It might be they will be like "shame they didn't have this awesome new material that has 0 environmental/health impact that we have today" though.
There are no clear substitutes for plastic in a lot of applications even when you disregard price.
The future is not known. Let's see. We obviously didn't all die of food poisoning before the invention of plastic.
To your point, though, we could use less sneering overall.
If you watched their actual choices, when confronted with shiny transparent-and-or-colorful familiar plastic vs. paper replacements...yeah.
(And as soon as you have paper packaging, the big companies want to "improve" it with 57 varieties of chemicals & coatings & treatments & crap. Not to say that manufacturing paper is anything resembling clean & green, either.)
One can make even grander claims about having plumbing vs. the effects of lead poisoning.
Like, clearly plastics are bad. And yet, humans like the convenience, the utility.
Asbestos too, though that's less threatening as long as it's not being actively fucked with.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2024-11-19/thousands-of-mas...
Microplastic risk is not anywhere close to lead, we should not even be discussing these two things in the same paragraph.
Lead is bad because it mimics calcium and iron in our body, binding to proteins, sneaking into bones, causes anemia, disrupts brain function...
Plastic is inert, it is made of long chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These long chains do not break down easily. Microplastic, while it does not pass through the body, and can accumulate in organs, its impact is still under study. We aren't ingesting high doses.
BUT, bad pipes may leach other stuff. Some additives in certain plastics seem to mimic hormones and potentially disrupt them. Some additives are carcinogenic. (but only in high doses I guess). Certified modern pipes are safer.
Our whole town is basically running on plastic pex pipe, always freaked me out.
Yeah, though I’m much more concerned about those that are not so obviously bad, that we still don’t know how terrible they are. You know, the unknown unknows.
I can drink water from a lead pipe all day and suffer not even a headache.
EDIT I'm serious. What is the obvious manifestation? Because the manifestations I've heard of aren't so obvious.
I'd say they did things that were harmful that they did not know they were harmful. Unless they did it in the face of clear evidence of the harm, what is there to mock?
I expect the people in 100 years from now will laugh at us for doing all of the things that we absolutely know are harming the environment right now. Perhaps they will even laugh at us for hand wringing about plastics on the possibility that they might be harmful while doing next to nothing about the things we do actually have evidence for,
I have to add that I hear this premise expressed quite often from people peddling low-evidence medical advice and not-quite-believable conspiracy, who try to give credence to their theory by pointing out that the people-you-don't-like disagree with them, no matter what the grounds of disagreement actually are. (I've seen people refer to this thought pattern as the "Galileo fallacy", although we also shouldn't let these named fallacies turn us away from actual interesting ideas just because the public disagrees, too. It's a balance.)
I usually hear what you've expressed from people who are glad that other people were censored: a vague argument for the existence of the possibility of censorship that isn't meant as political suppression, one which usually relies on accusing any possibly censored hypothetical person of likely being crazy, stupid, or a foreign spy.
Rather than an argument, it's an encouragement to use those priors when calculating the odds of the next "conspiracy theory" being censored off the internet actually being true. Remember, arrested people are usually guilty, because most of the guilty people I know about were arrested...
It is often the case that something with desired good effects also has undesirable bad side effects, but the good effects and their value outweigh the bad effects.
I don't know if the Romans made tradeoffs like this; they were well aware of its chronic toxicity which resulted in plumbism. But you have to remember that we're talking about a diverse ancient empire. People today know that stuffing your face with garbage food and in large amounts is bad for you, and the speed of communication and scope of regulation are might higher, but the "practice" is widespread anyway.
Assuming archives are up, hello from the past! :wave:
We wont do a damn thing about the dangers of micro plastic now until it gets incredibly bad that we cant ignore it.
Id say they would actually laugh at us for that though in the future
I'll concede that they are everywhere, and they are detectable. What is the established consensus on the harm that they cause?
Jump-off points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics_and_human_health...
The BPA wikipedia article says the primary source of human exposure is from canned food. That seems like it could be solved with a specific fix. It is not stated, but I would assume that the exposure from particles distributed in the environment would be insignificant if there is a known primary source that humans frequently interact with.
Whatever your gut tells you about what has the most or least plastic in the food you're eating is probably incorrect.
War rations from the 1950s had the most, along with fast food cheeseburgers and Whole Foods grass fed steak.
Kraft Mac and cheese was low, especially after microwaving.
The other question I have -- what does someone who consumes very little microplastics look like? Increased lifespan, decreased risk of cancer (by how much), does it have lead-like outcomes, etc... Avoiding microplastics seems like a lot of inconvenience (at least for an individual) -- I'd want to make sure the payoff at the end is worth it.
Plasticlist Report – Data on plastic chemicals in Bay Area foods https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633 - Feb 2025 (200 comments)
And another discussion for the same link is currently underway on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44366548
p.s. thank you, what a terrific resource
Direct link to a paper in replies if you don't use X: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286203208_Effect_of...
This is not to say it might not be worth it in some cases, just that it is a trade-off, and plastic is remarkably good at what it does.
Even being able to estimate this is incredibly far outside of my expertise or knowledge, but I suspect for most products plastic is only cheaper because the externalities are not factored into the price. It seems totally possible to me that for a lot of things glass packaging would be cheaper than plastic if plastic were priced appropriately.
Other things I'm not sure. We could probably approach it differently, using different plastics and requiring re-use. It would be interesting to hear a genuine packaging expert's opinion on the balance point here, I doubt it's truly zero plastic for food. But maybe.
FWIW I think any non-glass non-plastic food packaging is also actually plastic. Paperboard and aluminum & steel cans all have plastic linings at least. I think almost exactly everything does these days. Glass being the one exception still.
By the way, even glass bottles aren't safe, apparently, unless the cap material is carefully vetted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332912
At one point (my original training & first career was as a cook) I got interested in what was used before modern culinary parchment paper, which I'm sure you know is pretty new and totally unrelated to what was called parchment historically.
Seems like the answer was a huge array of per-application techniques though, with wax paper being the most similar to parchment but obviously not appropriate for a lot of things. Sometimes a layer of beeswax was used directly, melted into the pan and cooled; a lot of things that will absorb oil and stick don't do that with wax. Though others will stick to the wax and then it's a mess. Like I said per-application.
I believe cheesecake is a pretty new food but there are some similar/related dishes in slavic & french food traditions. For crustless custards the french moves have mostly been to just cut it out of the pan and then clean up the sides in a separate step. Either smoothing with a hot knife, or by applying some other intentional rough texture like crosshatching, or coating it in ganache or piped pastry cream or something to hide the damage.
For the slavic moulded easter cheeses (pashka) they lay wet cheesecloth into the pan first and the final food just has that texture on it along with the moulded pattern. Though those aren't baked, but some modern cheesecakes aren't baked either. I have also known pastry cooks that just ran the crust all the way up the side of the pan. Not quite the standard move and it changes the crust:filling ratio by quite a bit but it's not freakish either.
Sorry if this is an unwanted info dump, it's an interesting subject that I've also spent some time on in various ways over the years.
Which are most cost effective?
Who pays for The Ocean Cleanup, for example? That's an external cost.
EVERY SINGLE soil sample we've been testing has some amount of plastics.
Farmers are feeding plastic to our pigs, then spreading the waste as fertilizer. Imagine our farm fields being covered with a thin layer of partially digested micro plastics, neurotoxins and Roundup-like herbicides.
There is no longer any industrial food stream not heavily contaminated with plastics, the weird thing is no one seems to care at all!
Everything is a tradeoff I guess. The question is if this is a good one and if so how can we make it a better one. Alarmism is going to fall on deaf ears when the reality isn’t as bleak.
https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-...
It’s not even that we’re destroying the planet and our health so that everyone has enough.
Partly, if not largely, because we were lucky enough to have an influential politician who had been a chemist:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768
It was also a much simpler and cheaper to fix issue than micro-plastics because it involved replacing a few substances, used for particular things, that had alternatives.
Plus any planet-wide solution risks having its own side effects which may be worse.
I guess we need to upgrade politics somehow.
I'd imagine they come out in essentially the same condition they go in. :)
Dust in your house? Again, largely made up of fabric fibers. Which are increasingly plastics. Especially so if you have a carpeted house.
I'm not fully against some of these ideas and studies. And I am all for reducing our exposure to microplastics, where we can. But folks largely ignore the microplastic lining in cans, thinking they are avoiding that plastic bottle. We seem to have done a great job of avoiding large plastics in the fear of microplastics. Meanwhile, folks have very little intuition on where the microplastics come from.
This seems to make that cheap polyester shirt infinitely more of a risk origin than some cereal with microplastics.
Can you share a good source with some details on where the bulk of microplastic exposure comes from?
At a personal level, it is just kind of eye opening to see how much lint I generate in the dryer on a regular basis. Granted, cat hair also makes up an amusingly sizeable portion of that source.
If you do find a good read that is counter to this, please share. It would not be the first thing I was personally wrong about. Probably wouldn't be the last, either. :D
As for dust in the home - I have not heard these are microplastics. And given how it reacts I do not think it is.
The tire thing was a more recent discovery but makes a lot of sense - tire dust cannot be good for us to inhale or be getting into our bodies via other methods.
Would be delighted to find out I'm wrong on this.
My overall point is that the majority of the plastics that make up "microplastics" are not things that people think of when you say "plastic."
> Microplastics ... in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. [1]
[1] https://www.anses.fr/en/content/caps-glass-bottles-contamina...
I propose a new model; 'total liability'.
Every time something bad happens, you identify every person who contributed to the harm, calculate each person's liability and they have to pay. If some of the culprits cannot be identified, then the remaining culprits who can be identified have to absorb the unallocated liability... Not allocating full liability to people who do harm is akin to allocating it to everyone, including those who played no part in the harm. This is immoral and creates perverse incentives for continued harm.
For example, someone discards an empty plastic Coca Cola bottle on the ground in a public park, the person is fined maybe 95% but 5% of the fine is directed to the Coca Cola company for having made the decision to make the bottle out of plastic instead of tin or glass; thus being complicit in the harm. The money for any harm done, by any entity should go directly towards UBI and be paid out equally to all citizens.
The government could also use statistics to fine companies based on reasonable estimates of current harmful practices. For example, how much damage is microplastics causing in terms of medical costs globally? Make a list of all companies responsible, fine each one proportionally to their contribution to the harm.
People should be paid for identifying, reporting and successfully proving harmful practices (they deserve a commission, like a lawyer).
Identifying and reporting problems adds value to society and should be rewarded.
The majority of the proceeds should go to UBI. Why UBI? Because diffuse harms require diffuse remedies. It's not possible to award damages for widespread harm in a fair, non-corrupt way, so distributing to all citizens equally is the best approach. It's not perfect, but people know how to count and it's easier to identify and prove fraud if the rule is simple like 'each person gets the same amount of UBI'.
We are deeply confused. Even regulations (which many people think are good) are are actually an awful workaround the concept of 'total liability'.
The term 'limited liability' speaks for itself. What a massive hack it is! If liability is limited; it immediately begs the question; who is paying for all the excess damage which exceeds liability limits?
I hate how people keep saying stuff like "Show me the incentive, and I show you the result" yet those same people will say "We need to regulate X..."
What are regulations? Nothing is worse than regulations in terms of creating perverse incentives and encouraging neglect. What regulations do, psychologically, is akin to saying "So long as you stick to these guardrails, you can do whatever you want! You won't be held liable, so long as you're compliant with our regulations. It's on us, the government, not you."
This is a horrible message to convey. What should be conveyed instead is "There is no regulation, YOU are responsible for the harms YOU cause. If YOU cause harm, YOU will PAY. You better think hard about what you're doing, make sure you're not causing harm. Regulate yourself! Because if you don't, you will lose it all and it will all be your fault."
The messaging behind regulations disempowers individuals and encourages neglect... It's horrible in terms of incentives. Also, it makes a deeply misguided assumption that the government is capable of understanding some industry or process better than the people who created the industry/process...
Reality shows us, clear as crystal, that regulations always lag behind, are full of loopholes and basically kill all competition from smaller companies, allowing large companies to be even more neglectful.
It shocks me that there's people who still believe this. Suggesting regulations encourage otherwise moral businesses to be unethical is extreme propaganda. Just because someone finds a loophole in a regulation does not mean the alternative (everyone can do whatever they want and God will sort 'em out) would be better.
We have fire codes, which are regulations, because building fires were relatively common and often catastrophic in the 19th century. Did that lead to more house fires?
That is not a priori a net negative.
> One of the studies included in the new review found 1 liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters bought at the store — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics
How many non-plastic particles? I've heard it said there's enough uranium in seawater that we can theoretically use it to generate power.
Non-sequitor.
>And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have.
Red herring. Other peoples' diabetes or obesity doesn't really impact me. Plastic has contaminated water and soil, it's not possible to opt out of the consequences of others using it even if you do not use it yourself.
>I've heard it said
Must be true!
> Red herring.
> Must be true!
Someone took a class (or two) on Arguments!
and water is wet. What is your point?
Neither are true, anymore than water being wet is bad.
There's a plastic lining in the metal cans now.
By relatively new I mean within my lifetime.
There were not "innumerable" deaths in the US due to "improper food packaging" leading to sickness and death in my youth.
The only plastic products I recall from my youth were plastic bread bags for sliced bread, and plastic milk bottles. Everything else was glass, metal, or paper. I am pretty sure I did not see or touch a plastic soft drink bottle until my teens. If you wanted a lot of soda you got "The Boss" from Pepsi, which was a half gallon glass bottle.
[0] https://anses.hal.science/anses-05066642/file/Chaib_JFCA_202...
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-...
You'd assume that there is a study that tested 200 people with more and less microplastic intake over a year to show that it actually has an effect, but I guess you'd have to do 20 studies to get a p<0.05...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY
The safe allowable ppm counts are insanely low for this shit.
Also how willing people were to go along with covering up the danger. Not just businesses and politicians, but ordinary people in a company town.
Now it's the vaccine.