Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

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You may be right. I don't have answers. I'm not sure anyone does. I've often wished it were easier to see all the externalities and environmental issues in our stuff. So I can make decisions with my eyes open. I think it's likely we're making many poor choices for the right reasons at the moment.

I'd be surprised if unbleached brown paper, screwed up as padding, came out worse environmentally than oil derived plastic. It's probably polythene or variant which doesn't really biodegrade and lasts for centuries. Or leaches chemicals or ends up in the ocean and photodegrades to little bits.

How do we evaluate 1,000 year lifespan vs months for impact? Does that change if we consider it ending up inside wildlife or the ocean foodchain?

Here in my part of the UK at least it's essentially non-recyclable.

I think I'd like to use less, but that's very much an instinctive view. I'd rather corn starch replacements for much packing as it better suits a one time temporary use.

> I'd be surprised if unbleached brown paper, screwed up as padding, came out worse environmentally than oil derived plastic.

I would not be surprised; the production even of unbleached Kraft paper is quite energy intensive and environmentally bad (look up "black liquor" for example). Oil derived plastics (not very nice either by any stretch of the imagination) appear to use less energy to produce and of course much much less to transport.

> It's probably polythene or variant which doesn't really biodegrade and lasts for centuries. Or leaches chemicals or ends up in the ocean and photodegrades to little bits.

PE doesn't really biodegrade in any meaningful sense of the word. But if stuck in the ground it doesn't release any more carbon into the atmosphere, unlike decaying organic matter. Typical PE film doesn't contain interesting plasticisers so there's nothing to leach out.

The nasty end result of PE film is when it flies about and gets eaten by animals. That's why plastic bags are so horrible. I don't know if these air bags suffer the same fate; I suspect they do. That's bad.

But you said "envoronmentally" not just waste stream: when I look at the total life cycle it's not clear to me that paper is better.

Note that if oil were only involved as feedstock (so both products were produced with only wind or solar electricity) then the calculus could be different.

Interesting. I wasn't aware there was quite so much liquor (by weight) created from paper production. It does seem like they get most of their energy from it now they don't just dump it in rivers.

Recycled changes the numbers too if you don't need to bleach it back to white. Though you've a load of ink and finishers to deal with. At least paper is regularly recycled.

So I think we're in agreement that we don't know!

I would like to see the numbers (dollars and calories) on what it costs to recycle these materials, including transport and collection costs.

It appears the trend is to externalize the sorting of materials, as this appears to be the most expensive part.

Are there dedicated paid human sorters? Would people volunteer to help in such a way?

Actually, "black liquor" is usually burned, and some pulp mills are even energy-positive. The main problem is not energy, it's pollution (a huge source of controversy here in Uruguay, we have several huge pulp mills).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPM_(company)#Uruguay :

"provides CO2-neutral biomass-based electricity "

Some mills will even produce paper at a loss, in order to produce black liquor to make power from. Especially when there are "green" power subsidies involved.

It's kind of insane, but there was a mill near where I grew up that was doing exactly this a few years ago.

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