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Comment by negativity | Hacker News Reader

They're probably sitting on a stockpile of material, and would have to write it off as a loss. Either that, or they're committed to contracts with suppliers.

Note the following from the article:

  we took science ... to the companies and, without 
  having to spend time and money involved in a policy 
  solution, the companies themselves chose to solve it on 
  their own.

This means that, since the behavior is voluntary, they get to do it on their own timeline. In order to force anything to go faster would require some cattle-prod of a law or regulation, with punitive measures that hurt the bottom line through fines and injunctions.

Which points to another possibility: They know how long it would actually take to get those kinds of laws enacted and enforced, and they'll only go as fast as that.

And don't forget, two years is enough time to forget about this. So in two years, maybe they'll simply do nothing at all.

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They need to test the new products which will replace these. You have to cook something up, make trial products, sell them in locations outside the US where there is even less consumer protection than exists here, collect feedback on potential side-effects, and quite possibly iterate.

It's just a particular kind of plastic that could be melted down and used for any purpose. There's no stockpile.

I can't imagine they are making their product on an order-by-order basis. Nor would they be buying supplies for their product that way, and selling back supplies is not a frictionless process. Of course there is a stockpile.

It's plastic. They sell it in the form of "hurdles" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_particle_water_pollutio...), small plastic particles, which are mostly standard sizes. These are then processed into their final form as required by simple machinery. Typically these are fed into an injection molding machine to make plastic parts, but could be used to produce plastic bags or sheet plastic for thermoforming.

Unless they're adding something to the plastic, or coating it in something, they could absolutely just ship it back as smaller than usual nurdles, or make use of it for something else in their manufacturing process, like making bottles or caps.

In any case, do you really think they have a two year supply of this stuff? That'd be crazy.

> or coating it in something

Toothpaste and facewash?

I find it very plausible that they have a two-year supply of particular products, that can easily happen if demand does not meet expectations, or if they planned limited campaigns of particular products.

These micro particles of plastic are used by the train load which is why it's horrifying they're still being used. Where would you keep a two year supply if you needed that much of this sort of material? A plant the size of Wyoming? Secondly, they do not have warehouses of toothpaste sitting around. It's perishable.

This isn't the 1920s. Most major companies run on much leaner inventory, and it's not uncommon to turn over your entire warehouse several times a month.

My uncle does supply chain for a major american cosmetics manufacturer, and it's pretty lean. There's few stockpiles, AFAIK.

Probably. But only a small stockpile. A large, multi-year stockpile would be financially suboptimal.

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