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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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