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We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most
by MyPasswordSucks 1y ago
We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.
Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
- dpacmittal 1y agoLet's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
- smolder 1y agoWhat's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
- grufkork 1y agoI like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
- ozim 1y agoI think few cents do represent it. Production alone per piece is more like really small fraction of a cent.
- pineaux 1y agoCame here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
- Ray20 1y agoI think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization costs with near-zero impact on the environment.
- jplrssn 1y agoIf it were that easy there wouldn't be a garbage patch the size of Texas floating in the Pacific.
- Ray20 1y agoPutting your trash in a local garbage dump is EASIER and CHEAPER than putting it in the garbage patch in the Pacific, so stop doing that right now.
- zulu-inuoe 1y agoIncorrect. If I throw my plastic bags out on the road it's much easier. It'll find its way to the Pacific eventually
- tsimionescu 1y agoThat consists to a great extent of maritime generated garbage - plastic fishing nets and plastic thrown off of vessels, and of course lots of "recycled" plastic that was being shipped to China and ended up dumped in the middle of the ocean.
- algorias 1y ago
- lmpdev 1y agoThis is probably the most important comment ITT The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use sledgehammer methods like a “plastic tax” - which you’ll find very difficult to pass outside of more developed jurisdictions like the EU
- AnIrishDuck 1y agoThe economic term for this is "externality" [1]. A pigovian tax is one solution, though it suffers from issues like the one you describe. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
- yread 1y agoCollecting, sorting and burning is not that expensive
- tsimionescu 1y agoBurning is much worse than burying plastic - as it releases much of its mass as CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, and likely other pollutants as well.
- BurningFrog 1y agoFor CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You can burn trash to generate electricity too. At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of the emissions. One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the environmentally impact of things we personally touch. People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups, while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of sight.
- ddoeth 1y agoIn 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person. Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant. I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1339439/plastic-waste-management-by-method-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1339439/plastic-waste-ma...
- Tronno 1y agoHow can burning 150 kg of mass create 750 kg of mass?
- bornfreddy 1y agoBurning takes oxygen from the air so it makes sense that the released mass would be higher. Every 12g of C is tied to 32g of O to get CO2. However I would expect the number to be around 500kg (quick calculation) max.
- BurningFrog 1y agoWe produce uncountable billions of plastic bags. What specifically is the huge cost?
- ben_w 1y agoEnvironmental. Those billions of not degrading bags end up in places that harm the ecosystem.
- BurningFrog 1y agoI think they overwhelmingly end up in landfills, where they have no material effect on any ecosystem. I'm no chemist, but they don't really react chemically with anything in nature, as I understand it. I know it feels dirty and unnatural that they just lie there, but in practical terms I don't think they do any substantial harm.
- hollerith 1y agoMost plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming amounts. They get into the human body through food and water. You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics" does not ring any bells? >[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with anything in nature Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics bioaccumulate.
- card_zero 1y agoBy what mechanism are PFAs harmful to health? Is it because they are not, in fact, chemically inert? Or else how.
- 1y ago
- andrepd 1y agoWell the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.
- bell-cot 1y agoThat depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing. If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.
- tsimionescu 1y agoNote that burning plastic is one of the worse things you could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where it does far more damage then if you just bury it.
- bell-cot 1y agoIn a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.
- tsimionescu 1y agoThe goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.
- card_zero 1y ago> super-easy to mold Or "plastic".