- has to be affordable, or people will refuse to buy it. The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.
- has to be at least as performant as what it's replacing, or people won't want to change. The general public is not going to buy an inferior product in the name of sustainability.
- has to be more environmentally friendly than what preceeded it, or it has no benefit.
If you can find a more environmentally friendly material that is able to replace plastic, achieve its physical properties, at the same cost, then patent it and you will be very wealthy. And will have outplayed the billions (probably a lowball) being dumped into this by governments, universities, and private companies around the world.
Also, the reason most of these articles hype their own work up is because the name of the game in academia is grant money. If a funding agency doesn't think your work is impactful, they'll give it to someone who is. That's why articles rarely describe their incremental work as just being incremental.
The true reason it’s so cheap and available, is subsidies. $7 trillion as of 2023, to be exact.
Without subsidies, using a non-renewable, expensive to harvest resource, to produce single-use plastic would be an absolutely irrational decision.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."
https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/sen-wh...
I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.
I don't care to figure out exactly how much of that number is similarly misleading, but the article you quoted gives $20 billion for the US in 2022, or 0.3% of the federal budget that year. I don't support these (actual) subsidies, but clearly such numbers are not game changers when the average American spends 10% of their income on energy.
The fact is that any subsidies to fossil fuel companies is wrong. They don't need it, and petroleum use in almost all industries is ruining the planet.
The number one economic role of government is mitigating externalities that arise from free trade, often through the restraint of that trade.
This is the "I know you're struggling but the economy is actually doing great" but applied to environmentalism.
Why not just pass a law requiring everyone to be good?
I also believe plastic and PFAS coatings are used in packaging largely because they are assumed to be the only suitable materials. However, in earlier times, there were many clever and cost-effective solutions.
I didn't think plastics are used because they are considered the only submittable suitable material, but they are definitely the cheapest and easiest to use. You cannot injection mold wood to be the exact shape and size with a snug fit for something you are packaging.
About a decade ago I tracked down the somewhat provocative claim that contemporary New Yorkers (city, not state) produced less refuse, by mass, than those of the 1930s. My first thoughts were that total packaging weight and waste food might account for this, older packaging materials being more ecologically-friendly, but generally more massive: wood, glass, metal, etc., and refrigeration and food preservation less developed.
Good guesses, but wrong as it happens.
The culprit was coal ash, on the order of 40% of all rubbish by weight. It had been > 80% in 1900.
Building heat was supplied by boilers running on coal. That left a large quantity of fly ash as residue. As heating switched to natural gas and cogeneration steam from the 1950s through the 1960s, coal use was largely eliminated.
Former generations of New Yorkers would often refer to receptacles as ash cans, and they were traditionally made of galvanized steel, both useful when contents might contain glowing coals. As trash evolved to colder refuse, plastic bins or bags could be substituted. "[T]he New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969." (<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/...>)
Net non-coal refuse has increased, but the total, at least as of a decade ago, was still below the early-20th-century high point. Much of the current total however is plastics, and in particular disposable diapers.
I'd had additional sources on this at one point though I can't locate them presently.
This paper discusses composition and confirms the 40% & 80% figures above:
"How New York City Residents Diminished Trash", Paul E Waggoner and Jesse H. Ausubel, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven andRockefeller University, New York. October 2003.
<https://phe.rockefeller.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NYTra...>
The NYT article above also confirms "ash cans".
More or less, yes, but I think it deserves more nuance. Most of the general public is stuck trying to make ends meet, and regard the environment as a problem to be solved by their government and rich corporations.
If you take away their plastic bags and straws, they will make do.
Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics. What justification do you have to go back to that? No one has one.
We need sustainable plastics production. Maybe from agricultural waste or something. Not a transition to a "Glass-and-steel Age". There's no way around that.
Really? And are the two things causally connected in the way you imply? In that period infant mortality was falling which has a dramatic effect on mean life expectancy but is probably not all that greatly affected by disposable plastics.
Also life expectancy in Norway was 72.8 years in 1950-1955. When, if ever, was it only 36.4 years? I'm quite that plastic packaging was rare or non-existent in Norway and the rest of Europe in the early 1950s and life expectancy is certainly not 145.6 years now that it is ubiquitous.
I don't know about the US, but in my country butter is packaged in waxed paper, which is fully biodegradable.
It's almost like we're going to have to reduce our consumption or something. Maybe we don't need 200 different kinds of cereal and 300 different kinds of coffee available every single day.
I'm not sure this ends up as a net positive compared to the paper with plastic lining they provide tho, since you have to wash the container at some point.
Unlike different kinds of plastic, water is 100% recyclable and doesn't come from nasty petrochemicals in the first place.
Remember: "Reusable" containers also have an environmental cost. Each container will be used, on average, X times. Then it will break, or otherwise end its useful life, and end up in a landfill too.
Don't assume that a "reusable" container is better for the environment: My house is full of free, pristine, reusable water bottles that are gifts, souvenirs, ect. My kids go through about 2 reusable water bottles a year, each.
I think you're making a lot more assumptions than you think:
For example, glass vs glass: My single-use glass container may be recyclable, but the fancy glass reusable one isn't.
Aluminum: Aluminum cans are highly recyclable. Is your metal reusable water bottle recyclable?
Plastic: Ooooh, I won't go there.
Well maybe not at Whole Foods, I've never been in one, but at Walmart it's four wax-paper wrapped sticks in a cardboard box.
I don't think I've ever seen anything other than wax paper or foil, with only tubs of butter, rather than sticks, in plastic.
And removing them clearly didn't increase the price of sticks of butter by $5.
> Since EPA released its investigation, we have learned the disturbing fact that the fluorination of plastic is commonly used to treat hundreds of millions of polyethylene and polypropylene containers each year ranging from packaged food and consumer products that individuals buy to larger containers used by retailers such as restaurants to even larger drums used by manufacturers to store and transport fluids.
[1] https://blogs.edf.org/health/2021/07/07/beyond-paper-pfas/