2. What's wrong about plastic packaging, exactly? The alternative use for oil is to burn it. Having it do something useful and then get buried doesn't sound so horrible.
I mean, I totally get why we wouldn't want to burn oil. We breath that air and it increases CO2. But why exactly shouldn't we extract it? After all, you can do a lot of useful things with it. Like, for example, food packaging :) Also half the device you're reading this on, most likely.
That said, the same can be said for a lot of other thing like natural resources we drain faster than we replace them. Perhaps those can be classified similarly.
Beyond the limited availability of resources in the forms what we can make use of them, there is processing of those resources which has its own set of problems, as well as normal use of processed resources and waste management of used resources.
Example: Aluminium as we know it takes a lot of energy to get to a state where we have a use for it (parts of machines, or foil for example) but once it is in that state and we treat it properly it can be used and re-used and recycled almost infinitely with comparatively minute amounts of energy. Imagine such a process for other resources where we won't have to constantly input new raw materials and energy to get more of the stuff we want.
This is really hard for oil after we have changed it to whatever form we wanted to use it for; turning it back into oil or turning used oil into usable oil isn't exactly a viable process.
Plastic packaging doesn’t always get buried either. Landfills aren’t exactly a solution because of toxins they leech into the surrounding soil. It could end up in bodies of water. It could end up burned in an incinerator which releases the CO2 + volatile organic compounds stored inside it (and volatile organic compounds are quite bad for human health)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/science/earth/13trash.htm...
1. how much "toxins" are we talking about here? You'd think that if they were toxic enough to cause problems with the surrounding soil when buried along with tons of other stuff, that they'll make the food they're in direct contact with absolutely inedible.
2. Landfills are lined to prevent this specific issue.
2. Good point! Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.
You also have an issue of land usage. We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise. I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms, parks, (I’ve heard of landfills being turned into parks but we still have the concerns of low to moderate containments in the surrounding soil) nuclear/solar/wind farms (although luckily you can still use landfills for these since contact with the public would be minimal), and wildlife habitats. Any ban on plastics, even if it reduces the waste going to landfills by a tiny or fractional amount. Sounds like a win to me
What about the plastic wrapped foods that last for years? Are those just low in toxin and the plastic clamshell packaging for fruits/vegetables loaded with toxins?
>Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.
Without getting more specific about what what "toxins" consistns of, it's hard to know assess the actual risk of them. eg. for BPA wikipedia says:
>Despite a rapid soil and water half-life of 4.5 days, and an air half-life of less than one day, BPA's ubiquity makes it an important pollutant.
It's probably fine even if it leeches out into a landfill, and there's some cracks? By the time it leaks out it would have degraded already.
>We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise.
America is definitely not running out of landfill space anytime soon. For asia/europe incineration is an alternative
>I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms
That sounds like a non-issue given that we have a functioning market for land?
I appreciate a good whataboutism as the next guy, but please keep in mind that fruit already has short shelf life, and plastic packaging is not used for longevity or higiene but to protect the product from mechanical actions and to prebundle items.
> It's probably fine even if it leeches out into a landfill (...)
The whole point of using paper-based packaging is that this problem simply does not exist at all, it's recyclable, and the timespan it takes to biodegrade is not measured in geological time.
I fail to see how that's whataboutism. I'm not trying to justify one form of plastic packaging with another. I'm merely questioning how much stuff actually leeches out and how it compares to how much leeches out during normal consumption.
>plastic packaging is not used for longevity or higiene but to protect the product from mechanical actions and to prebundle items. The whole point of using paper-based packaging [...]
I'm not sure about you, but buying pre-packaged fruits from opaque bags does not sound very appealing to me.
It's textbook whataboutism, in the letter and in the spirit. The proposal consists of replacing plastic-based packaging with paper-based packaging for fruits and vegetables, which have a notoriously short shelf life. You, on the other hand, tried to divert attentions to "plastic wrapped foods that last for years", as if it was relevant or meaningful. That's a totally unrelated usecase, which has zero to do with the discussion.
One should keep in mind that degradation and half-life are technical terms with specific meaning - while the original substance is no more, in no way does it mean the products are less or more toxic. Often they are less toxic or even degrade fully (into CO₂, H₂O etc), for the most part, but not always and all of it.
Landfills are one of those places where numerous funny reaction take place, creating wondrous chemicals, that people haven't even dreamed of.
That being said, I don't worry much about chemical composition of fruit packaging and their degradation products in non-smoldering landfills.
In the chain of raw resources -> refined resources -> partial assemblies -> assembled products -> used products -> waste all steps are finite, and it's just a matter of which limit we hit first. Instead of waiting and "hoping for the best" it would make much more sense to plan ahead and start limiting the growth and acceleration towards that finite limit so we have a chance at mitigation.
What timespan are we talking about here? Literally the next generation? Or a few hundred years from now? With the available space in the US I'm leaning towards the latter. With that in mind and recognizing the net present value of landfill space a few hundred years from now is close to zero, I can definitely get behind "lets push the problem forward and have the next generation deal with it".
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/09/toxic-fo...
Nuclear energy produces some of the most dangerous, long-lasting byproducts imaginable, but appropriately handled it's preferable to almost every traditional form of energy production.
While reducing our meat intake is vogue, the impact it will have on climate change is depressingly incremental. Dishonest ideological documentaries like Cow/Sea-spiracy frustrate scientists dedicating their lives to fix these problems. 92% of the carbon impact reduction of going vegan can be achieved by switching from beef to pork/chicken/fish, before considering that plants are grown in animal waste and vast parts of manufacturing rely on animal products. http://environmath.org/2018/06/17/paper-of-the-day-poore-nem...
We need to examine our assumptions here. Are we short on land? Can we build adequate containment facilities? Is the carbon impact of properly transporting/containing these long-lasting products greater or lower than fast-decomposing paper products that can immediately release carbon into the environment?
Unfortunately there are huge financial/personal interests here and it's hard to get past the misinformation. Recycling was one of the biggest lies sold by corporate interests. It's rarely a moral or environmental good, in spite of all the propaganda for it. (Aluminium and paper are exceptions).
The answer depends on having the right facilities to handle the waste products, whether hydrocarbon or paper-based.
But people arguing about landfills are just idiots. Put it in a secure landfill in some geologically stable desert and stop worrying if that's really a problem.
Properly disposed of, minimal plastic packaging can prevent damage and therefore waste, resulting in a smaller environmental footprint than alternatives, including no packaging and reusable materials.
The problem is that packaging is not always disposed of properly, and is not always minimal or justified by reasons other than marketing.
Also, not all plastics are the same, some are more environmentally friendly than others and you may need more or less of it.
Why do people insist that the thing that allowed the USA to become prosperous and go from a poor former colony of the British Empire to a world power wouldn't be feasible?
I've heard that for many mass products China can get things onto the shelf for less than US manufacturers would have to pay for raw materials. On that extreme end I just can't imagine us producing those items.
Of course it's a sliding scale, I pay a lot more for certain types of goods that are made close to where I live but it seems foolish to extend that approach to everything.
I'd say that it's feasible to have mass manufacturing return to the US, but not a mass of manufacturing jobs in the short to medium term. Manufacturing with automation that is cheaper than the world's cheapest labor is feasible in the US. But, until the US standard of living converges with parts of the world that have large, organized sources of cheap labor (today that mostly means Asia), the cost of US labor will not allow competitive prices on manufactured goods.
There are partial exceptions to this. For example, it can make sense to do final assembly of cars in the US. This has many reasons... parts can be sourced from all over the world, there has long been investment in automation around auto assembly so the cost of labor is a smaller fraction of the consumer price, shipping cars across oceans is expensive, etc. Even in this example, far less US labor is used in the end to end production of a US assembled car than was the case decades ago.
I realise this is quite a complex question, and I'm sure that there are many reasons why it's a bad idea. Can anyone link me to a good explanation?
Economics on this scale is one of my shortfalls of knowledge
If I understand your question... the tax would, for example, be paid by Apple on their products sold in the US if they continue to build their devices in China and it would be based on the difference in the cost of labor between the US and China. Let's assume the administrative details could be worked out, which does not seem trivial (e.g., If you want it proportional to the labor savings of manufacturing in China, how many hours of labor are spent on an iPhone and how is that audited? And how many hours would it take to make in the US with different worker protection laws / expectations?).
Apple would not just absorb such a tax. It would be reflected directly in the prices of their products. So prices go up for products sold in America, regardless of whether they are made in China (prices go up to cover the new tax) or they start being made in the US again (prices go up enough to cover more expensive labor).
Apple would now have the choice of continuing to manufacture in China or bringing manufacturing "home". They still want to sell to the rest of the world. To be competitive in the rest of the world, the non-US products still need to be made in China to keep prices down. So bringing US-bound production home means managing a more complex supply chain. I think I'd want to just pay the tax and keep logistics simpler by continuing to manufacture everything in China, even items bound for the US. One way around this would be for the government to charge US companies the tax for products sold outside the US as well. This would almost certainly be a disaster for the US because non-US companies now have a price advantage everywhere in the world except the US. Apple now has two choices... cede the global market to non-US competitors or move themselves outside the US.
So, if the result is that this doesn't help American labor much, then we're left with Americans paying higher prices for products with little offsetting increase in income. So Americans' purchasing power drops relative to the rest of the world. Revenue does increase for the US government and some of that will benefit the people who would have liked those manufacturing jobs, but certainly not all of it.
In the long term I can see the US getting more competitive in the global labor market because of such a tax, but not in a way that many would choose. It's not hard to see this dropping the standard of living in the US to some extent. If it drops enough that Americans are eager to work for the same compensation that Chinese workers get, manufacturing jobs could start coming back. Be careful what you wish for?
I sincerely hope you check your history and read this :-)
First off, thankyou for the in-depth response.
I, personally, think the race to the bottom style economics hurts everyone. It promotes a style of business that isn't healthy to employees, and allows companies to find loopholes to abuse Labor.
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I completely agree about the downsides of the race to the bottom - I think it's inherently short sighted on a number of fronts (humane treatment of workers, wise use of natural resources, long term success, etc.). But I also see it as an almost inescapable consequence of US style capitalism. US capital markets reward companies who squeeze out every last penny and punish those who don't. Executives in public companies that are seen sacrificing short term revenue or short term profits for anything don't often keep their job for long. And those executives exploit this by making sure they have golden parachutes.
I think it goes way beyond race to the bottom. It's the effort to optimize the exploitation of everything for money. There is so much money to be made by exploiting every nuance of every law and regulation (or lack thereof), that I don't see companies pulling back willingly for any length of time. And the people who are already benefitting most from this have accumulated so much wealth and power that I don't think there's much hope of establishing laws or regulations that don't have exploitable loopholes designed in. I fear it will take something on the scale of the Great Depression to get meaningful change in this regard.
You grow your industrial base by ignoring it