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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. The alternatives are often energetically quite a lot worse. Most plastics recycling is nonsense outside of a few developing technologies that actually produce Virgin quality precursors.

Plastic should be burned in power plants when it is no longer needed and people shouldn’t litter. When reasonable other polymers should be replaced with PLA which does not have the endocrine disrupting qualities of other things and doesn’t last centuries in the environment (and is just lactic acid which is everywhere in biology).

The plastic most people use absolutely does not destroy the environment or end up in the ocean. This is a littering problem mostly in Asian countries, not a materials problem.

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Plastic is necessary? I think civilization survived just fine for millennia without plastic, actually.

Plastic may be beneficial for applications like medicine or non-disposable applications like buildings and machinery, and nobody's arguing against that. But to wave away all single-use plastics like sauce packets and drink bottles as necessary is IMHO ignoring very recent (like, just 50 years ago!) history. We can have a bigger imagination than that!

Saying plastics are fine, as long as people don't litter, is wishful thinking. People are lazy and they will litter, and even if they don't, people are cheap and irresponsible dumpers will dump trash anywhere to save a buck. Wishful thinking and moral prescriptivism aren't solutions to problems of human behavior. Taxing single-use plastics to oblivion is.

Civilization was an utter hellhole for a majority of humanity for millenia, they didn't get along just fine. Life mostly sucked, with only brief moments of prosperity and joy for most human lifetimes.

Plastic is necessary for food with a shelf life of weeks or sometimes months beyond what it would be without plastics. Throw in antimicrobial properties and the lowered spread of diseases through shopping as another ancillary benefit. To get rid of plastics means increasing the cost of goods and lowering quality of life, most drastically for poorer people.

Quickly replacing unnecessary plastics is good, but some plastics are pretty crucial to a high quality consumer lifestyle.

I'd like to see a totally self sufficient, sustainable, and accountable lifestyle for everyone on the planet, but I'm also 100% on team human first, and humans living now take precedence over hypothetical humans later. There are too many interdependent factors requiring plastics for me to get on board with "end all plastics now! "

We should do the best we can do (we aren’t) but this doesn’t mean reverting to the Stone Age or mass suicide.

You don’t need to end plastics you need to use them more responsibly. You don’t need to go after meaningless high visibility targets you need to go after the big ones.

You can benefit now humans and future humans without making blind absolute actions, but you have to actually be able to understand what you are trying to accomplish and be able to make compromises based on mixed effects.

But people are dumb and the mythology that pervades society is good vs evil and people are thus rather unable to see things in any other way than good or bad. Things are complex, almost nothing is without positive qualities or consequences and whether it’sa person, a vaccine, an environmental issue, or an opinion, people need to start being able to accept that everything has risks and rewards, good sides and bad, complexities that can’t just be ignored for an absolutist option.

Plastics are necessary. Just as cars and airplanes are necessary to civilization. Cellphones and computers are also necessary. I just got a life saving operation two months ago. None of these things would be possible without plastics.

Civilizations grow on top of their earlier innovations and we can't just go back to the way things were without a collapse. How do you think the cell phone in your pocket could possibly be made without plastic? Or how about the Starship?

To be fair there really isn’t that much plastic in space hardware, it tends to outgas and deposit itself on everything nearby in a vacuum. Some very specialized polymers sure, but not many, and not much.

That's a fair point on the components themselves. But what about the plastics involved in the production of the components?

It's turtles all the way down.

Eh, when it comes to metalworking or the production of advanced alloys, again plastics really aren't a big part of the process. I bet machinists eat fast food and use plastic straws sometimes :) but maybe that's not the point.

Space rockets just aren't prime examples of how plastics enable modern tech, of course it would be hard to find something that had zero plastic in the production chain, but food, medicine, and biology are really where the plastic shines and consumer goods are where there are lots of times where plastic is environmentally competitive to the alternatives unless your argument involves transitioning to a luddite society.

How many people do you suppose the advent and usage of plastic keeps alive today?

For reference, in 1950, there were 2.5 billion people alive.

A plastic coke bottle, a plastic burger wrapper, a plastic child's toy, and a plastic shopping bag aren't keeping anyone alive. That's what we're referring to here: single-use junk plastic.

In terms of plastic used in the fishing industry, the fishing industry did just fine without plastic nets for again, millennia.

And those are all a tiny proportion of the plastics used in the world and banning them would only be an inconvenience, waste of energy, and moral show that would not accomplish the stated goals.

People don’t care about what they can’t see, and focusing on that means you do not really care about the problem.

All that plastic is used for economic/efficiency reasons. Those increases in productivity are part of what allows us to support more than triple the population of the world since plastic's inception.

Plastic --> efficiency --> overpopulation --> more plastic? Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying it.

Overpopulation isn’t and won’t be an issue. With tough economics and dense living, advanced economies have shrinking populations and less advanced economies are all headed in the same direction.

During Covid times several US states have had more yearly deaths than booths which is a all time first occurrence.

You forgot a plastic straw (lol) although I wonder if those are really as bad as the rap they've gotten or there are more detrimental plastics that we don't even think about

Plastic enables us to feed the world and many technologies which enable modern civilization. There were many billion less people in the world before plastics and would be many billion less if you eliminated them.

Disagree; it was synthetic fertilizers[1], not plastics, that made it possible to feed billions. It is perfectly possible to deliver that food to people without single-use junk plastics, and people have been moving large quantities of food around without plastics for millennia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

> people have been moving large quantities of food around without plastics for millennia

There absolutely have not been food supply chains for millennia that looked anything even remotely close to what has been enabled by modern sanitation and global shipping, in big ways enabled by plastics. For millennia the norm was malnutrition and risks of starvation whenever food was out of season locally.

I don’t know how you think eating a plant based diet is possible without plastic in a northern climate in winter.

And if you think food waste is a problem now, wait until supply chains can’t store food in airtight oxygen free environments or how many forests will have to be cut down to use wood instead of plastic or how much shipping fuel usage will increase when packaging that used to weigh grams is replaced with metal that weighs 1000x as much.

Is burning plastic better than just burying it? It seems like burying plastic waste would be a decent way to sequester carbon long-term provided it's done in a way that's not going to cause harmful chemicals to get into the water table.

Burning it just turns it back into CO2. You get energy in the process, but is it worth the trouble? Some materials like PVC emit chlorine gas when burned... it seems like that would be a problem, but maybe there's a reasonable solution.

Eh, if you think about burning garbage displacing burning fossil fuels, it seems to be more or less a carbon neutral act (in that the decision doesn't increase the amount of carbon burned, just switching from burning fossil fuels to making oil into something useful for a little while before burning it. It has the added benefit of not having the things like radioactive soot that burning coal has.

Is burying better than burning? I would bet there's a complex cost-benefit analysis to be done there which might not be all that obvious which one is better.

> This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes.

my fist job leaving my home country was working as a PADI diving instructor. We set up a small company in Colombo, Sri Lanka called "Adventure Sports Lanka" and hired a local fisherman in Unawatuna just outside Galle. We (dumb Brits) had no idea what we got ourselves into but because a civil war was also raging (another story) this guy who drove our boat supported his whole family with the salary that he made from acting as the "captain" of our diving boat.

He took me and my students nearly every day out on his boat and waited patiently for us to get back to the surface and into the boat. Once I took out a student to teach them in an Advanced course about project A.W.A.R.E which is basically about how not to have impact on the environment as a diver, never leave anything behind etc. The student was a German girl who was very keen. When we got back from our dive our captain decided to throw an empty water (plastic) bottle back into the sea. I was incredibly embarrassed because he was on my payroll and I was just finishing a whole day of telling her (who was 100% a supporter of the Green party and much onboard with the whole program in this cursed course) about how well we take care about the environment as PADI divers.

Getting back onto the boat I confronted the captain who just shrugged his shoulders and said: "but you know sometimes a bird comes. and they sit on the bottle. they are tired and they sit"-

I had no words for him because I realized how far his reality was from mine. In a similar way I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you.

peace.

> what we need is a total ban on any plastics... I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you.

You're proposed solution would cause the deaths of at least tens of millions of people yearly and would undoubtedly push a huge chunk of society worldwide into abject poverty. This is among the worse solutions I can think of to address the problem of plastic pollution in Asia.

It’s not going to reach me because you don’t have a point besides a gut feeling and a sense of moral superiority. If you have no words then don’t use any, unlike what you’ve done here. If your opinions were driven by practical reason and concrete goals you could discuss them and even come to an understanding of different opinions based on differing priorities but instead it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position.

> it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position

I reflected on your comments and it's a shame because the interesting points you made got completely drowned out by you entering the chat with hostility:

> This is nonsense,

it's impossible for anyone not to immediately become defensive after reading this.

Too bad, your way of emotion driven arguments about the real problems the world faces is the threat to solving them and I am unapologetic for my hostility towards that attitude.

If these problems are going to be solved, they will be by people who can survive and continue to engage with people that think their ideas are stupid. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and if we have to coddle them we’ll end up in exactly the echo chambers we already suffer from. Only willingness to be around people that disagree with you to the point they think you’re crazy and not take your toys and go home because people aren’t nice about your opinions is going to enable actual progress.

> your way of emotion driven

don't worry I don't feel a thing when being attacked because I assume the person doesn't know any better. Neither am I here to teach grown men something their mother failed at.

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