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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

Though you are right about the pollution, plastic isn’t all bad.

It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.

If every single-use plastic container/wrapper had to be replaced by some kind of paper or waxed paper doing the same job, we’d need dramatically more of that material than plastic (barring clever inventions).

That comes with its own side-effects. More dead trees if it’s paper vs plastic, more metal mining if it’s metal vs plastic, more weight being shipped around, in many cases more energy being used to produce the alternative packaging in the first place. And all that to have packaging that’s functionally worse than plastic.

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My dad grew up in a world without plastic. Packaging of food and goods was orders or magnitude less than now. Most of it is completely unnecessary.

There's definitely more plastic than we need. I've seen individual bananas sold in styrofoam.

But I think that's a tiny % of plastic waste and the vast majority comes from the production processes.

Factories wrap things up heavily before sending their items along to the next step in the value chain.

Farmers sometimes lay down plastic sheets on the ground.

I hate it as much as anyone but removing any of it will have knock-on effects.

It's better to wrap that pallet in an extra pound of plastic rather than it getting damaged and having to re-produce the whole 1000-2000lb amount of goods.

It might be better to lay down the sheet and use less pesticide & water, or be able to grow crops closer to the point of use.

I used to toss bananas in my cart without any plastic bag around them. Nature packages them already!

Now if I want organic apples or something, I may be forced to choose a pre-bagged selection of far too many; take it or leave it.

It was also a time when grocers kept a lot of goods in bulk, and customers were given portioned quantities wrapped in paper, or in paper bags. The additional labor costs were the reason this practice was ultimately replaced, largely by single-use plastics. Of course, capitalism and market forces mean that this is more efficient and profitable (even though they do not take into account externalities and future deficits caused by the damage these products inflict. I would suggest that the costs were more inline with reality, and in a time when folks are already too isolated, I would pay a premium to frequent an establishment that still offered that sort of full-service, more sustainable practice.

> It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.

That does not matter if it's poisoning us. And if we end up in a situation where energy is cheap (thanks to PV or whatever), it might be much better to use less efficient less poisonous materials, like glass or ceramics (and so on).

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