or the individual nation matter less. I can't remember a time in my life where the end customer was less powerful, their views and wishes less relevant. Communal or community bodies died on that hill too.
When my parents went shopping the baker, butcher and greengrocer etc were usually individual shops, sourcing from a local wholesaler or farmer, and there were fewer national products. Five or ten people complaining about the bags or wrapping would probably at the very least have the shop keeper questioning his choices. You think Walmart cares about a dozen people buying their loose veg elsewhere? They'll win on monopoly or price in the end anyway.
It's reflected in the choices coming from every multinational that serve their need far more than ours - and in consumer frustration in those limited choices whether phone size, fixed batteries, non-repairable laptops and fridges, using plastic to cheapen and shorten life, DRM in the car, or just every single simple item coming in shrink wrap or plastic pack.
> if avoiding buying plastic will improve your life and reduce demand, why not do it anyway
Sure improving one's own life is valid, but it won't reduce demand. Not unless you get 125,000,000 of your closest friends to join in. Individually you are so irrelevant you are not even a rounding error. Achieving change needs a popular Twitter movement not individual action. What you might get is countless examples of greenwashing.
Even a popular boycott against a multinational may not matter much if they can just start promoting in other parts of the world instead. See the tobacco industry for examples.
The USA discovered and started to exploit fracking, and it's transformed US oil security - that's well known. The American Chemical Council (the industry trade body) are delighted to tell of the hundreds of billions invested in new plastic production on the back of that. Here's a 2017 piece of $180bn in new plastic production[1]. It's now well past $200bn of new production. You will have more plastic in your life - you just haven't been marketed to yet. You won't be given a choice. Check the ACC's news pages[2], filled with pushes against any hint of responsibility of use. I'm sure many nations have equivalents. I'm sure they are spending extensively on lobbying.
> Besides it will lead others to change and can lead to politicians realizing voters want regulation
This really, really is not how it works.
Food safety legislation, the clean air acts, our pollution laws all came from the top. Not from individuals trying to not buy coal, or avoiding alum laden flour. From government and politicians realising it went too far and were willing to constrain commerce. From demonstrations and meetings in constituencies having them realise "do something or I may not get elected". Politicians who often still actually gave a shit about making the world a better place anyway. In a world that was lobbied far less, and the revolving door between commerce and politics was at least discrete.
Regulation has been made unacceptable bugbear. We have to rediscover some, and soon. 40 years of reacting against the oil-shock caused chaos of the seventies is far more than enough.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/26/180bn-in...
[2] https://www.americanchemistry.com/News_and_Resources/?topic=...
Unless I misinterpret, everything you wrote stems from interpreting my suggestion to reduce as exclusive of other things.
I'm learning that I have to clarify every time that I'm not suggesting one solution as exclusive of any other to avoid misinterpretation.
Plenty of legislation emerged from popular behavioral change.
Well you did effectively write a pre-dismissal of group action; "this community usually responds that you can't and suggests government action". Perhaps the community responses have had a point?
Leaders, and corporates today generally lobby, market or campaign to individualise more business overheads and make them an externality (ie someone else's problem, like litter or packaging). It becomes a consumer "choice", which makes it all rather one-sided. It's been a point of almost surreal agreement between major parties around the world in recent decades making the current multiple crises inevitable.
Most quality of life regulations seem to have come from hard-fought, often literally hard-fought, mobilisation in groups - that gave enough leverage - whether through civil disobedience, campaigns and demos or unionisation and strikes, and the occasional bad accident to get government action.
I see politics and group action as leverage, a multiplier, that might bring change in the timescales we need. Individual actions as being about self-respect and looking my kids in the eye rather than any chance of achieving change, as that needs a movement. shrug
Human beings are astounding! Assuming the Earth is about 5.972 sextillion (1,000 trillion) metric tons, we've converted .000000000000134 of the Earth into plastic. No other species could have accomplished this. A testament to our ingenuity.
This is a, uhhh, strange opinion to say the least. We've also doubled the CO2 in the atmosphere since the last ice age. Big numbers! Progress! Our destiny is assured! Success is inevitable!
And foolishness, if we become extinct as a result of our own ingenuity.
If my calculations are correct and assuming an average plastic density of 1.15g/cm³[1] that's 7.2 billion cubic meters of plastic. If you pressed all of that into a solid cube it'd be 1.9km along each side. More than twice as tall as Burj Khalifa.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/595434/plastic-materials...
That just...doesn't seem like that much? There are individual disused mines where more earth than that has been removed. Put all that plastic back into one of those mines, and solve 70 years worth of your landfill problem.
The problem isn't the volume. It's the distribution.
Some of it is in your bloodstream. And your children's, messing with your and their endocrine systems, among other problems. Some of it is in the bellies animals around the world. How do you plan to get it?
We can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. The stuff is out there and dispersing more.
You had me until thermodynamics. We're obviously not getting every substance in our bloodstream like we are with plastics so I don't think thermodynamics is the issue here.
I think he was referring specifically to entropy in his reference to thermodynamics. Once we extract the source materials from the earth, turn them into plastics and distribute them, there is no cheap way to undo it.
The following sentence was about dispersion in the world and not about the chemical reactions in creating plastic, so I don't think that's what was meant.
I meant what FlyingAvatar suggested.
Quoting Wikipedia: In statistical mechanics, entropy is an extensive property of a thermodynamic system. It is closely related to the number Ω of microscopic configurations (known as microstates) that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system.
and
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time.
Applied here, when plastic breaks into pieces, the number of microstates -- ie, the entropy -- increases.
It's not the same as the ideal gas law, but similar.
Another way of visualizing it based on ginko’s 7.2B M^3 estimate is that it’s enough to wrap the surface of the earth in a 15um thick layer, which is coincidentally about the thickness of common plastic cling wrap.
It's one or two cubic meters per person.
Sounds low. I’m sure it’s at least an order of magnitude higher for me.
I thought this at first and then realised I'm one of <1Bn consumers at Western-levels of plastic consumption, so my usage will be an order of magnitude higher than that of those >3Bn people at the poorer end of the spectrum.
This underscores the sadness in burning oil. Plastics allow us to do and make so many useful things. We should be stockpiling oil for this sort of use and only burning it when no other option exists.
We can make plastics from other raw materials, plants included. Interestingly, bioplastics can be mfg with CO2.
Very cool! Just another reason I love plants.
“Well, what would you say if there was such a plant that could substitute for all wood pulp paper, all fossil fuels, would make most of our fibers naturally, make everything from dynamite to plastic, grows in all 50 states and that one acre of it would replace 4.1 acres of trees, and that if you used about 6% of the U.S. land to raise it as an energy crop, even on our marginal lands, this plant would produce all 75 quadrillion billion BTUs needed to run America each year? Would that help save the planet?”
...
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Hemp.”
...
“Well, Mr. Herer, did you know that hemp is also marijuana?”
“Yes, of course I know, I’ve been writing about it for about 40 hours a week for the past 17 years.”
“Well, you know marijuana’s illegal, don’t you? You can’t use it.”
“Not even to save the world?”
“No. It’s illegal”, he sternly informed me. “You cannot use something illegal.”
In the US, all I can say is write your senators, house representative, and donate to campaigns with sensible policies. It does seem closer to reality now than ever before now.
Plants require water. Yes we can solve the plastic problem by growing more plants, but then we will have a water problem as plants, heavy industry, chemical production, recycling (which uses a lot of water), power production (most use steam), live stock, and human water consumption all compete.
I mean I guess we could melt the ice caps for more water...
What an incredible false dichotomy. Which do you want, less fossil fuels, or melting the ice caps?
Oh wait! I forgot that burning fossil fuels is already melting the ice caps.
>What an incredible false dichotomy.
I think their point is more "We're already running out of water, aquifer depletion is a thing on multiple continents and there are now cities that have officially run out of fresh water. Adding even more farming, which requires water input above and beyond natural rainfall, is just going to worsen another dire issue".
> adding even more farming, which requires water input above and beyond natural rainfall
Hemp (referenced in a sibling thread) is known as weed because it is drought tolerant and often requires less water than non invasive species. Kudzu and Bamboo are also invasive species that are drought tolerant when compared to most and even natural land uses.
You're missing the mass amounts of water to extract plastic from oil.
>You're missing the mass amounts of water to extract plastic from oil.
The water that effectively stays in a closed system and can likely be treated on-site for nearly immediate reuse? The water that doesn't largely evaporate (70 percent of the annual precipitation returns to the atmosphere by evaporation, I assume water from irrigation is still several tens of percent) and cause soil erosion?
It takes 180 L of water to produce 1 kg of plastic and 302-492 L for 1kg of hemp based on a quick Google query.
ExxonMobil sits at the epicenter of one of the top 3 purest water tables in the nation, squat on the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. [0]
The insane amount of water they use for oil refinement is causing the entire surrounding area to leech hard water. What was once the softest table in the region is now becoming infested with salt water.
I have seen the water table schematics, I used to live a couple of miles from the plant and I can tell you that even in the last decade it's gotten noticeably worse.
This is objectively worse than the alternative, using hemp for biodiesel and bioplastics which requires far less water and doesn't ruin the environment.
[0] https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_cadd93c...
That water isn't being used to make plastic though. It's being used to refine crude oil into: gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, gas oil, naphtha, reduced crude etc. That stuff is going to be refined with or without the plastic end use purely for the various other things that get manufactured from crude oil.
Something like 10% is what gets used to as raw chemicals for further manufacture of goods. Overall about 5% of the original crude gets manufactured into PVC/polystyrene/nylon/PU/PP/polyester etc.
I was specifically comparing the amount of water to manufacture 1kg of plastic and 1kg of dry hemp.
Yes; my post specifically mentioned biodiesel.
I'm not a plastics guy (so correct me if I'm wrong) but my impression is that it's not either-or. Some parts of the crude oil is better for fuels, some for plastics. It's so cheap because it's a byproduct of the refining we were going to do anyway.
I've been told that the plastic companies would prefer to burn it for energy for disposal, the idea being that it was destined to be energy, and that path had a short detour as a cup. Not saying its a great plan, but it's a plan that let's them sell more plastic.
Google Green PE.
Why is this necessarily bad?
Because a large portion of it ends up as both macro and microplastics in the environment, which has a severely negative effect on ecosystems.
The problem with capitalism is waste management and producing good and services in excess.