World in $1.5 Trillion 'Plastics Crisis' Hitting Health From Infancy To Old Age, Report Warns (theguardian.com) 51
Plastics are a "grave, growing and under-recognised danger" to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned. From a report: The world is in a "plastics crisis," it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5 trillion a year in health-related damages. The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060.
[...] Plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review said, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.
[...] Plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review said, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.
slicker dolphins eff tee doubleyoo (Score:2)
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So what are we going to do? (Score:3, Interesting)
What should we use instead of using plastic, and how do we realistically encourage companies to stop using plastic in favor of the alternatives?
Re:So what are we going to do? (Score:5, Informative)
Why instead? Here's what should be done:
* There's been a lot of discussion around developing plastics that degrade in just a few years. We need to fund this research immediately.
* The amount of plastic packaging should be reduced as soon as possible -- and eliminated entirely wherever feasible. When was the last time you bought a gadget? Remember how it came wrapped in ten layers of plastic?
* Here in Russia, back in the USSR days, many products like milk, kefir, and sour cream were packaged in paper-like materials or glass. You could return glass bottles for money. It was a highly effective system, and many people really liked it.
* Implement policies that reduce the amount of plastic used in clothing and footwear. There is an insane amount of microplastics in those items.
* Do something about the tires. I'm not a chemist or physicist, so I have no idea how to tackle this issue.
* Single-use plastic bags should be either eliminated, or made extremely sturdy and equally expensive, or replaced with something biodegradable that doesn't turn into microplastics.
Re:So what are we going to do? (Score:5, Informative)
It's pointless to discuss what should be done (Score:1)
If you care about things like the environment you have to deal with the underlining political and social problems that prevent you from doing anything about it.
Specifically the lack of critical thinking, people's obsession with and willingness to engage with moral panics, and the presence of a ruling class.
Dealing with any of those things requires unpacking a shitload of things you were taught in your childhood during the critical 4 to
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What should we use instead of using plastic, and how do we realistically encourage companies to stop using plastic in favor of the alternatives?
Paper and cardboard, which typically comes from cutting forests, and glass containers, which are energy and water intensive to re-use. The alternatives are not benign, which is why we switch to plastic in the first place.
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> What should we use instead of using plastic, and how do we realistically encourage companies to stop using plastic in favor of the alternatives?
Replace food packaging with what ever was used before the use of plastic became wide spread ? Outlaw plastic packaging ?
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Instead? How about nothing? There are many situations where plastic packaging just doesn't need to exist. Think of a music festival. I remember the single use plastic law coming in and the music industry saying it would be the end of music festivals. Just a few months later the festivals operated perfectly fine with reusable cups and no waste.
How about plastic packaging around oranges? Our local supermarket did that. They recently abolished it. Nothing happened. Turns out Oranges come with a protective skin
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Just slowly increase taxes on anything not compostable and industry will find a way.
You could use plasma coating to put some Aluminium or SiO2 on a compostable plastic for instance. Non perishable, till it gets ground up.
LOL? (Score:1)
The funny thing is that the rich think they are immune to this, but microplastics have now been found in every form of life tested.
I wonder how they are coping with that.
And I'm pretty sure it's only gonna get worse, a lot lot worse before people on earth do something about it.
I've long suspected that most religious people don't actually believe in an afterlife or God, and how we've been royally fucking with this planet over the past 100 years is a prime example of that.
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I've long suspected that most religious people don't actually believe in an afterlife or God, and how we've been royally fucking with this planet over the past 100 years is a prime example of that.
Faith that you will be in a better place no matter what happens here is the perfect reason to burn it down.
So the super rich are probably okay (Score:2)
Now if you're somebody who makes say 8 to 10 million a year then no you're not immune. And if you indulge in peasant food like Trump does then yeah you're not immune either.
But for most people in the 0.1%, they really are completely disconnected from this. It's like how they don't give a shit that the Boeing 747 is a flying death trap because th
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It doesn't get buried. It gets shipped to Asia and then incinerated, where microscopic particles of it enter the atmosphere briefly before rain puts them into the ocean, and then the food absorbs it.
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Doesn't matter. They have plastic in Asia too, and they burn all of it.
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They burn _some_ of it. The rest, they throw into rivers or directly into the sea. That which they burn isn't all burned in well controlled, high temperature incinerators. Which will reduce plastics to H2O, CO2 and some Nitrogen oxides. The latter being able to be further reduced in the same manner as diesel exhaust treatment.
In the short term, this is how you solve the "plastics crisis". You just have to keep people in remote villages from "recycling" technology by throwing it in a campfire to recover the
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Less than 10% of plastic is recycled (Score:1)
Greenpeace found that no plastic meets the threshold to be called "recyclable" according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative.
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Greenpeace found that no plastic meets the threshold to be called "recyclable" according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative.
Once again, the environmentalist fringe has set standards so high that they are impossible to meet so that they can berate folks for not meeting them.
Meanwhile, PLA 3D printer output can be trivially mechanically shredded and extruded into new filament several times. It's hard to say that PLA isn't recyclable with a straight face.
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And they are correct. So, we should quit producing fossil hydrocarbon based plastics and go back to using whale baleen. While we're at it, we can reduce the production of hydrocarbon oils by replacing them with spermaceti.
And we'll credit all these changes to the efforts of Greenpeace.
The plastic industry is worth (Score:1)
You could actually have all those things if you wanted but you would have to be prepared to give up moral panics.
And people motherfucking love moral panics.
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Dude. Wrong dosage again...
Average response (Score:3)
Although, I can't blame them completely as there are so many crises now, some manufactured, some not.
Not as big a problem as global warming (Score:3)
This problem is a self-correcting problem.
Plastics are almost all artificial hydrocarbons made from fossil fuels. They are basically strange newly invented and artificial 'organic' molecules. They are not composed of They should easily be edible to life, but being new, creatures have mostly not evolved to eat them.
Yet.
You see, this is changing. Now that we have filled the world with plastics, new creatures are appearing that can safely eat it, turning into normal hydrocarbons, which should get fed into the food chain.
I strongly believe that 100 years from now, most plastics will be easily edible my microbes. Hopefully they will be specialized creatures that do not do well outside of landfills.
The real problem is not plastics, but silicone. While some of them are biodegradeable, some are not. A silicone material that is not biodegradeable, made with mostly silicon and oxygen, only burns at a high temperature and could be far more dangerous over the long term.
Re:Not as big a problem as global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time a ubiquitous new durable polymer material (lignin) was introduced into the environment, it took 60 million years for things to evolve enough to break down any significant amount of it; this was the Carboniferous Era. So while you might count on life finding a way, you can't count on it doing so in a timely manner.
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1) I like your insightful response.
2) But coal was such a wonderful new thing!
3) I suspect that we might assist the microbacterial significantly. We have already discovered several potential creatures to help out.
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you can't count on it doing so in a timely manner.
Put AI to work on the problem.
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It's self correcting in the same way that climate change is. Sure, life on Earth will adapt... But the speed at which it is happening means that people living through the adaptation are going to experience some bad times.
Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time (Score:2)
Bury it for the win! (Score:2)
Burning plastic properly is better than recycling. So little is recycled and even that does not get many cycles!
The real solution is to just put it into the ground. Figure out what to do centuries from now. It's cheap carbon storage... while burning it releases gases.
Also, simply BANNING plastics and regulating the types of plastics would go a long long way. Short life bioplastics for disposables and banning in other cases.
We should figure out how to add MORE Carbon to plastics...
I blame that guy... (Score:3)
I blame that guy, standing poolside, at the graduation party for Ben Braddock in "The Graduate" when he told the world his advice for a rich, prosperous life -"one word, plastic".
Hmm (Score:2)
The world is in a "plastics crisis," it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age
Yes, I hate how many times I died as a toddler and in my twenties. Was very inconvenient!
Could we please have a smidgen of balance? (Score:2)
Consider the hyperbolic blather the article begins with: "Plastics are a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned." PLANETARY HEALTH??? Really? Sounds like something from a Star Trek movie... "it's the Genesis device, and it's a threat to planetary health, Jim."
YES, there are lots of irresponsible people improperly disposing of plastics, and yes there are plenty of things being made of plastic that ought to be made of something e
4 mitigations for you (Score:1)
Just to let you know:
- Sulforaphane helps get it out of the cell
- NAC helps it out of the blood
- a water filter and boiling helps get it out of drinking water
- a pm2.5 filter on an old fan helps prevent it being breathed in during sleep
These are the main things.
Hope this helps.
Next,
wouldn't it be nice to help poor people in Bali with a place to use that plastic decomposing bacteria instead of having to dump it all in the river?
No one in their right mind (Score:2)
No one in their right mind believes that plastics are causing 1.5 trillion dollars a year in health related damages. If every household in the world started burning plastics in smoky fires and breathing in as much of the fumes as they could tolerate it would be difficult to reach a figure like that.
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But those numbers don't mean much. Maybe the overwhelming majority of the problem is from places where plastic is being burned, and this is really just a domestic health and safety issue, not an international concern.
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I don't know, but no one should be burning plastic except at very high temperatures in incinerator and definitely not breathing in the fumes. It just sounded like a ridiculous number to me unless there really are hundreds of millions if not billions of people in the habit of doing so. Possible damage from use of things like plastic water bottles isn't even going to register except as a rounding error. Can't say I lose much sleep about that. But smoky fires are a real problem, and not just from plastic.
Trump will fix this for us (Score:2)
Let's not worry about it. /s
If it was really a problem, surely Donald would do something about it.
existential (Score:2)
All the talk about everything being an existential crisis is an existential crisis.