Plastic packaging makes hygienic food more accessible as an effective and cheap barrier to pathogens, incoming and outgoing. Such public health interests should be balanced against their toxicity. It's easier for wealthier people to substitute with restaurants, servants and higher quality materials. So a general plastic ban would amount to a regressive tax on sanitary food.
It tells us that people are willing to sign a petition to ban a thing while clearly not having done their research on the thing, just because an authoritative-seeming stranger told them something plausible. It means that such petitions shouldn't be taken seriously; and, to the extent that they are serious, it implies something about people's recklessness with regard to policymaking.
(I wonder how such a survey would fare today, when most people have smartphones with browsers and an internet connection.)
Agree that a case by case analysis is appropriate, but I don’t really see any world where the cost/benefit analysis of plastic and water would be anywhere near the same ballpark
The canadian government is big into the business of making these kind of "declarations" these days, so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is.
Although I don't think Mother Jones is a legitimate news source, so would be careful about taking anything in the article at face value.
> so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is.
Maybe he should focus on providing vaccines instead (Canada's vaccination rate sits at barely 4% while the US is at 38%) [0] and stop pushing pipelines to export some of the most environmentally destructive oil on the planet [1].
Not an expert in the oil sands but personally I think there are benefits from getting oil from a virtually uninhabited area in northern canada vs relying on other suppliers.
I completely agree on the vaccine issue, Canada had failed miserably vs. comparator nations in this regard.
What comparator nations? Do you mean the ones with their own vaccine manufacturing, and the ones that put in place protectionist measures to prevent their trading partners and allies from buying vaccines from them?
Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south.
Now that we have supply, Canada's vaccination rate is climbing rapidly. Well over 50% of the eligible (12+) population and climbing.
> and the ones that put in place protectionist measures to prevent their trading partners and allies from buying vaccines from them?
Citation needed? There are no, as far as I'm aware of, any trade restrictions on vaccines being shipped to Canada from the United States. The Trump administration simply invested earlier in promising vaccines, and therefore secured the first deliveries. Canada decided not to do so, and invested later so it wasn't able to secure earlier deliveries. It also wasted time and money backing the SinoVac which failed to deliver anything.
> Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south.
All Canada had to do was invest earlier. I fail to understand how the US are "letting Canada down" by simply... getting deliveries they paid for!
Trump enacted controls (used the US Defense Production Act) which prevented manufacturers from exporting until all domestic orders were fulfilled. It was questionable whether it was enforceable, but manufacturers have followed it. Biden has continued this policy. Even to the point of hoarding vaccines not yet approved in the US (AstraZeneca) though they did eventually relent and give a smattering of expiring doses to Mexico and Canada.
In addition there's recent controversy about US export controls on medical supplies & materials which would be used for administration or production of vaccines as well:
You didn't read then, it clearly states in the articles (and many others you can google) that the defense production act (or rather the threat of it) and executive order required manufacturers to prioritize domestic orders over exports. To this day manufacturers in the US are still not exporting their supply. What date you put your order in doesn't matter if the supplier isn't allowed to provide it to you until later -- so we didn't order from the US because at that point Trump made it clear we wouldn't be getting any from them. So Pfizer supplied us from Belgium.
FWIW Canada announced their order of the Pfizer vaccine August 5th. The US on July 22nd. Are you seriously trying to suggest that two weeks is the key decider here? Nonsense.
And an executive order was signed later to make it clear, these vaccines were for America First (despite the R&D on them being done in Europe)
"Trump made his remarks just before signing an executive order intended to ensure that priority access for COVID-19 vaccines procured by the U.S. government is given to the American people before assisting other nations."
You seem to have been mislead here. The act exists, but has not been used so far. Manufacturers are simply following delivery schedules.
> FWIW Canada announced their order of the Pfizer vaccine August 5th. The US on July 22nd. Are you seriously trying to suggest that two weeks is the key decider here? Nonsense.
Two weeks is a huge amount of time! The US was smart to secure it's orders sooner. There's limited supply and one big buyer (the United States) placed a large order first. I don't understand why Trudeau decided to wait a whole week to place his order (but hey, If Canadians prefer to get vaccines later that's good for us). It's like with investing: if you show up a week late to the series A, it's too late!
> for COVID-19 vaccines procured by the U.S. government is given to the American people before assisting other nations.
"Procured by" here is the key. It's only natural that what the US government bought using American taxpayer's money goes to American taxpayers first. This EO does not prevent any company from selling internationally, it prevents the US government from distributing the dose it purchased to foreign countries. This doesn't impact Canadian purchases.
Not sure why there's so much misinformation floating around the Executive Orders and manufacturer's delivery schedules. Maybe the Canadian government is trying to save face?
I just did, and they're generics made here in Canada.
I'm not sure what your point is meant to be, but I'll just mention that the main COVID vaccines (other than Moderna) all had their research and development in the EU.
BioNTech is in fact headquartered in the town my father is from (Mainz, Germany).
Out of three (generic) medications I have at the moment, they're all made by Indian companies, although one has the name of an American subsidiary on it.
(Aurobindo, Lupin, Heritage/Emcure)
My point is just in a very general way, I think of drugs as coming from India in the way consumer products come from China, and I get cognitive dissonance from people talking as though everyone knows they all come from the US.
There was something in the news not long ago about a covid vaccine related factory in India that had a fire while under construction, so I'm pretty sure they are making vaccines.
As one of that number I was glad to see this: a single shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine is 80% effective in preventing infection (vs the ~90% of two shots):
The Canadian vaccination rate is not 4%. It's as of today in Ontario at 60% of adults single dosed (49% of the population, and 58% of those 12+). The Canadian strategy is to get herd immunity on single doses before moving onto second doses. And judging from what I've seen happen in other countries, and from the emerging data about single-dose effectiveness, it's turning out to be the best strategy.
If Canada (Ontario in particular) has such a clever strategy, why are we living under a stay at home order where police have been deployed to prevent us from doing anything but grocery shop? I dont see how anyone living in Ontario could have anything good to say about what I would argue is our governments complete failure to serve its citizens in any way, whether protecting vulnerable people form covid, or even affording basic freedoms ot its citizens. It's amazing to me that in the face of an utter failure by our government, people can pretend that we're doing well.
I see you have an axe to grind, but those are two separate issues. And two different levels of government. The federal gov't does not issue stay at home orders.
FWIW I think this provincial gov't is mind bogglingly incompetent, and also a bit malevolent.
> FWIW I think this provincial gov't is mind bogglingly incompetent, and also a bit malevolent.
Sounds like we're on the same page then :) I'm confused about the rest of your comment - healthcare, and whatever emergency powers they have unconstitutionally used to try and get us to stay home, are the responsibilities of the provinces. Does the federal government have a role in this at all? Are they somehow setting the overall vaccination policy?
Most progressive folks I know are pretty disillusioned with the Canadian PM for being a Liberal and not at all a Leftist. His treatment of indigenous people in particular is something they've repeatedly pointed out as glaringly terrible.
So the weird thing is: I can’t find a CBC report on this announcement on Wednesday. Nor any other Canadian news source, even in the weeds ones like iPolitics. Maybe I’m just not searching properly, but I don’t see any other reporting.
I mean, they absolutely promised they’d ban single-use plastics, and I was under the impression that was definitely a real thing:
I agree it is a bit weird. I also wasn't able to find a recent press release from the government and some of the articles about this from the past week have been using quotes from 2019 (giving the impression, to me, as though they are recent).
But in the interest of proving to myself that this isn't all some big hoax I did manage to find the government page listing all the schedule 1 toxic substances [0]. Hopefully that helps a bit. The final item on the list when I write this is "Plastic manufactured items"
Great. Regulation and reduction of plastic production is long overdue.
There are some places where it makes sense to use plastic, but we're far, far overproducing the stuff because it's convenient.
It's fantastically difficult to recycle in practice, burning it produces toxic smoke and carbon emissions, and putting it into the waste stream results in a bunch of it getting dropped on the sides of roadways.
If there is less demand for plastic in general, then that means there could be less demand for recycling (properly sorted) old plastic to produce new plastic goods.
We recycle less than 10% of our plastic. And of that, very little goes back to producing the same products -- plastic is typically degraded when recycled and converted from food packaging down into benches or clothing, both of which will shed microplastics into the environment before being sent to the landfill.
Plastic recycling is not an eternal loop like metal recycling can be. It's almost entirely downcycling when it happens at all.
> Plastic recycling was invented by the plastics industry in the 1970s to assuage environmental concerns without substantially reducing plastic consumption, according to Max Liboiron, an expert on plastic waste and a professor at Memorial University.
> It has never worked. Despite decades of effort, only about nine percent of Canada’s plastic waste is currently recycled, according to the 2019 ECCC-commissioned study.
Right. My point is if we stop producing plastic we are still going to have a lot of plastic waste. Perhaps we could invest instead in actually making recycling work for the waste we already have
It is true that most plastic is not recycled. It is not true that recycling does not work.
California has 87% of its plastic beverage bottles recycled.
British Columbia implemented an extended consumer responsibility policy that allows the mixed-stream plastic to get recycled through an automated sortation, shredding and sortation system. Their recovery rate of plastic beverage containers was 73.9% in 2017.
Paper produces vastly more carbon than plastic for most disposable items. The existential risk to humans is climate change, more than litter.
We need to control litter and excess plastic by increasing recycle rates. The unwillingness to adopt better recycling infrastructure is due to unwillingness to adopt taxes to fund the conversion (the cost of converting mixed streams is greater than the market price of the output commodity), not because it is technologically infeasible.
The constant theme of recycling that works is government policy that increases the cost of plastic packaging, and uses those funds to stabilize markets or invest in the expensive equipment that it takes to process the material. But it's worth it to do that compared to the wasteful, CO2 blasting approach of "just switch to paper."
Is there a good list of what things we can reasonably replace? As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions.
Edit:. Looking around, electrical insulation, seals, and shock absorbers are the three things that I cant think of a good replacement for. Some seals like for weather proofing you could use spring bronze.
Large, durable plastic use is less of a concern, if I understand correctly. Plastic use around food (and packaging in general), for instance, has a lifespan of approximately 6 months. Compare to the 13 years for plastics used by the automotive industry.
There's TONS of packaging that could be replaced by other materials -- particularly materials that can non-toxically decompose in the environment in a reasonable time frame.
Anything that can be made from paper, should be. Primarily bags, shipping containers, product packaging, etc. I've seen Amazon replace plastic bubble wrap with paper-based bubble wrap, for example. They use really fine bits of paper and presumably glue to create the "bubbles".
Instead of using plastic to wrap shipping containers, you could use a more re-usable material. Or perhaps we could come up with cardboard "rings" or other techniques to keep stuff together instead of wrapping it in plastic.
We might have to use more soap or other sterilization techniques, but where practical, using glass containers and aluminum cans would still make sense. I'm certain that if plastic single-use containers were eliminated in convenience stores for a country, we'd see a switch to cans, glass and waxed paper instead, almost overnight. Same as in alcohol stores, perhaps.
Cans for food is actually one thing I would like to see addressed with an alternative. With how ubiquitous cans are, it was a source of plastic in contact with foods that is difficult to avoid.
True to a point, but plastic and the cloud were transitioned to for many things a few years ago because of "saving trees". And then overused to the point of surpassing paper's previous carbon output.
Calling to mind palm oil, adopted as more healthy and sustainable. And then also over-done.
Disposability seems a deeper issue: a retreat to forest products doesn't seem the solution.
The fish-catching clear plastic rings that you throw away, or cut up, are bad, the cardboard packaging coated in paints is bad, but the craft beer heavy duty Paktech rings [1] and Roberts' Craft-Paks [2] seem harbingers of a more reusable + indefinably recyclable future, regardless ultimately of the specific materials involved.
A piece of the wider craft brewery innovation of the '10s in the U.S. [3]
> As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions.
Respectfully, CV boots on car suspensions have a lifespan of several years, same with phone cases potentially.
As a first step I'm more interested in replacing the things that hundreds of millions of people discard multiple times a day. Starting off by thinking about CV boots and phone cases strikes me as being precipitously close to the "we can't replace everything so lets replace nothing" path.
Not at all, I agree packaging and liners should never need to be plastic. Lets ban them now. Glass and ceramics can replace almost everything that metal can't.
Recycle the metal and reuse the glass/ceramic. I was just astounded how few things really needed to be plastic.
Don't throw away your phone every couple of years and that phone case will last many, many years. Think of anything plastic that you throw away. The items you list are durable goods and are likely environmentally better and less toxic than what was used prior to plastic.
The big problem is that there has been little to no effort on what to do with waste plastic. It's cheap to produce but it looks like it's expensive to deal with the waste. Right now it costs money to discard it so people and companies do their best to shift the burden to some one else.
Plastic is an important part of our modern society but we need to use it and get rid of it wisely.
There is a process being developed where plastic can be recycled back into an oil be burning it and condensing the vapors/smoke into a liquid (capturing it). This is also very good news given the issues we have with recycling. This process would make it much easier since you would not have to sort.
Curious if we can put said oil back into the earth we extracted it from, or if there are reasons that ecologically would be a bad idea. It’s interesting to me thinking about restoring the environment to a state prior to human interference.
Phones are re-sold and re-used. They would account for a minor fraction of plastic use. It would be completely unreasonable to set a standard form factor and disrupt the market for an evolving product category.
What could use a standard form factor would be packaging, especially for glass jars and bottles which could be endlessly re-cycled.
If there are restrictions, I hope they target major microplastic sources like tires and textiles, rather than easily scapegoated but very minor sources, like plastic bags and drinking straws. Based on precedent, I am not holding my breath, but I hope so.
The entire class of fluorine-based waterproofers should be banned, since they don't degrade.
Next ban polyester, since the fibers are a major source of microplastics, and since they are flammable (made of plastic after all) they are coated in toxic and endocrine-disrupting flame retardants.
Have you got a source for this concern? Tires are rubber, not plastic as far as I know, and though many textiles are polyester, and fleece is mostly recycled plastics (if I recall) where is the mass use of plastic in the textile industry?
The fish-killing is caused by an added chemical that acts as a sunscreen. It increases the UV resistance of the rubber, thus prolonging tire life. It isn't the rubber itself that is the problem, at least in that example.
I think it's fair to charge the responsibility of the additive to the material that it's included in. It would not have been included if it didn't serve a purpose of enabling the use of that material.
These are the fibers in the reinforcing bands and rims, right? Those are buried under the rubber and if your tire is shedding material from those bands then your tire must be truly worn to nothing. I think the vast majority of material shed from tires must be the rubber itself.
>The estimated per capita emission ranges from 0.23 to 4.7 kg/year, with a global average of 0.81 kg/year. The emissions from car tires (100%) are substantially higher than those of other sources of microplastics, e.g., airplane tires (2%), artificial turf (12–50%), brake wear (8%), and road markings (5%). Emissions and pathways depend on local factors like road type or sewage systems. The relative contribution of tire wear and tear to the total global amount of plastics ending up in our oceans is estimated to be 5–10%. In air, 3–7% of the particulate matter (PM2.5) is estimated to consist of tire wear and tear, indicating that it may contribute to the global health burden of air pollution which has been projected by the World Health Organization (WHO) at 3 million deaths in 2012. Pollution from tire wear and tear also enters the food chain, but further research is needed to assess human health risks.[52]
They were originally natural rubber, but it's expensive and less resilient than synthetic variety, and not avaliable in quantities that would be needed for all the cars in the world.
It's such a pleasant surprise to me how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. The recent WWF report came out less than 2 years ago [1]. Microplastics were obviously known for a long time, but that's when conversations about microplastics re-ignited. And now we can see an entire country declaring plastics toxic and restricting them. If you'd asked me an hour ago, I'd have predicted it'd take at least another decade before concern about this would spread widely enough to prompt a national policy shift. Great to see that raising public awareness can actually do something!
Environmental action can be taken relatively quickly when nation-state-level corporate interests aren't funding campaigns to oppose it. The premier example is the banning of CFCs in the 1980s in defense of the ozone layer:
"The discovery of the hole [over Antarctica] was evidence that the magnitude of the problem was far greater than scientists had originally predicted. International alarm at the ozone layer’s thinning led to unprecedented multilateral action to ban the dangerous chemicals that were responsible for its deterioration – chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). By 1987, just two years after the hole was discovered, an international treaty was in place that cut the use of CFCs in half. Three years later in 1990, the Montreal Protocol was strengthened to ban the use of CFCs altogether in industrialised countries by the year 2000 and by the year 2010 in developing countries. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result."
Plastic is a magically useful and durable material with many orders of magnitude more uses than CFC. I hope you’re right but looking around the world, there are very few objects that aren’t at least partially made out of some polymer.
Another question is what to do with all the existing plastic. From what I understand there’s not really anything other than high temperature burning that will safely get rid of it without turning it to micro plastic eventually
We could bury it in a giant pit somewhere without a lot of water running through it (prevent leeching).
The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere.
I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world and put it in one place it would be a kilometer cubed, or something like that.
It may have been per year, I don’t recall. The waste in that photo does not seem very deep, so it’s possibly taking up a lot more area than needed.
So if we go by that stat (300 million tons per year) we need 0.3km^3 per year for the United States to store all of its waste. So let’s say we have a hundred years worth, that’s 30km^3. Could we dig a hole 30km^3 somewhere? Not really, we can’t dig that deep generally. If we made this hole (or structure, it could have walls and a net over possibly) 100km by 100km it would need to be 2.7km deep/high to store 100 years of garbage.
It would be difficult to do this, and would probably need more area to be feasible, but I would think it would be less of a mess environmentally to try to contain the problem to a few sites like this rather than having smaller poorly contained dumps all over the world.
The NYTimes magazine [1] ran a piece in 1996 says a 35 square mile landfill, 100 yards deep, will store all US trash until the year 3000. To put that in perspective, that's about 1 tenth of 1 percent of the range land currently available for grazing. I'm sure someone could find a corner in a desert somewhere for such a need if required.
Many people might think something as massive as the ocean is basically unlimited and that there's no way us humans could screw it up.
Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.
I can't understand this perspective at all, but it seems to have been a key philosophy guiding human development for a very long time. Was it just a belief based on convenience?
It's a story as old as humanity. There's many examples of humans exhausting their nearby resources because they thought they were effectively infinite. Whether that's a forest, a food stock, a water source, or something else.
Not every time, or at least the solution doesn't always result in everyone surviving. The Mayan civilization, for instance, is thought to have exhausted their local resources and fallen apart as a result.
Up until the time industrial revolution really started to get going, it was true. If you look at the literature, poetry or philosophy of most any culture before 1880s it’s easy to see an unwavering belief of the invincibility of Nature against mankind. Humans have always been able to alter nature, but their ability to alter Nature with the capital N is a very new thing on a geological time scale.
It's worse than that. It's showing up in rain and snow, and our water supply because most filtration systems don't catch micro/nanoplastics. It's in our bodies.
I think we will eventually find it's also largely responsible for the tremendous drop off in birth rates and reproductive health that the world has been experiencing the last 10+ years and possibly other neurological and "brain" issues that have increased in frequency. Infertility of people in their reproductive prime is at an all-time high. We already know BPA has a lot of these side effects.
Sorry but I can't abide the scientific ignorance being displayed all over this conversation.
(1) The first article you cite "Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs" only announces that some scientists made a technique to discover such particles. The only ones they found were ones they inserted on purpose to verify their technique. That headline leads people strongly to incorrect conclusions like you have made. That's one of the main techniques of fake news.
(2) Fertility rate has nothing to do with how many people can't get pregnant who are trying. It's just a variation on birth rate.
(3) Mother Jones - here cited many times as factual - shows a picture of a bird with a plastic mesh around it. That is not what "toxic" is. Maybe powerful lobbyists got Canadian legislators to pretend that plastic straws are "toxic", but again that flies in the face of scientific fact.
Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.
Ha, your technique worked! It didn't taste like anything - one of those characteristics of non-reactive chemicals. It did get stuck in my throat on the first try, so I got it down with water like a pill. (It was one of those short/round/1-studded pieces.)
>Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.
This also shows scientific ignorance. Some plastics can be somewhat inert (although their manufacturing process maybe embed random trash in them), but microplastics are a whole other beast. The smaller something is, the more likely its physical properties are to differ from its bigger counterpart.
About half of the plastic in oceans is from plastic netting used fishing. And that netting causes the vast majority of ecological damage by entangling marine animals or dragging along ocean beds.
The real problem is excessive fishing and plastic waste from fishing, far more than using plastic for a cup or shopping bag.
> Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.
Is there an estimate that goes along with that number for when 95%+ of all fish stocks will be gone?
Given the extraordinarily fast depletion implied by the 80% figure (the vast majority of which has happened in the past century), it must be very soon. Within 10-20 years there would have to be almost no fish stocks left given the advance of world's population and its collective demand for fish.
> Under the proposed rules, Canada will ban six single-use plastic items, like straws and six-pack rings, create incentives for companies to use recycled plastic, and force plastic producers to pay for recycling
I suspect it won't restrict 3d printing, but could conceivably increase prices for some materials.
I think it's more about anonymous down voting to be very enticing for people who "hate" certain ideologies. Which can go either side, regulation, unionization, I've seen both side comments been downvoted. But on both case, yup, to hell with the nuance.
My car was recently hit while it was parked and the plastic trim under the front bumper started to come off by of course scraping against the road. It's not simple to remove either. I had to jack the car and remove some bolts from under it holding this plastic. I can only imagine how much micro plastics it spread all over the road and then of course washed into the ocean.
Looking forward to reduce plastic in the clinical and research settings. I think it's a great idea to elminate at least 99% of plastic in these environments. It will make patient treatment much more human, research much more transactional and pure, while eliminating pollution in most places.
I thinking banning plastic straws will end up pushing the movement towards reduced plastic usage backwards. At least until there is a competent alternative. Paper straws are not it.
Especially since straws aren’t even a real contributor or issue overall. But it’s not at all difficult for a populist or reactionary to hit a nerve with this kind of thing however well intentioned it is.
In the UK a granny can't buy a few vegetables without being charged a surcharge for the bag that's required; though corporations package food with thousands and thousands of tonnes of excess packaging with seemingly no additional charge.
Where's the justice in this? Why charge the consumer when huge corporations like Asda, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Sainsburys etc are happy to buy tonnes of plastic that's unnecessary and will be thrown away? Carrier bag charges are just posturing in the face of this.
Even as someone who doesn't think highly of this admin or mo'jones, plastics are the crack cocaine of manufacturing, and of all the empty gestures this government has made, this is probably the most useful thing they could do.
It's regressive in the sense that it will cause a hedonic hit to people who buy cheap things for comfort, but the majority of plastics begin and end their lives as disposable garbage. Let's just say when you clean up a park, creek, lake, or a beach, you don't end up with a collection of champagne bottles and caviar tins - it's all fast food bottles and containers.
The next one would be concrete and laws about disposing of contaminated fill, because that's the huge environmental horror afflicting rural areas that is a direct result of a real estate bubble manufactured by their other policies, but it's a start.
The problem with these kinds of things from this particular gov't is that they are spoken about and press releases are issued.... but they never actually happen.
Electoral reform, indigenous reconciliation (or even just clean water for reserves), CO2 reductions, you name it...
Honestly, it's what got them elected. I met lots of people who were going to vote NDP (many of my friends, coworkers) -- or not vote at all (trades people who were working on my house, people I talked to online etc.) -- who got out and voted Liberal because of this issue alone.
It's been a few years now and the world hasn't ended and it doesn't feel like cannabis consumption is any higher really. It was probably good policy to do it. While the NDP (who were ahead of the Liberals in the polls at the beginning of that election and actually in majority territory) have always had legalization as policy, I bet you that Mulcair wouldn't have had the political confidence or buy-in from the provinces to get it through like Trudeau did.
I'm curious what is meant by "plastic" here - it would be a shame if they banned all plastics. Plastic as we know it comes in many varieties, depending on the use case. In general I think it refers to polyethylene. [1]
However, it is also possible to produce plastics from hemp, which is vastly superior on many dimensions compared to what is common today. Hemp was just legalized in many US states in 2018 after having been banned in the 30s due to lobbying pressure from cotton manufacturers. Moreover, there are recyclable (and I assume less toxic) plastics produced from corn, which you might see in cups at forward-thinking shops. These plastics biodegrade significantly faster than petroleum-based alternatives.
So hopefully any legislation is specific to plastics which are harmful.
There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article.
They claim plastic recycling doesn't work. It's true that most plastic isn't recycled, but that's because of lackluster government involvement, not some technological barrier.
British Columbia has the most sophisticated recycling equipment in North America. Two plants there first use lasers to identify different types of plastic (PP, HDPE, PET, etc) in the incoming stream and then use air blasts to categorize it.
These streams are then separated by color. The material then goes to a plastics reclamation facility where the material is shredded, washed, dried, melted and forced through a filter, and turned to pellet.
The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in BC are recycled. Why isn't this done elsewhere? It's because BC has a tax on plastic packaging, and this tax money is then used to subsidize the loss from converting recyclables into new plastic pellet (the cost is higher than the revenue). And other governments don't want to do it, partly due to lobbying from plastics packaging manufacturers.
Plastic recycling does work when society wants it to. But instead we turn to paper. Paper produces double the CO2 emissions of plastic, and it requires vastly more energy: a European study showed that switching to paper in Europe would consume 57% more energy and 61% more greenhouse gases from packaging than are produced today. In a world where human existence is threatened most likely from runaway climate change, this seems like a bad idea.
And while we're so focused on transitioning plastic packaging to paper, we ignore the real problem with plastic in the oceans: plastic netting dumped from illegal fishing. Plastic netting wraps around animals and drowns or suffocates them. It can also drag along a seabed, killing the seabed life.
But this is considered a difficult problem to solve (international waters, policing is difficult, etc) so we ignore it.
The idea policy would be:
1. Tax plastic packaging. Use the tax money to pay for recycling that works, which has been proven to work.
2. Develop international treaties and enforcement mechanisms to prevent illegal fishing and find ways to reduce fish consumption.
3. Implement carbon taxes that reflect the cost to human survival imposed by any kind of packaging, or other activity, in accordance with the degree of GHG emission.
74% is still a far cry from a solved problem - what do they do with the quarter that can't be recycled?
Aluminium is actually 100% recyclable with some countries approaching 98%.
Plastic has symbols that tell you what kind of plastic a given piece of packaging is made of, and the consumers need to figure out which kind are recyclable in their particular state or local area. Then some plastics are thermosetting and therefore unrecyclable - they have to be broken down through pyrolysis or similar.
So while it's true that plastic recycling is possible, you have to:
1) sort out the random mish-mash that is the recycling system which vary by local area and are incomprehensible to consumers for the purposes of sorting.
2) Increase that 74% number to something in high-90's. Probably forbid unrecyclable plastics for single-use consumer goods and packaging, and somehow constrain the wild variety of plastics that enter the waste stream to a few known varieties that can be sorted
3) forbid items that shed microplastics like there is no tomorrow. This would include clothing made out of nylon? This seems very unpopular.
We should absolutely push for even higher rates of recycling. High 90s would be fantastic.
But even 74% is already much higher than we get with aluminum cans. You say aluminum cans are "100% recyclable", as if they are 100% recycled, but that's a sleight of hand. PET, PP, PE is also "100% recyclable" but the issue here is what actually gets recycled. For aluminum, the actual recycle rates are less than 50% in the US.
Aluminum is an interesting example because it is intensely GHG emitting. Because of how energy intensive smelting is, an aluminum can produces five times the GHG of plastic, and more than double paper. If you wanted to choose the worst technology possible (with respect to the climate) to make containers from, aluminum is king.
It appears to be 82% in UK and over 90% in brazil. But also Aluminium is not toxic and does not disintegrate into microscopic particles that accumulate in your organs. Unlike plastic, it can be recycled perfectly and produce a product as good as the original, so long as people are bothered to drop it into the bin. Most types of plastic are only 'downcycled' -> bottles become carpets, and carpets become garbage.
I think CO2 is a red herring when it comes to packaging, most of world GHG emissions are not from packaging production - it's energy, transport, heating, etc. If tomorrow all packaging had zero CO2 emission, we would have made no real difference.
"There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article"?
> The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in Canada are recycled
"Canadians dispose of about 3.3M tonnes of plastic each year [...] almost 50% of which is packaging. Well over 75% currently goes to landfills, a small proportion is incinerated and about 1% ends up directly in the environment. Only 9% — or 305,000 tonnes — is recycled, the 2019 study found." [1]
Seems rather misleading to focus on one region's moderate success with beverage containers when there have been such massive failures with larger issues, no? It's not like the problem was even unforeseeable [2].
The 74% recovery rate was in reference to BC only, not all of Canada - I updated my comment which mistakenly referred to all of CA for that recovery rate.
The reason to focus on BC is because they are the only province to have passed EPR that allowed these facilities to be built. The point is that EPR, taxing plastic packaging, and investing in recycling works, and BC versus the rest of Canada is the prime example of that.
Also, the study from the National Observer cited national data from 2016, which was only two years after BC passed the EPR bill. So it's old data and mostly covered provinces with no EPR policies.
As for BC, yes, beverage containers are the highest rate at 74%. But all rigid plastic still achieved a total recovery rate of over 55% in 2019, and the rates are increasing.
Should it be higher? Absolutely! And it's getting higher. But I'm mystified by so-called environmentalists who look at this success and cognitive-dissonance themselves into emitting more carbon and accelerating climate catastrophe because "plastic is bad", instead of asking how we can push for legislation to replicate BC's success everywhere.
> so-called environmentalists who look at this success and cognitive-dissonance themselves into emitting more carbon and accelerating climate catastrophe because "plastic is bad"
I don't understand what this means or whom or what you're talking about, but regarding your general sentiment:
What you're doing is making some very generous extrapolations that are rather dubious and going to need a lot of evidence to make a compelling case for. Examples include:
- That all plastics are fundamentally recyclable with success comparable to some subset of them if only we care to invest more in it.
- That the rates will increase to be much higher than they are. (Because frankly I do not find it plausible that even 55% recycling globally across all plastics is going to do anything but stretch the deadline for a real solution a little bit.)
- That other countries that are still developing won't end up increasing global wastes N-fold, which would easily eat through any moderate 50% or 70% rate or whatever moderate amount you hypothetically manage to achieve. (And it's not even really a "budget" to begin with, given this stuff lingers around.)
- That if only environmentalists cared to spend time lobbying legislators, you'd see legislators across the world react the same way as they appear to have in BC, and on a short time scale. (i.e., you're basically ignoring differing politics, economics, and competing interests.)
By all means, we should make progress on every front we can. But we also don't want to let that distract us or get deluded by half-baked solutions with questionable scalability (and whether it's physical vs. economic vs. political barriers doesn't really matter here). Frankly I cannot fault anyone for believing we do not have the luxury to keep betting the future of the planet on an asymptotic solution. We need drastic global changes fast, and the average person has only so much bandwidth to spare. Giving people a false sense of optimism about recycling can (and has) made everyone too comfortable with plastic consumption, which has been vividly damaging.
We should greatly reduce fishing. This would also help human reduce trafficking, since international fishing boats are often run with slave labor.
As for taxing the containers: I think a market based approach would be better. Regardless of what you use in your packaging, you have to pay for it “cradle to grave”. Companies could use whatever packaging they prefer, on the condition that they recapture 100% of the waste, and are carbon / landfill neutral.
Can that be an excuse to stop any industry? Might as well stop selling phones, books, shoes, clothes and... really any industry. I'm sure they can all be traced back to "slave labor" somewhere.
It’s a bigger issue with fishing than other industries. The slave boats stay in international waters indefinitely, and they hand the fish off to other boats to bring it into port.
Some clothing is sewn in route in international waters, but I get the impression it’s less feasible to transfer the contents of container vessels in open water. Also, it’s harder to conceal the slave labor on those boats: You’d need to make the paperwork match on both sides of the journey if you left with a “skeleton crew” and a load of textiles, and arrived with products ready to sell. There’s no source port for the fish, so that problem becomes easier. You just need to conceal one way shipments of supplies into the ocean.
Clothing manufacturing is also an abusive industry, but I get the impression that fishing wins out in terms of absolute number of literal slaves (not “slaves”, as you put it).
Re: plastic netting, couldn't we also try encouraging the use of other materials for making fishnets? I wonder if that would be an easier target than shifting consumer behavior and illegal activity
I'm not all that concerned with plastic recycling rates; I'm more worried about how much gets into the environment. Bringing recycling into the debate feels like misdirection, and I'm not sure why.
I believe plastic may be human civilizations "Great Filter" - I'm only half-joking. In less than a century, we managed to put plastic everywhere on the planet, and microplastics everywhere inside our food sources and our bodies, including in placenta(!). Our reach exceeds our grasp, we do not yet know what dangers microplastics pose, and we do not have the technology to remediate it. Our reach exceeds our grasp.
I do hope plastics end up more or less benign, but there is a very real possibility that humanities gravestone will read "Here lies human beings. They managed to make their way into low orbit and their only moon, but were felled by their discovery of synthetic polymers"
It’s also possible once it saturates the ocean enough, it’ll get ingested by plankton which won’t survive much of it and then it’s game over for most life
"toxic"? My BS detector is off the scale on that one. Plastics are used precisely because they are inert and nonreactive. If you burn them you can definitely create toxins, but then why not declare wood toxic too.
Chemically pure hydrocarbon polymers may be inert and generally nonreactive, however pure polymers like nylon or polyester are virtually useless.
Plastics only become useful when they're mixed with a vast array of plasticizers, conditioners, chain extenders and other industrial chemicals.
And those chemicals absolutely leach out of the materials we laypeople refer to as 'plastics', even before you consider environmental factors that cause the materials to decay.
I'm not an expert or a chemist, but I have the impression that the leaching of chemicals from plastics should generally be in proportion to how soft and flexible they are. The first thing that comes to mind as full of "squishy" plastics is a typical automobile today, hence the "new car smell". People are also conditioned to think that more soft plastics means higher quality.
But clothes and other things that don't smell and aren't squeezable would seem on the face of it to be unlikely hazards. We've got built in chemoreceptors, so why be paranoid as though we didn't?
Are you aware of or concerned about PVC piping widely used for plumbing? Do you know of any practical plans for eliminating it?
Tax the plastic, and let the market sort out the restrictions.
Not only does it result in the most efficient way to "regulate", it results in tax revenue for the government, so they don't need to tax things like jobs.
On top of taxing plastic, we should also create a 'new' plastic quota.
Petro-chemical industry makes profit only on new plastic not recycled plastic. They will forever fight this transition away from plastic.
If you introduze a plastic 'from oil' quota, the Nestlé's and Unilever's of the world would have to bid for a share of new plastic in a "new plastic market", making plastic from oil more expensive.
This would incentivize manufacturers to either create plastic return deposit schemes, or to recycle more plastic, or just straight move to glass/aluminium/paper.
Edit: the point of this is that it would desincentivize manufacturers away from plastic while increasing the "per tonne" profit of petro-chemicals (who would be manufacturing a lot less).
This has always been the solution, but politically untenable due to actually causing people to sacrifice.
Want less carbon emissions? Tax the source of carbon emissions, I.e. fossil fuels. How much? Keep raising the tax until the consumption levels go down sufficiently.
Same with plastic (although above solution would also prob solve plastics since they come from fossil fuels too).
Bottom line, has and always been, we can’t afford to have this many people living this luxurious of a life (quarter acre lots, single family detached house with 2+ cars, constant AC, $50/hour commercial flights, $0.50 per mile travel costs by car, dialysis for 80+ year olds, etc). Assuming the goal is to leave the environment in the same condition for future generations.
Recycling and reusing is far too little, reduce has been the only solution for a long time.
Things taste better from a glass bottle. Which is how most drinks would be sold. The only downside was broken glass everywhere. Not uncommon for kids getting serious cuts just playing in the neighbourhood couple times a year. Sometimes main arteries, and death was a possibility.
YES! No to neutralize the opposition from the petrochemical industries, plastic, companies like coke which literally say " as long as there is recycling, pepper disposal of plastic is on the customers". Companies like that are rich by offloading the production cost in the environment which people have to pay
this is good as a way around the setback that occurred in the last year. Far as I can see on the ground, the whole environmental movement, climate change, plastics, oceans etc, was steadily ramping up more and more... Greta etc.... everyone using reusable grocery bags was a highly visible thing and then the pandemic/covid hit and all of a sudden we're all using plastic bags by the ton again and people are littering masks all over the city etc. No more reusable shopping bags, a ton more waste because everyone is at home, etc etc. Big set back.
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