What bugs me most is the use of long-living plastics in fast moving consumer goods.
I have to buy 12g of plastics to get 80g of Prosciutto.
From packaging to EOL its lifespan is max. 60 days, most of the time more like 20 days I suspect.
Why does it need to be in a container that degrades in 300+ years?
> Why does it need to be in a container that degrades in 300+ years?
Because there's no other cost-effective material we've invented that keeps the prosciutto airtight (so it doesn't dry out in hours), won't puncture/rip easily, holds up to shipping+stacking, and is transparent (to examine for fat percentage, slice thickness, etc. -- always essential for meats and veggies).
Can you provide a material that does all that but starts degrading after 60 days? If you can, you stand to make a lot of $$$.
Obviously, the main alternative is having someone slice it at the deli counter for you, but that means you could only ever buy prosciutto at places with a staffed deli counter, including the 15-minute wait for the deli counter if you're going grocery shopping at the end of a regular workday...
There are bio-plastics(usually made from corn) that degrade fairly fast, the problem is they cost less than a percent of a cent more. This is really a thing where government subsidies that are forward thinking about the environment could help.
Citation please? I have dealt with packaging products for 35 years now and it’s expensive. In my experience anything close to what the parent poster described would result in packaging costs an integer multiple price increase per unit if biodegradable. Storage requirements would also increase because 60 days is not a long enough shelf lifetime for prosciutto or anything similar
There was a piece in The Economist a couple of weeks ago about how some scientists made disposable coffee cups out of bagasse (wasteproduct of sugar production) which were basically as good as plastic on all the metrics GP mentioned but just fractionally more expensive. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/14/...
Come on, be serious. These kinds of science-y puff pieces come out every day, on all kinds of topics (I can't count the number of times claims around cancer cures, fusion reactors, new battery technology that's 1000x better, etc. are made). This is one engineering group making very preliminary case (that they may have embellished for the media attention - wouldn't the first time - see: recent "life on Venus claims"). It takes time and lots of effort to figure out if this new material can satisfy all the necessary constraints in order to scale to the market.
Are bio-plastics really a big improvement though? Growing corn burns a lot of fossil fuels. I think there's a case to be made that plastic that ends up in a landfill after few carbon emissions is better for the environment than plastic that degrades after lots of carbon emissions. Not saying that's definitely the case, just that I'm not sure it's so clear.
Head-scratching a bit there. Corn absorbs CO2 while growing right ?
From https://www.agweb.com/article/corns-carbon-cowboy-busts-outs...
...At 200 bu. per acre, every acre of corn absorbs 8 tons of carbon dioxide. In 2012, U.S. farmers grew almost 100 million acres of corn and absorbed 800 million tons of carbon dioxide...
Tractors, combines, trucks - there's a lot of heavy equipment that gets used to grow corn, and then there's emissions related to both producing and applying fertilizers.
I believe that pulling oil out of the ground is way less carbon intensive than growing the necessary amount of corn, and I believe plastic is made from some tiny fraction of the petroleum that isn't used as fuel, so the petroleum would be extracted anyway, but the corn would not be grown anyway. I'm assuming the actual production of the good itself is similar in either case.
There is also a land cost. I'd be surprised if we determined that plastic is better than bio-plastic, but until we are making bio-plastic with a low land footprint land will continue to be a factor here.
I think the issue isn't emissions in that case but a "amount of land space necessary for landfills for traditional plastic" vs. "amount of land space necessary for plant growth for bioplastic."
If the bioplastic growth land takes up more space by a certain amount than is used to dispose of regular plastic, that's presents its own set of issues.
In some ways, yes, and in others, definitely not. I think we'll get there: I also think some plastics are made using byproducts of fuel (gas/diesel) production, and as long as that's the case, we should probably use and recycle that (or find something else to do with it). Kind of like using every part of the animal, except with oil.
Does it need to be a big deal to wait a few minutes at the deli counter?
In our rush to maximize everything for efficiency we are causing numerous small problems that are adding up, a tragedy of the commons and loss of our humanity. Our culture seems to value efficiency above too much else.
we are causing numerous small problems that are adding up
Those numerous 15 minutes waiting in a deli line and waiting in a bakery line and waiting in a butchers line add up too. We value efficiency because we need it and you’ll learn the value of time efficiency once you have kids that need to be fed every day and a 9-5 job with a commute.
How did we solve this before? We deprived half the population of their right to work for a wage and had them run around doing all this waiting and cooking. That’s over now and the rest of our lives need to be more efficient.
> We deprived half the population of their right to work for a wage and had them run around doing all this waiting and cooking.
Here's the funny thing though. Your perspective changes when you have kids.
As a personal anecdote, we just had our first baby 3 months ago. My wife had spent the last 3 years getting her masters degree and getting her teaching certificate. She pushed hard. It was important to her. She got the email that her certification came through the day after the birth. She didn't care. All she want's to do right now is take care of her baby. That will likely change, and she'll probably work part time sometime in the future. But saying we've deprived half the population of their right to work is missing another perspective. The joy and privilege of raising a family. Yes, the efficiencies are wonderful, and for my wife (and for me), that means more time with our family.
Who is being deprived now? I would hate to see my daughter deprived of her time with Mom so Mom could sit in an office all day. And I feel like our society is suffering because kids aren't being raised by their parents anymore.
> She pushed hard. It was important to her. She got the email that her certification came through the day after the birth. She didn't care. All she want's to do right now is take care of her baby.
I had a similar discussion with my brother the other day. After multiple miscarriages, they're finally pregnant, 17 weeks in and healthy.
He worked from the time he was a teenager joining military reserves, degree in criminology and kinesiology, and finally a provincial constable around 6+ years in to get to where he is.
An hour after their latest ultrasound, his only words were: work sucks.
The time with the father is also important. Did you consider to take a one year sabbatical to be with your daughter instead of sitting in an office all day?
I would if I could. I'd retire and be full-time Dad (among other things) if I didn't have all these dang bills to pay ;-) I did consider a 12-week sabbatical, but couldn't afford it since we just bought a house. I do plan on prioritizing daddy-daughter time though, because it's important to me. When I mentioned the efficiencies meaning more time for family, that was including myself.
I'm very privileged to have gotten 12 months paternity leave, even in Sweden that is a bit unusual but not unheard of. I had 7 months at 70% pay financed from the goverment, so I had to pay a lot and it was a bit risky. In the end my girl got a better job because of the time I spent with my daughter, and I had a wonderfull time.
So for me personally getting those 12 weeks alone with the child would be worth every penny, and can be very liberating for your wife, but the first two months were hard on me. Good luck, what ever you decide.
Not because of people forcing other people to not do things. Because most of the things were super dangerous, and there wasn't enough value sloshing around to have lots of nice time-flexible desk jobs.
There's nothing romantic or natural or virtuous about wasting time waiting in line and visiting multiple shops and having less items available.
It's just boredom and tedium.
It's a good thing when we're able to free up time from mundane tasks so we do things that are rewarding to our soul -- whether it's spending more time with your family, playing sports with friends, going to the theater, reading a good book, whatever it is.
There's also nothing virtuous or efficient about the typical modern middle-class American lifestyle, double the house size of fifty years ago, three cars, college as status symbol, etc.
I think most people would say that all this new efficiency is crushing peoples souls. Isn't everyone talking about the loneliness of the modern age, the scary amount of people who are depressed at any time, hiding with drugs, the loss of clubs and other social institutions?
I tend to think that we've been selling our soul for efficiency. We'd have so much free time if we we didn't need to consume so much.
Absolutely none of that has to do with how efficient your grocery shopping is.
What you choose to spend your extra time on is your choice. But that's the point -- it should be your choice to be able to spend it on hanging out with friends, rather than standing in long lines waiting to buy food.
If you want to spend in on working extra hours to buy a third car, I mean that's your choice too I guess. But it's not like wasting your life waiting in line is any better.
I'll try to clarify/refine where I'm coming from: Systemically we as a culture care more about our quick cheese than we do about the hundred of years of trash. Ideally the price of the fancy cheese and everything else should include the cost of disposal, and right now it doesn't, and that's not right.
Would you agree?
I do believe that our culture is too focused on economic efficiency, and ignoring numerous consequences of that. That might be a separate discussion?
Quality packaging reduces spoilage, and thus reduces waste. A stack of slices wrapped up by a deli will spoil long before individually sealed slices.
Longer shelf life enables efficient shipping and shopping, which reduces trips taken. This counts towards fuel use, road wear, and vehicle wear.
Counting both the waste and the product that gets used, the total cost is a rough approximation of environmental impact. The less you spend, the lower your impact.
I got three cars so I could be more efficient. Use the right size for the job.
For minor little trips around town, I use the Fiat 500L. It has 5 seats in 2 rows.
For high speed, or a bit more stuff, I use the Subaru Ascent. It has 8 seats in 3 rows.
For traveling with the whole family, I use the Ford E-350 extended-length passenger van. It has 15 seats in 5 rows.
Before I bought the smaller cars, I had to drive the van everywhere. It's a beast, 3 tons empty or 5 tons full. I think I get about 12 MPG, which is efficient per-person when I'm bringing a dozen kids. As a commuter car, the van is horrible.
So efficient = working 12 hrs/day and being able to afford everything ready-made/shipped for/to you (frozen and flavorless, on occasion past expiration date).
Even if you have an exciting/fulfilling job (a relative rarity) it gets old very quickly after a few years because most people need some variety in their lives.
Every time I vacation in southern Europe, I love going to markets, picking fruit/vegetables, having prosciutto cut for me. I think the time you claim it takes exagerrated - usually there are 1-2 people in line.
People dream to retire and tend to their garden (very "inefficient"), cooking their meals from scratch everyday, etc.
Lots of cooking shows and shows like "Escape to the country" (BBC) seem to prove my point.
Most people work 8 hrs/day, not 12. If you go to your local supermarket, you'll see tons of people shopping for fresh produce and meat, not frozen or flavorless or expired (???).
You're inventing a total straw man. Yes some people work 12 hour days and eat frozen food but it's a small minority.
If spending lots of time at markets is what you enjoy, that do that. That's what farmer's markets in the US are for. But lots of people prefer to spend their free time doing other things they enjoy. Farmer's markets can get old very quickly too. Sometimes people want to spend just 5 minutes grabbing some ingredients and checking out to make a quick dinner, not 30 minutes visiting different stalls, waiting for the three people ahead of you at each one, and then haggling over prices.
Office hours: 9-6pm -> 9 hours (yes, includes "lunch" where people get a sandwich and eat it at the desk)
Note that many people work longer, till 7pm or 8pm (startups, etc). Many people need 2 jobs to pay the bills.
Average commute time: 45 mins (you can google it) x 2
E-mail checking/responding at home after the kids go to bed: 1 hr
Total: 11.5 hrs easily (or more if you want to climb the corporate ladder)
So market-browsing/cooking is not your thing - that's fine. But let me just note that we invented all these life "efficiencies" - and are less and less happy (loneliness, drugs, etc).
So how about we add the cost of proper disposal to that cheese? It is inefficient and unfair to pass the cost of someone's cheese to everyone else now and for three hundred years. Then if you have the money you don't have to wait in line. Does that sound fair?
We do pay for proper disposal - Often through taxes that go towards waste disposal, but some folks pay direct. The cheese plant pays for this sort of thing too. It simply isn't entirely in the cost of the cheese itself.
If things aren't getting properly handled, unfortunately that is a political issue with legal solutions.
Having someone slice the cheese at a counter comes with its own risks: Have they cleaned properly? Are they treated fairly? Is the price going to go up because now places need a staffed deli, sinks, and equipment? Will it be just deli products or is everything in the grocery store going to be more expensive to pay for this extra stuff? Heck, what sort of impact is all of this stuff going to have on the environment?
I'll add that no matter what, we all are paying for things that we, personally, don't do, haven't consumed, or disagree with. It is part of living in a society. If you buy a pair of pants, you are covering the cost of theft and loss. If you go to the doctor, you are paying for other people's care in addition to your own (heck, that's what health insurance is). You may or may not feel you get much back for your tax money, which is really dependent on where you live in the world.
Whether it's prosciutto or cheese, of course. It's a common view among economists that externalities, including environmental ones, ought to be factored into costs. It's an unfair subsidy, exactly as you describe, when they're not.
Then or now? Running around and being efficient after spending your days working away in an office might not feel like an upgrade to someone who had the other option.
Is this a catch-22 though? Would it be a less busy world if we the price of cheese packaging included the externalities of disposal?
Some people would choose the cheaper of more time consuming alternative, and what is wrong with that? Do we have to have everything possible asap, damn the consequences?
But what is the goal of all these new efficiencies?
Many of the efficiencies the modern age brought us have been in service of "more" - more house, more car, more entertainment, more clothes, more disposable technology, more status symbols, etc. We totally live in a consumer society, our biggest companies revolve around advertising. The economy would fall apart if people stopped buying stuff they don't need.
Instead of all that we could have chosen the best modernity had to offer and only worked twenty hours a week. That would have been way more efficient than what we have now.
But no, everyone went for the prosciutto. The advertisers won.
You don't need to be waiting in line but the meats also don't need to be all precut and stored before they get to the store. Cut some off in the morning and put it in simpler packaging, and if that runs out, Cut a bit more
Yes. Deli counter people are notorious for interrupting you while you have your nose buried in your phone. And then you have to actually talk to them. It's a big deal.
>Our culture seems to value efficiency above too much else.
Capitalism tells us that if we're not making money, we're worthless as humans. It's not about hard work or efficiency, just look at the lack of respect for work that doesn't make money (e.g. stay-at-home parents).
No it doesn't it says that the value of living in a capitalist society should be reciprocated with value, i.e. individuals providing value to society, as societal value is nothing more than the aggregation of individual contributions. I'm not saying this is entirely good/correct, but I am saying you misstate the message.
> just look at the lack of respect for work that doesn't make money
This conflates individual value with societal/communal. But why should anyone give a dam about stuff that doesn't benefit them? To be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't give a damn, I saying why couldn't they i.e. why should they be forced if they choose not to.
There's also a nuance to value: Capitalism determines value on the basis on what money people are willing to spend. Firstly, if people go out of there way to ensure money is not involved with something, don't be surprised if it's value is miscalculated by a capitalist system: this is like not winning a competition you never entered. That said, the economic impact of packaging is undervalued because no one is attaching an accurate debt/penalty to it, which is arguably the real problem here.
Secondly, there is a notion that things of value create "market demand", so if little money is offered for something, then market doesn't want it, and people supplying it are refusing to offer what society actually wants. I think this makes sense: people have children even though parental benefits might be low suggesting they aren't really doing it for society, though I've discussed this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24423077
TLDR: Capitalism only deals with societal value; so it only determines your value (of actions, say) on the basis of value to society. People are free to value things outside that system; If you think "people don't care about X" because "people don't provide money for X" then it is you declaring the value of something to be its dollar amount.
> To be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't give a damn, I saying why couldn't they i.e. why should they be forced if they choose not to.
In a lot of these cases it's probably true that there's no direct, measurable, benefit. One has to look past the direct benefit to the indirect benefit to understand why we would be forced to do something that has no direct benefit to ourselves.
For example, a property tax increase to pay for improved schools doesn't have any apparent benefit if you're a single adult with no children in school. In fact the whole education system has no measurable benefit to you if you're an adult. It seems like a waste of money. So we can say it has no first-order benefit.
But suppose that the increased funding would help pay for things like civics education. There's a second-order or third-order benefit to paying those taxes. By ensuring other peoples' children are educated in how our Democratic institutions work, they are better able to navigate those institutions, and they will make more informed decisions about their elected officials because of this. If you care about maintaining and improving those institutions then that tax increase is very worthwhile even if you have no kids. But it has no measurable economic benefit.
I think our Capitalist system has gone insane because it no longer acknowledges those benefits that have no tangible monetary value. It also encourages us to think in terms of money above all else. We've gone so far into the weeds with Scientific Management that if we can't measure the direct monetary benefit it doesn't exist. And that's not true.
Being unable to measure something simply means we can't quantify the benefit. It doesn't mean it has no benefit. And that's at the heart of a lot of economic arguments against tax increases. They're arguing that being unable to quantify the benefit implies the benefit doesn't exist. And that's patently untrue in a lot of cases.
> But suppose that the increased funding would help pay for things like civics education
That why can't I just opt for that, the civics funding?
I'm not saying that only things with measurable economic benefit should be funded,
I'm saying only things with measurable economic benefit OR that people want to pay for should be funded.
One or the other, or both. But if neither condition is met, you shouldn't get funded.
and if your opinion is that there is a non-tangible benefit, you need to convince people of that. Our Capitalist system does acknowledge benefits that have no tangible monetary value - by allowing people to freely spend money on what they care about.
>Our Capitalist system does acknowledge benefits that have no tangible monetary value - by allowing people to freely spend money on what they care about.
So the most "successful" society under this reasoning is one where every parent works and childcare is done by employees instead of parents. There's no economic benefit to raising a young child, so the only other option under your axioms is "people want to pay for it".
I'm not sure how this follows from what I said which only concerns people being forced to pay for childcare for other peoples children, but if a parent cannot afford to stay at home at look after their own kids then what is the alternative? I'm also not assuming "childcare done by employees" is necessarily worse than from their parents, at least employees could be regulated.
If the only reason we're choking our planet with plastic is so we don't have to wait at the deli counter might I suggest we just start placing orders to the deli counter a few hours before we arrive?
IMHO, material transparency is the only difficult to meet requirement. Paper works fine to wrap most cold cuts and it's already used extensively in packaging for fruits and vegetables.
People are already willing to pay premium for organic and other hard to inspect/certify labels; it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that people would be ok buying paper-wrapped prosciutto that has some similar stamp of quality.
Paper also works fine if you're ordering your prosciutto at the deli counter.
But even waxed paper isn't going to prevent the prosciutto from drying out for more than a day or two. The whole point of the plastic that prosciutto is often sold in is to keep it good for months, since it's usually a low-volume item that may sit on the shelf for a couple weeks or more.
Personally I find paper wrapped items from the local deli fine, but I'd be pretty skeptical of any food products shipped only in paper -- too easy to contaminate.
Couldn't we just augment the existing plastic with seeds/fungi is some way? That way, after some time in the trash, the fungi actually develops a colony which eats the packaging?
>Can you provide a material that does all that but starts degrading after 60 days?
What's the motivation (market pressure) to develop such a thing? Plastic is cheap, so without other external pressure, there's no reason for any company to fund the development of something new. This is why pollution and other society-scale problems need a society-scale solution (government regulation).
> What's the motivation (market pressure) to develop such a thing?
That’s a good point actually. Up until now it was “impossible” to make a vaccine in less than 7-10 years. The epidemic happened and we were able to make one in less than a year. But there was a fuckton of money to be made in it so we found a way.
Honestly, it's called a glass jar. Folks should eat fresh local meats and produce and make their own preserves. Less reliance on mass-produced products and support local farmers/producers. Back before the garbagization-of-food you'd go to the butcher and get high quality meats. You'd go to the market to get produce. And, you'd make your own preserves for the winter WITHOUT PLASTIC. Simple, and in fact they taste much better if seasoned well!
What will actually happen is they'll make the switch to biodegradable plastics. Too few will want to give up the convenience of ready-made packaged foods. It could also require more travel to reach small distributors who don't use plastic, which wastes CO2 and time.
The alternative would be more feasible if we had better-designed, walkable cities. But in North America places are built staggered, public transpo sucks.
Yeah, it's unfortunate really. All I can say is, as a collective people are really lazy and stupid. Even smart people are stupid because they think adding an _unnatural_ amount of mushrooms to the world will solve the problem. Like, hello people, adding _a bunch_ of something to the _bunch_ of something else is not a solution. By bunch I mean _trillions of tons_. People just value money more than anything and it will be our undoing.
> Obviously, the main alternative is having someone slice it at the deli counter for you, but that means you could only ever buy prosciutto at places with a staffed deli counter, including the 15-minute wait for the deli counter if you're going grocery shopping at the end of a regular workday...
This and a million other small inconveniences hardly seem too great a price to pay to avoid filling the planet's air and water (and by consequence our bodies) with plastic waste
I think this is overblown. The earth is already ‘full’ of oil and gas and minerals and lots of toxic things. We are just transforming one type of substance into another - more useful to us - type of substance.
The issue is when the waste gets in to places where it wreaks havoc, like especially waterways.
Currently, afaik, this problem is primarily driven by a few countries in Asia, so I think the effort that would have the most impact is figuring out how to convince those particular Asian countries to stop throwing plastic in to rivers.
And anyone else who gets it in their head to throw plastic in to rivers.
As long as waste is contained properly it doesn’t seem to make so much of a net change in the earth.
> Currently, afaik, this problem is primarily driven by Asia, so I think the effort that would have the most impact is figuring out how to convince Asian countries to stop throwing plastic in to rivers.
The west could start by not exporting a huge portion of its plastic waste to said Asian countries.
> I think this is overblown. The earth is already 'full' of... toxic things.
The earth was certainly not "full" of macro-, micro-, and nano-plastics 50 years ago.
Americans ingest and inhale tens to hundreds of thousands of microplastic particles per year[0]. Microplastics likely impair cognition in hermit crabs[1]. Nanoplastics accumulate in plants[2]. It's not just waterways.
Nobody really understands how this might affect human health. We're all participants in a planet-sized experiment to find out.
> The west could start by not exporting a huge portion of its plastic waste to said Asian countries.
That's not how it works. Worst-case scenario that winds up in landfills instead of being recycled.
The problem in Asia is 100% domestic, with citizens and households and apartment buildings dumping their local plastic trash on the side of the road, burning it in backyards, dumping it in the river.
> That's not how it works. Worst-case scenario that winds up in landfills instead of being recycled.
It's a problem even if it ends up in landfills. Plastics can leach chemicals into groundwater. My point is that the "Asian countries are responsible for most of the world's pollution" narrative is simplistic and unhelpful. Most of the plastic in the oceans is indeed from Asian countries. But plastic concentrations are 4-20x higher on land than in the oceans. The United States has the highest tapwater contamination rate in the world (94%).
> The problem in Asia is 100% domestic, with citizens and households and apartment buildings dumping their local plastic trash on the side of the road, burning it in backyards, dumping it in the river.
You're of course correct to point out that this happens, but calling the problem 100% domestic is disingenuous.
The ham itself will protect it, wrapped in Aluminum foil or even a hemp bag for shipping. The packaging is simply an artifact of people not wanting to buy a whole ham and wanting it presliced, which is perhaps an artifact of the fact that most people in the US will heat the majority of their meals by themselves and do not like to prepare meals. Sad.
Maybe you don't know what prosciutto is...? It's not just ham.
Buying an entire prosciutto costs hundreds of dollars, obviously people don't want to buy a whole one.
It's also usually not heated, by the way. This has zero to do with not liking to prepare meals... most people who buy sliced prosciutto are doing it as part of the meal they're preparing. We're not talking about hot pockets or frozen lasagna here.
Even when I ate meat, I wouldn't buy a whole ham. What the heck am I going to do with a whole ham?? I literally do not have the freezer space for this. I've never had children, and have only been in a house with one other human.
That's a lot of food waste. Heck, I sometimes lament that I can't buy smaller amounts of spinach because I hate seeing half the bag go to waste.And I'll add that this has nothing to do with cooking or not cooking: I like to cook, and do so most days.
That packaging keeps food waste down because it breaks things into smaller portions - not to mention that many food places seal them in ways to make them last longer (example being adding a mix of gasses to help it not oxidize).
This drives me crazy as well. Even sillier is that at my local supermarket where I can either buy regular tomatoes in bulk and take them home in a paper bag that the store provides or just in my reusable bag or I can buy the biologic organic tomatoes that are packaged by 6 in a little cardboard tray and wrapped in plastic.
When manufacturer was asked about this, they did try to sell organic tomatoes in bulk. But these tomatoes are too soft and usual bulk handling by customers resulted in too much waste.
If you actually want to optimize calories per unit land, you should be considering neither organic nor non-organic tomatoes, as both produce significantly fewer calories per unit land than crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans.
Organic is a buzzword that doesn't mean anything useful. They can't use some chemicals so they substitute others which are often more harmful. Or they destroy the soil because they can't replace the nutrients that they are taking out.
Classic example I saw was Chamomile farming in Egypt. Traditionally done along the Nile. 'Sustainable' in terms of family owned farms for literal millennia, community works projects of maintaining the nile flooding irrigation, etc. Of course there are issues, but the families live close to their fields, kids go to school, they make their own business decisions, don't want to deplete their soil, and there are social frameworks in place for solving collective problems. BUT! Doesn't work for organic: if a neighbor 3 fields up uses pesticides, and a tiny amount blows over onto your field, your crop isn't organic.
No problem! We found an aquifer (fossil, non-renewable) in the middle of the desert, we'll pump up the water and irrigate the ground out there where we're far away from pesky neighbors. Of course this is a big operation, so we need big investment, and thus a big company. Also we need workers, since nobody lives out there. We'll bus them in. They'll need a place to stay, so we'll put them in camps.
After my evening yoga I like to have some warm chamomile tea to wind down before bed. I like this one because it's organic and has a haiku on the inside about how we should take care of the planet.
I suspect the picture does vary somewhat around the world, but in the UK there are eight government approved organisations which are allowed to certify for organic labelling [1] and the EU has something similar[2]. Because the organic logo adds financial value to products, there is a significant interest in protecting its usage. You may disagree with the content of the legislation, but it does mean something.
In any global industry there are going to be outliers and people breaking the rules, but suggesting that organic farming destroys soil and uses more harmful chemicals than non-organic farming as a general rule sounds very much like FUD.
I think the complaint is meant to be "organic doesn't mean anything".
I read GP as saying that while an organic product might be produced responsibly, as your family's farms do, it could also be factory-farmed using pesticides worse than Roundup.
If that is true, then the word "organic" is not meaningful for consumers who want to support sustainable, low-impact farming.
There is certification and regulation required and a fair amount of promises to become USDA organic or even use organic on the label of a food legally in the U.S. So if they were using pesticides they would be engaging in fraud. There is large scale organic farming that is probably not sustainable though and this is likely the source of a lot of organic produce that is not locally sourced, but it also probably doesn't have pesticides on it. O. The other hand fraud does happen and there was a big organic grain trader who was found to be substituting non-organic grain for grain and I think he was prosecuted for it but he got away with it for years. There are also local sustainable farmers who grow organically but can't afford or can't justify the cost of organic certification. So while it does mean something it isn't doesn't always mean what you might think it does.
I'm not sure what the industry standard for something being a "pesticide" is, but there are clearly plenty of tools organic farms can use for pest control. It would be an undertaking to figure out the potential health and sustainability ramifications of all of them (and of course, the label "organic" could encompass the use of any or all of them).
Organic farms use pesticides: They are just limited in what pesticides they use. This isn't a secret or fraud. Unfortunately, the pesticides allowed can easily be worse for the environment than the chemical counterpart. Fertilizers have the same woes, and folks can still not take care of the land.
Crop rotation is a useful technique that both organic and non-organic farms use. However there are lots of other farming techniques. By being organic you are limiting yourself out of them all.
It's a buzzword, but that doesn't mean that what people think of as "organic" - in the good sense - doesn't exist. I'm sure you didn't mean it, but your comment gives the impression that all "organic" food is a shame. There are plenty of sustainable farms that don't use harmful pesticides. It's unfortunate the word has become what it has, but it's not a catch-all one way or the other.
Agh, I hate choosing between differently correct. Do I buy the paper towels that are giant sheets of recycled paper, or the little sheets of bleached paper?
Most bio dairy products I can buy here come in plastic cans that have cardboard clued around of them. I guess it is done to make the look more organic but of course it makes it worse because it makes the recycling more difficult and introduces more waste of resources.
I guess the only reason this happens is due to price, but we could force a "plastic tax" on those types of products unless they came in something that was biodegradable.
Seems like a solvable problem, but only if we make it harder to pollute; otherwise price will dictate.
Hungary has plastic tax, still it's every where. In the case of prosciutto I guess it's because sliced up meat needs to be protected from drying out even if it is preserved. You can't prevent this with paper, so the shelf life would be short. So you either need a deli counter in the shop, or have customers buy the meat in bulk.
They used to seal jellies and jam with wax over the top. Unfortunately, this method made it more likely that you would get food poisoning (and it is still an issue with home canning, but we are a little safer).
Hence the question about if it keeps out microbes and such.
Can you provide evidence that the wax is failing and not some simpler explanation like "you can pasterize the product plastic and all" or just basic home canning issues? Wax is used everywhere for water/air proofing but somehow only fails in food?
Tax will not make it go away, only make it more expensive to people on a budget. You gotta buy food and at some point you don't care how it is packaged as you must eat.
But is it fair to pass the externalities onto someone else - you get your prosciutto and someone else gets the mess? That's doesn't seem right to me.
As opposed to an arbitrary tax discourage something I would whole-heartedly support that the cost of all products includes the cost of all externalities.
Maybe people on a budget should wait in the deli line for their prosciutto, or buy something cheaper.
Only fair is to ban non-degradable packaging altogether. Give companies a year or two of transitional period and then heavily fine companies not implementing the ban.
> Tax will not make it go away, only make it more expensive to people on a budget
This is a matter of the size of the tax. If a Snickers bar was slapped with a $30 plastic tax, you can be sure Snickers would not come wrapped in plastic tomorrow.
It would come "from the back of the van". If there is a demand and supply vacuum (product not available at a price majority of people who wants it can afford), then you'll find brave people wanting to make extra money on the side and simply dealing these.
That piece of plastic will spend its hundreds of years of retirement buried in a hole in the ground in the landfill. It produces no harm to whatsoever, and we are not going to run out of land for millions of years.
Whenever I bring this up someone inevitably brings up polluted oceans, so I might as well address it now - if you don't throw your plastic bags into the ocean and neither does your local waste management those bags will never make it to the ocean. They will be in the landfill.
The logistics graph probably needs to have fewer edges, and the average path be quite a bit shorter, but then we can't all have whatever we want whenever we want wherever we want.
since you used prosciutto for an example, we ought to discuss how absurd it is to need a special container to keep slices of cured meat fresh in the first place. the block of prosciutto is already a container! perhaps the big block needs some sort of protection in transit to meet modern food safety requirements, but buying 80g at a time of prepackaged prosciutto creates a needless inefficiency. we ought to be able to go to the meat counter and buy a few days worth of prosciutto wrapped in paper.
If there were carbon taxes, plastic taxes, or more generally if the externalities were priced in this would be less of an issue. Plastic would still be used where it is economical, or where it is really needed, but cardboard, paper, and other materials that can be recycled or reused would be cheaper and more common. Glass jars or wax paper could both work, but currently the glass is more expensive than plastic, and wax paper would probably give a shorter shelf life. And these taxes don't need to be for 100% of the cost to change behavior.
It's too much in developed nations. Went to Tokyo and almost every thing is wrapped in plastic over plastic without guilt. They say its burned/recycled but not sure how much is true and how much impact it is bringing to the surroundings.
The volume of packaged foods in developing nations are comparatively lower but can't imagine the footprint it could cause when those nations also develop into heavily packaged FMCG consuming behemoths.
True, in Iran everybody buy their fruits and vegetables from designated stores that only sell those. you can have even bring your own container to consume zero plastic. in Denmark it is not even an option. Day to day groceries are bought in supermarkets with insane amount of plastic wraps.
I wish it were more acceptable to simply bring your own packaging to the grocery store and let them do a tare-weight.
My wife and I tried this a few years ago for a few weeks, either bringing in our own Tupperware or Mason jars to do it, and each time the person working in the deli area had to get a manager involved, and one time they accused us of stealing their tupperware, since they sold that same container in the shop. We did this partly for environmental reasons, but mostly for "meat packaging gets really stinky in your garbage can after a few days in a small apartment" reasons. After awhile, we decided it wasn't worth the headache to us.
In NYC (and California too I think?), they're starting to encourage bringing your own bag instead of buying them at the register, so I might retry this experiment again.
Probably depends where you shop. At the more expensive, bougie, "socially-conscious" grocery stores in the US, this is pretty normal or even encouraged. Whole Foods is the most prominent example of the kind of store I'm thinking of.
I really like glass growlers for beer. I can walk across the street and buy a canned 6-pack of a local beer or I can ride my bike to the brewery and have a drink while I wait for my growler to fill. It's about the same price for me.
For me it's the sheer volume of the stuff and how casual people are about buying it. My kids have more toys than they know what to do with and they're all plastic. Every week I buy produce wrapped in plastic. All of our dental care products: plastic. My tools: have plastic in them!
That lego set my kid builds for Xmas? It'll be here for thousands of years and Lego is manufacturing billions of bricks each year.
Fungi are great and all but we have a destructive behavior we need to fix. We can't rely on a quick fix or a miracle cure.
I loved lego as a kid and I now have an embarrassingly large pile of bricks collecting dust at my parents' house. I don't quite know what to do with them. in theory, they're worth a decent chunk of change. looking at used sets on ebay, I'd estimate it's somewhere in the four figure range easily. trouble is they're all disassembled and jumbled together. I can't even find someone who would take a bag of random bricks for free, let alone the whole pile.
I got rid of my childhood legos when I was like 15 in a garage sale. The lego bucket was completely disorganized and it was easily the hottest commodity we had there- there was a woman who showed up 5 minutes early to buy it and the next 6 hours of garage sale we had people showing up a few times an hour asking about it from the ad.
Throw that up on Facebook marketplace or something and people will pay hundreds for it
good to know, I've just been trying and failing to give them away to friends with young children.
I probably ought to just donate them like the sibling posters suggest. it's not like I get any use out of them now, but psychologically it's kinda hard to think about just giving away something that was so important to me as a kid to someone I don't know and might not even meet.
Take them all to a local children's hospital and drop them off if they embarrass you. Sell them on eBay by the kilo/pound if they embarrass you but you want the money in exchange for them.
PBS Frontline has a good documentary called Plastic Wars. It’s part conspiracy where the Petro Companies need alternative sources of $$$ since the Energy $$$ is drying up with the advent of Renewables and EVs
It wouldn't practically matter if there were only 500m of us on the planet. I'm not advocating any particular policy btw, but a lot of pollution problems just go away when you minimize the multiplicative factor.
Certain things are possible with 10,000. Others with 10,000,000. Still others with 10 billion.
Certain things are impossible with only 10,000. Others with 10,000,000. Still other things are impossible with 10 billion.
We want rich, diverse, dynamic and satisfying lives. We do not want a crowded, polluted, impoverished world. 10,000 of us is certainly too few to sustain our civilizational accomplishments. My guess is that the numbers we have now are too many. What is the right-ish number?
It doesn't really matter, is my point. We might need at least 30 billion to fully colonise the Solar System one day, or we might need to become a tiny colony that subsists off heat from the Earth's core hiding from super robots.
Ethically, we would need a pressure great enough to reduce the population for a horrible reason. We would never choose it.
It may be that a policy solution can be arrived at that is non-coercive, and gets around the temporary downsides of an aging population. I'm less pessimistic I guess.
We make policies all the time that affect peoples reproductive decisions. Many of these are, in fact, explicitly about biasing reproductive decisions in one way or another. For example, countries like Poland have introduced policies to increase fertility, monetary incentives to have more children. The purpose of that policy is quite explicit. Other policies discourage people from having more children, including improving access to safe and effective contraception, and either the withdrawal of fertility-increasing tax incentives or enabling people to postpone starting a family (which all by itself can slow or reverse population growth).
Yet, it seems that you only have moral qualms on one side of this coin. But perhaps I judge you too hastily.
> Yet, it seems that you only have moral qualms on one side of this coin.
That's because we've only been discussing one side of it. There are endless bad things that aren't worth denouncing in a particular conversation, if that conversation isn't about those things.
Counterintuitively, because food that's not wrapped in plastic spoils faster it's actually better for the environment to use plastic, owing to reduced waste elsewhere.
Food takes energy to produce, transport and store, that releases (much) more CO2 for now than plastic packaging. Plastic is rather efficient, you only need a tiny drop of oil to create a lot of packaging.
If food production at some point becomes CO2 neutral you still have a lot of other detrimental effects to the environment from food production to account for. Plastic is a net positive for the environment when it comes to food packaging.
unfortunately sometimes wax paper is proposed as an alternative but although the name suggests it to be ecologically it isn't. most, if not all, "wax papers" use paraffin instead of wax
What if a requirement was made for producers of products to handle the disposal of their packaging? I have no idea how much of a financial burden it would be but that could go far to help reduce waste.
We should be able to buy things in bulk and it should be generalized. The norm, not the exception. And if it is not possible to sell stuff that way, then the goods should be forbidden to be sold (with probably some exceptions).
Bulk buying isn't always the solution though (perishable goods, for instance), and isn't always affordable. Your financial situation shouldn't dictate your ability to avoid unnecessary waste.
In my opinion, the move should be towards normalising reusable containers (where practical). Where I am, there are some more "specialist" shops who are doing great work in this area, but it's not mainstream and is often more expensive than just going to the supermarket.
You're right, I guess I used the wrong word... "bulk". I wanted to say that we should buy food which has no container and as such no plastic container. Not that we should buy them in large quantities, if it's what has been implied by my use of the word.
Anyway, someone thought I should be thanked with another -1. Can we go to -Infinity ?
Yeah, it's confusing terminology, because "buying in bulk" usually means buying large quantities, but the "bulk bins" of e.g. nuts at the grocery store really means "buy as much as you want."
But when the tomatoes are loose, we don't call that bulk.
Fresh meat and vegetables, however, should be buy-able in small portions. Otherwise, you either have to buy a giant freezer and eat frozen food all the time, or go to a diner on a daily basis.
I personally think that long-life plastics should be illegal for quickly used items.
Glass and wax-cardboard should be our primary packaging methods for food.
It should also be required that all plastics be recycled. I HATE plastic.
Also, look at cars - whats the average lifespan of a car these days - and in all the millions of cars - with thousands of parts made from plastic that never get recycled.
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Truely an amazing and under appreciated lifeform just waiting to be utilized for planetary healing. I'm looking forward to continuing my research, please subscribe if this is of interest to you.
I took some woodchips that had been used as bedding in a chicken coup (so it had feathers and poop in it), put down a layer about four inches thick, then covered it in a rich mulch that had lots of mycelium in it already[1], and left it alone for about six weeks. The mycelium went all through there and converted the woodchips to a chalky almost asbestos-like form.
I had another experience with this same mycelium mulch[1] where it literally sealed off an area of sandy soil and routed water somewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15059654
[1] Kellogg's GROMULCH 2-in-1, it's my secret weapon.
The difference is huge, for starters this method uses a slow, cold, and mostly anaerobic environment, the conditions mycelium enjoy.
Trying to use a hot compost methods would require epic amounts of nitrogen feedstock for the bacteria to run the process.
This is also faster and requires less human input, no need to turn or aerate the pile, no need to carefully monitor the balance the nitrogen to carbon ratios throughout the process.
The change in chips I show in the video was 8 months. Leaving the chips for longer in the ditch/trench will yeild better results, I plan to leave this latest batch for a couple years to really let the mycelium break down the materials.
A portion of aged fungi composted material can be added to a hot compost pile to let the bacteria take over.
Fungi dominant soils are better for food forests and more stable than bacteria dominate soils.
I typically use bacteria dominated soils for kitchen gardens.
It's all inputs and outputs at the end of the day and simply dropping material into specific conditions can yeild different material outputs. It so much fun to think in terms of systems. I fell in love with computers and networks for this reason. Natural systems are even more impressive to me.
Gardening, food production, and nature is all about inputs and outputs over the course of days, months, and years. It's a much slower feedback loop to programming, but a feedback loop nonetheless.
Any idea how well this would work with sawdust? I generate a ton in my workshop. The city currently takes it in our organics bin, but it's a pain. Have to buy expensive compostable bags, then transfer from the dust collector to the secondary bags which takes a while and is messy.
Sawdust can be a great media to grow mushrooms on. There are species that prefer hardwoods vs softwoods so you might have to do some research. Oysters generally eat anything.
I'm really enjoying the new generation of battery powered lawn tools. From chainsaws to leafblowers to lawnmowers, li-ion is taking over. I won't miss the mess and cheapo carbs and tricks like shipping products without a simple fuel filter.
Electric is nice, but the long term cost seems to be significantly higher. As a practical matter an battery electric mower, for example, is good for a few years. Where a gas powered Honda is good for decades. This is what has stopped me from buying too many electric yard tools. Instead I just pay someone to do the yard and that way the ecological impact of the tools are minimized.
i can't wait either. gas leaf blowers are technically illegal in LA, but yardworkers still use them all over the place without concern. they're loud, but more gravely, emit noxious pollution. all the more, it's not much more work or time to sweep or rake whatever it is they're (more rigorously) blowing up into the air and our lungs.
you're welcome--you can apparently report it, giving regulators the time and place to come check and cite the violation. i haven't done so because i don't want to punish low-wage workers frivolously, but i hate the smell and pollution those things put off.
Good luck when your manufacturer changes their battery system or drops their electric line all together. Or your batteries start to deform. I’ve seen all of the above happen to family members.
Keep ethanol fuel out of the equipment to keep the carbs in good shape.
There's usually a third party manufacturer you can get replacement batteries from for any decently popular system.
My cost on batteries/electricity is probably less than I would have spent on fuel. The noise/size/maintenance-free advantages of electric are huge too.
For anaerobic (no oxygen) composting you just leave the pile alone and let nature do it’s work. The spores are already there they just need the right conditions. It will take months to year(s) if you just let it sit.
For aerobic composting you should layer leaves and grass clippings. One brown layer, one green layer and so on. It’s best done in a sunny area and you’ll need to turn the compost weekly. It should only take a few months or more and it will be hot. Ever driven by a steaming pile of wood chips or some other steaming earthy pile? Organisms are making heat while they feed on organic matter.
Just remember the fungus and organisms are already there they just needs the right conditions to flourish.
Depends on how much work you want to do, but please research the difference between hot and cold compost, you may use either process for leaves, ideally you will want at least 1 meter cubed.
For hot compost you will need a feedstock of nitrogen for the bacteria. Grass clippings, coffee grounds, liquid nitrogen (urine). This is bacteria dominant composting (hot composting is fast).
On the other hand if you want to do less work just make them in a pile and allow for fungi to process the leaves over a longer period of time. This is fungi dominant composting (cold composting is slower).
The soil life is already present on the leaves. Just keep the pile consistently moist but not soaking wet.
I have hot composting videos documented on YouTune, although they are from before I upgraded my camera so the quality isn't as good as my newer videos, hopefully still informational.
Just wanted to comment that mushrooms naturally erode wood and decomposing biomass (I used to study environmental science). That's sort of just what they do. Keep em damp and away from sunlight and they should do an even better job!
Yup damp and dark, so with the trench method the top is sunny but most of the growing medium (in this case chips) are in the dark since it's underground.
The unanswered question is what will you do with the mushrooms after they've munched on petroleum or plastic? My guess is that you're not going to want them on your pizza cause they might just be toxic. Will we only be replacing one kind of waste with another?
For plastics the answer is out there, biodegradable plastic made from corn. It has to overcome two problems:
1. It's slightly more expensive
2. If we want it to degrade rapidly we need to make an investment in plants to do it. Otherwise you're looking at 100 years versus 300+ years for regular plastic.
I think for plastics the right answer is standardization. I know that's not people want to hear, but I don't think there is any way around it.
1. Ban all single use plastics that can be replaced somewhat economically with biodegradable materials (with a small price increase, maybe 2-5-10%).
2. Standardize plastic container compositions, shapes and sizes in a huge ISO catalog. EVERY product a company makes/uses has to be from this catalog. Companies can add another category one by going through the standardization process. Marketing can be done by applying biodegradable materials to the exterior.
Basically have a few material compositions:
- high strength/heavy
- medium strength/medium weight
- reduced strength/light
Have a standardized set of sizes:
- 100ml (and US equivalent)
- 250ml
- 330ml
- 500ml
...
Plus a standardized set of shapes for each size.
At the end of the day you'd get:
3 x number of sizes (probably 40-50 sizes?) x number of shapes (probably 10-15 shapes per size?) = 1200 - 2250 categories. And I'm being generous here, I think we should probably keep this total number under 500, ideally under 100, but I don't think such a low number is feasible.
Then charge a deposit for each plastic container and upon container return give this deposit back.
Same thing for glass, actually.
This would make plastic containers reusable, even across brands, and would probably reduce our plastic waste by orders of magnitude.
Heck, the same thing could probably be done for plastic bags.
However, this plan would also reduce plastic consumption (and production, so $$$) by orders of magnitude, so I don't expect it to ever pass a solid lobbying plan.
Point A: Biostarch PLA wastes huge amounts of energy to convert biodegradeable starch in to nominally biodegradeable PLA. It would be better for everyone to (1) move to non single use plastics; or (2) recycle plastic (very problematic and rarely economical); instead of (3) wasting the energy and CO2 to fabricate biostarch PLA just for the option of throwing it away carelessly.
Point B: As I have spent months of time on thermoforming research (just visited 9 machine manufacturers last week and am currently buying a line to produce permanent parts) I will try to raise a few points as to why this plan might also be difficult technically. Many parts are custom produced for specific use cases. Moulds degrade over time and may not produce the same caliber of part early, middle and late run. Some people require different polymers for valid engineering reasons (optical, thermal or structural properties, joining/printing/other post-process compatibility, etc.) Say you have a mould and you use virgin material versus some other material. Polymer selection affects all properties. Thickness affects thermal characteristics and structural properties. Equipment and ambient environment state including thermals, air particulates and humidity, mould state, die state, air pressure, configured cycle time, coolant circuit state, type and care of handling after forming. However, the kicker is food safety (a legal requirement in most markets) - rarely guaranteed outside of purely virgin material (there are exceptions: I believe there is a UK recycler that does it) and food safe material is the dominant single use plastics market.
I know my plan doesn't cover everything and there are a lot of exceptions.
But if we don't want to destroy the planet, we have to do something like it. Everyone thinks they're special. Why does Coca Cola have a different bottle shape compared to Pepsi or to Fanta? That makes no sense.
We should turn the approach on its head with what is a dangerous material: you should have to prove that what you're doing deserves being made. Have you thought about the consequences of your actions when this product is mass produced, 30 years from now? I doubt many have.
The standard catalog could have more axes, such as different material types, mine was just an example.
Get 10 world famous materials engineers and have them come out with a catalog that covers the most widespread uses.
This doesn't need to be a 100% solution, it needs to cover, say, 95%. The rest of the 5% could be treated as exceptions and you'd have to get a license. Yes, some creativity would be lost. But you could for example, exempt some smaller producers (if your factory makes fewer than 10k units per year, in total, no need for approval, just show us the proof that you're only going to produce that much).
But again, plastics have proven to be dangerous materials, in an insidious way. They're not explosives but they do a lot of damage.
Regulation can help. If we regulate though, perhaps we should ban the CPG industry as it stands. Look for example at how Australia has forced cigarettes to be sold in blank packages. Remove the marketing element from packaging, and have the supply chain utilize larger, shared, reuseable storage containers for larger quantities of currently individually packaged items. Force the collection of goods in customer-owned reusable packages. Many places already do it at the level of banning or charging for plastic bags and banning low grade/thin/single use plastic bags. We should apply the same thinking to single use packaging in general and request that people BYO packaging for all bulk items.
ie. Don't just remove custom plastics, or move to the lesser option of recycling, rather remove the vast majority of single use plastics in the consumer supply chain and simultaneously reduce the effect of retail packaging advertising on consumer behavior to force a real change.
PS. I don't think a courageous change on this level is ever likely to occur in the west (well, perhaps Europe?). I think it is far more likely to occur in China.
I slept on this and it occurred to me that this is exactly how markets in Asia traditionally operate. Some of them still operate like that. However, they are being rapidly destroyed by the combination the supermarket chains, and the automobile culture/parking lot nightmare they engender, and convenience stores, which encourage unhealthy snacking in lieu of real ingredient purchase and preparation, and small quantity purchasing (such as single use plastic wrapped shampoo and soap sachets).
> However, this plan would also reduce plastic consumption (and production, so $$$) by orders of magnitude, so I don't expect it to ever pass a solid lobbying plan.
That's why we're being buried in trash, because people are making money from that trash.
Plastic is effective and cheaper than other solutions. It is lighter, generally efficiently stackable, and easier to ship. The plastic waste problem is therefore less a grand moneymaking conspiracy and more about cost savings for businesses and consumers which, under a traditional capitalist model, do not account for the 'tragedy of the commons' - ie. completely ignore environmental or social concerns except in cases of post-facto regulatory action.
This isn't theoretical any more. My state (tamil nadu/india) has banned plastic bags and cups .. generally what we might think of as single use. You have to take your own bags or (in some shops) buy reusable+degradable cloth bags. There are also grocery shops like "eco indian" to which you take your own containers, fill them up, weigh and pay. That's how we used to do it when I was a kid, but it all went plastic after that. Glad to see it coming back. Covid threw another curve ball but the ban hasn't changed. Next up should be food packaging.
I really like the idea of standardization. Even if there are 500 standards, that's much better than an unbounded number.
Regulation would certainly force the issue, but one way or another the consumer packaged goods industry (and other industries) need to get their heads around focusing competition around everything BUT packaging.
When packaging has become standard, no one competes there any more. If everyone has the mindset that this is expected and OK, just focus competitive efforts elsewhere -- product quality, branding, better ingredients/parts, lower price, whatever. Your packaging design/pollution budget is now free for other opportunities.
There is some advantage in selecting the right standard size, but you either know what your industry is doing or you pay a consultant to tell you which one to try next.
What you don't do is spend lots more money designing your own custom packaging that may or may not help sales and will never be recycled.
And then there is the entire packaging design industry, not a small one, who will not like this at all. Anyone want to play devil's advocate and guess what they might say?
> When packaging has become standard, no one competes there any more. If everyone has the mindset that this is expected and OK, just focus competitive efforts elsewhere -- product quality, branding, better ingredients/parts, lower price, whatever. Your packaging design/pollution budget is now free for other opportunities.
They can still brand the packaging. Just use biodegradable, safe glues, paper, paint, etc. to put on top of the actual bottle. Yes, the bottles will be a bit generic, but there's a lot you can do with a bit of creativity.
What they're doing is like developers rewriting the Python library 1 billion times because they all want to be special snowflakes. Though rewriting does happen, the vast majority of developers build on top of the standard library, not besides it.
> And then there is the entire packaging design industry, not a small one, who will not like this at all. Anyone want to play devil's advocate and guess what they might say?
When a few benefit and many lose, that's called corruption. Any proposal will have some people against it, you can't please everyone all the time.
And coloring, well, a part of it would be composition and the rest should IMO temporary marketing coloring on top of the base composition (i.e. paint the bottle with something biodegradable).
Color should not be part of the standard as it would make the "support matrix" unsustainable and companies should not be allowed to "pass the buck" back to us consumers.
I have some friends who have recently started a business based on this model. They don't have a site up yet, but are doing some small scale tests in Colorado. I'm happy to direct anyone who is interested toward them.
This is great, though I wonder what we would do about laminates. For example, a can of cola has a plastic lining to protect the aluminium from degrading, tetrapak containers are laminates to prevent leakage, counter tops and flatpak furniture tends to be plastic-wrapped chipboard.
A lot of these laminates can be replaced, but some are rather harder to. Progressive taxation based on recyclability is an easy win which incentivizes correct packaging (and transport packaging as well) and would be an easier sell.
Additional, homogeneous packaging would be taxed less.
The branding that goes on the packaging is still open to design, so there's room for differentiation there - a necessary component for adoption.
Lastly, standardizing recyclability across the state/county/country would be useful as then tourists etc. can also understand a simple recycling message.
I was discussing this with a friend the other night.
I can envisage a future where plastic packaging is all entirely standardised and left as virgin as possible for recycling - no dyes, no printed elements or thin film decoration.
Instead, basic (/complex, if you like) low to medium resolution laser-etched graphics and descriptions, and any fancy-ass graphical marketing/advertising visible through whatever spectacles/phone AR is popular.
Or perhaps encourage "container for life" storage with refill machines. e.g. purchase a long-lasting detergent container, and refill it at a detergent dispensing machine.
Otherwise you'd need to provide an easy way or sorting returned containers (by type) so they go back into circulation. Maybe QR-codes on bottles and "smart bins" that pay you for disposing of them?
Plastic containers of all types should be reusable and there should also be incentives for reusing them. We don't make a screw, use it to build something and then discard it once we disassemble the thing.
For the last point, I'd definitely want to see examples where taxes are more efficient than bans. Everything I've seen and read (and I like to read a lot), points the other way around.
So I'd definitely want to read some studies that says that tax increases are better than bans.
As a single counterpoint, we've been taxing cigarettes a ton for several decades. Smoking rates have gone down, but only extremely slowly. It took decades. So if you consider partially solving an issue after several decades "efficient", then yeah, taxes are efficient.
> As a single counterpoint, we've been taxing cigarettes a ton for several decades. Smoking rates have gone down, but only extremely slowly. It took decades. So if you consider partially solving an issue after several decades "efficient", then yeah, taxes are efficient.
Economists usually take into account that people also get utility out of eg using plastic straws or smoking cigarettes. They are by and large not a very judgy lot.
Taxes just make it so that the private cost-benefit decision can take into account (ie 'internalize') the costs to the public.
Your examples of screws is great to illustrate this! We don't ban the discarding of screws, and it would be somewhat silly to do so.
> For the last point, I'd definitely want to see examples where taxes are more efficient than bans. Everything I've seen and read (and I like to read a lot), points the other way around.
What are you reading? I am talking about efficiency in the same sense as it's used in economics. And taxes being more efficient than bans is pretty much Econ 101. But I can dig up some links, if you want to.
In Poland it became harder to export trash to other countries, so instead landfill owners started burning all their trash to make space for new. Commentators refer to it jokingly as "storing trash in the cloud".
> The unanswered question is what will you do with the mushrooms after they've munched on petroleum or plastic? My guess is that you're not going to want them on your pizza cause they might just be toxic.
Believe me or not, I ate that yeast grown on petroleum paraffin once.
At the time of extreme food scarcity in Russia, we had people eating animal feed produced from yeast grown on paraffin. It's called paprin in Russian.
So, knowing that most of petroleum hydrocarbons are toxic if ingested, the result may be more amendable than the source product.
The product disrupted hormonal and water balance, causing edema to form throughout the body of the animals, reported by the Russian business consultancy, which brought studies from Bashkiria State University.
“Meat obtained from animals fed with Paprin contained an accumulation of abnormal amino acids that were incorporated into the membranes of nerve cells, thus disrupting the process of conducting a normal nerve impulse,” said Raisa Bashirova, principal investigator at Bashkiria State University, who added that it was even harmful to humans to paintings with Paprin:
“Factory staff and local citizens were presenting diseases such as canker sores and bronchial asthma. “
In the 1990s, almost the entire production of bioprotein in Russia was stopped. Gaprin, although it had proved to be safe and efficient, could not compete with rather cheap imported protein feedstuffs, which began to land on the local market in large quantities. Now, several decades later, bioprotein production in Russia seems to be getting a second chance.
That would never make sense to do. The atmosphere is heavily enriched with CO2 already, so plants don't need help obtaining it. If you want to grow plants in an area where water is so scarce you have to import it, but you have oil, don't burn your money: sell the oil and buy water.
Exactly. There's a big difference between merely absorbing plastic and petroleum, and metabolising it. The former might be nice if you want to collect microplastics or clean up oil spills or something, but the latter would actually get rid of the plastic and the oil and turn it into something more ecologically useful.
Last I checked (circa 2017), bioplastics like PLA had poor heat resistance. This made them unsuitable for certain applications like bushings or gasket seals. IIRC "heat resistant" varieties of PLA are rated up to 120 Celsius, which is good for many applications but not all e.g. automotive seals, washers, and bearings.
Footnote: I was going to compare the properties of heat-resistant PLA to those of PTFE aka Teflon, since the latter is commonly used in heat-resistant applications, but after some Googling I've learned PTFE is not petroleum-based.
I'm very much not an expert on this, but I believe there's an additional problem with plastic made from corn:
3. It requires huge land areas to grow enough corn to make enough plastic for the whole world's population, which requires clearing huge expanses of existing forests and other natural areas.
Mushrooms and mycelia can be used as a resource to fabricate textiles, packaging, bricks etc.
Also, if the mushrooms grow only on what they can break down it's totally safe to eat them. It has to be a controlled process. Not just trying to grow mushrooms on a heap of trash you'd otherwise just burn.
Having said that - even mushrooms won't liberate us from using resources more responsibly.
"The mushrooms’ enzymes re-manufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates, fungal sugars,"
I wonder if the process would be similar for plastics. If so, it could then be used as feed. I don't see any information, but the fungus grown from plastic might not be toxic.
when we move to renewables, the production of oil will go down, and plastics as a byproduct will decrease in supply increasing its price, so I'm predicting point 1 to happen in time.
Whenever someone mentions something organically eating away at plastic this the idea that it decomposes faster than we are used to scares me.
Imagine what would happen if the plastic insulation of our cables rotted away, plastic housings of powertools fail... Basically most of our modern world would melt away in front of our eyes.
Wood decays fairly rapidly in nature, and yet we can build things out of wood that last centuries. Keeping things dry goes a long way towards preserving them. That of course doesn't work for all applications, but I don't think there is a concern that some fungus will eat your Nylon shirts while you're wearing it.
GP mentioned cable insulation. Between that and food containers and gaskets, I can easily imagine that if a biological agent that could decompose petroleum-based materials were to spread, it could topple our civilization. Like, I don't care about my nylon t-shirt, but I care about the gasket in the LPG bottle underneath my sink, or about the PVC pipes that carry water into my apartment, and waste out of it.
There are 1,000s of agents and organisms in nature that eat everything around us. Wood is pressure treated to prevent these types of things from happening.
Not to mention oxygen is probably one of the biggest agents that “eats” or oxidizes our world. Water and moisture are catalysts for other life forms to start eating stuff.
Some materials have been around for much, much longer, and so things had an opportunity to evolve to eat them. So we can judge. Eg we know how fast different woods rot. Or how fast stones or steel can be attacked.
This isn't really a big concern. Bacteria and mushrooms can eat anything: rock, metal, radioactive waste, basically anything at all. But metabolizing those things isn't very efficient. Plastic-eating mushrooms will always lose to ordinary dung-eating ones.
This one seems over-hyped to me. Some species of fungus have been observed extracting energy from gamma radiation. While incredible, it's roughly similar in principle to the way plants extract energy from visible light. The fungus isn't breaking those radioactive isotopes down into stable isotopes, it's just basking in the glow. Maybe this could have some positive benefits for others, if perhaps layers of fungus grew around radioactive particles, thus somewhat shielding them, but this is a far cry from what the popsci headlines seem to suggest.
Nature shows us nothing. Nature is an abstraction for a collection of different systems in a state of dynamic equilibrium. What is unsustainable disappears and the rest remains as long as it can until it is replaced.
Wood used to not rot for millions of years. That's where lignite comes from.
From practical point of view, rusting is just inorganic version of rotting via oxidizing agents. Both happen naturally over time, given appropriate environment, and both result in interesting/useful stuff turning into less interesting/useful stuff.
It is highly likely that these fungi don't grow unassisted. They aren't likely to colonize in your wiring, for example, without significant help and ideal conditions, such as a great deal of starting spores all over the wiring and lots of water and a good dose of additional nutrients that the fungus needs to grow.
In other words, if you shred your wiring and put it on top of a pile of fungi that are bred to eat this type of plastic, they'll probably use rainfall to extend their mycelial network and eat the plastic. But if you just park your car next to the pile, it's probably never going to colonize your car and digest its electrical system.
The post-apocalyptic, young adult series "The Uglies" by Scott Westerfeld is based on a similar idea. A Fungus is created that causes petroleum products to explode when exposed to air (thus further spreading the spores).
On top of that, an organism genetically modified to eat plastic could surely change the ecosystem drastically since it would thrive like crazy due to so much dormant plastic in our environment.
This isn't really discussed enough. There's so much chemical energy in plastic that it really is just a matter of time (although evolution scale time could be thousands to millions of years...) until something evolves to break it down. Depending on the rate that happens, it might cause some real issues.
Yes, also the core idea of the network came from him. There are a couple of interesting podcast interviews with Stamets. Fascinating stuff. He truly and deeply cares about nature and mushrooms in particular, has done extensive research over the years and has found a wide variety of applicable solutions.
Just recently watched a movie last week, 'Fantastic Fungi'. It covers some of this, as well as many other interesting (and beautiful) aspects about Mushrooms/Fungi.
It makes me wonder if there are any mushrooms that could survive on Mars...
If not, then one poster suggested that the surface of Mars is rusted (oxidated).
If that's so, then my question becomes something of the following:
Is there a food chain (from rust/oxides, to simple bacteria that would eat that rust, to more complex bacteria (that would survive on those simpler bacteria), to spores, mushrooms, etc., such that that whole "food chain" could survive on the surface of Mars?
Speculation: Maybe we'll find strange/weird "food chains" (for lack of a better term!) like that on Mars, and if they aren't directly on the surface (due to violent dust storms, too much radiation, or what-have-you), perhaps such "food chains" exist in caves, or perhaps deep underground, in caverns protected from Mars' harsh atmosphere...
I would love to know the answer to this in the future!
The plants "eat" CO2, the mushroom eat plants and keep the carbon fixated for some time. Using the same accounting method elephants and whales also "eat" CO2.
Decompose wouldn't, by itself, be a completely a accurate word either since fungi does consume some of the decomposed matter. I think digest can be appropriate since they are breaking down the food for consumption. I believe the enzymes they use are called digestive enzymes, even though they excrete them and reabsorb it (some microorganisms do this too as they are animals and lack a true digestive tract).
The article doesn't contain any more information about the topics in the title. Which is too bad, because I would be interested in hearing about the economics of these things and hearing from companies attempting them.
Paul Stamets received an Invention Ambassador (2014-2015) award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The character Lieutenant Commander Paul Stamets on the CBS series Star Trek: Discovery was named after the real Stamets. The fictional version is an astromycologist and the chief engineer of the USS Discovery, and is credited with discovering a mycelial network that powers an advanced spore drive.
Slightly offtopic but, one thing I've been thinking: If we can produce plastic that won't degrade for thousands of years, why not leverage this and make books from it?
Biology gives us the existence proof for most of our big technological aspirations. Solar energy, energy storage, dealing with waste, "artificial" intelligence, nano bots.... obviously every medical problem.
Biology is already doing all these things in clever, scalable ways. It's one of the great technology wildcards, long term.
It's not surprising that something eats petroleum waste products. It's organic and energy rich.
There is a general hope that science will save the world from the mess it is in. I think this have been part of the problem all the way trough the last century.
Since 1950 lifespan and healthspan have increased on every continent. In every continent bar Africa wealth per person has increased as has education level. Seems to be working well enough so far.
That is a good point. Lifespan/health has improved and that is great. I refer however to the matter that many people would just sit back and read a half cooked news about a mushroom that eat plastic, «with the hope science wil fix it» instead of taking a real possible action within their reach to improve conditions on earth.
USA is not a densely populated country, so I wouldn't call it overpopulated. And yet, USA is one of the biggest polluting countries per capita (if not the top polluter).
As far as I know, people in dense cities also pollute far less than other (less heating per capital, smaller households, less commute, more walking/biking...).
In terms of resources being used by by the planets ability to regenerate them it seems to be true. Too many people consuming too much. And that's with billions living very modest lifestyles.
Ask them how to solve the "overpopulation" problem, and you'll find that for many of the people who bring it up, it's a lot worse than a diversion tactic.
From 1961 to 2015 (http://www.worldeconomics.com/papers/Global%20Growth%20Monit...), real GDP per capita in Africa grew by 1.1% annually (!), compared to 3.9% for Asia, 1.7% for the Americas, and 2.2% for Europe. Growth from 2001 to 2010 of 2.9% is included in that figure; it was the first decade in that period in which Africa outgrew any other continent.
But why do you agree with the comment saying real GDP per capita in Africa hasn't increased in the same sentence that you say it has increased (by 1.1% annually)?
(Though a slight wrinkle is that your sentence talks about GDP and the original comment was about wealth.)
And I know that 1.1% isn't great. But it's bigger than zero. And compared to humanities historical average before the industrial revolution of basically 0%, 1.1% is enormous.
The much vaunted industrial revolution had Britain at not more than 1.25%. Boring by today's standards, but absolutely game changing compared to what came before.
>But why do you agree with the comment saying real GDP per capita in Africa hasn't increased in the same sentence that you say it has increased (by 1.1% annually)?
Because:
* 1.1% annual growth is a) terrible at any point after c. 1800, and b) sustained over decades (during which bien-pensant commentators repeatedly proclaimed that Africa was about to/already had/surely would grow at enormous speed and soon catch up with the developed world). Comparing it to the industrial revolution-era statistics is meaningless unless the rest of the world is also at that level.
* The data shows that multiple countries within Africa have regressed. Like, full on collapsed. Zimbabwe was not invaded by an outside enemy. A volcano did not destroy Madagascar's markets. Gabon's political disruptions are not unusual compared to what has happened elsewhere on the continent and in the developing world. And yet their economies have collapsed, and not in a Western-style "country x's economy is in recession" meaning of 'collapse'. Outside Africa this has not happened in such scale across multiple countries in a region/continent without some discrete factor, such as the imposition of Communism in Eastern Europe and Cuba, or the Maoist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. And even Eastern Europe and Cuba, while far poorer than they would be without Communism in their history, are better off than the Ivory Coast.
I'm just more pedantic and count a terrible increase still as an increase.
Mostly just to be precise, so that we have words left for the situation when there's an actual decrease. Like the collapses in individual countries you mention.
I’m not confident it has. It hadn’t as of 2000. Population growth in Africa has been break neck for decades. It’s looking like there might finally be some major success stories there this century, like Ethiopia and Nigeria.
GDP per capita is a measure of consumption. Consumption has increased on every continent bar Africa since WW2. People are a lot less poor.
If you want an illustration of this look at this graph of the cost of 66 technologies dropping over the 1951-2013 period. That’s people getting richer.
This is increases in broad based prosperity, the same kind of thing we think about when we consider how antibiotics went from cutting edge technology to ho hum, or how air conditioning made large parts of the world amenable to industrial civilization. You know the kind that reduces poverty.
Science and engineering have actually helped us address ecological challenges in a way we could not have imagined. It’s science that allowed us to extract coal and stop depleting forests at incredible rates. Science that allowed us to extract oil and gas powering the economic growth and prosperity unprecedented at any other time in human history. Science gave us Renewables too... today, it’s mostly a question of whether we have the political will to commit to mobilize on a large scale to convert to clean energy and end the inevitable climate catastrophe.
If we survive intact, science will give us even better tools to deal with the problems we face. There is so much we don’t know about our universe. We have barely scratched the surface of the earth, barely discovered what lies outside our immediate planetary neighborhood, barely understood the biochemistry of us even....
Science can point the direction, but it takes the will of large populations of individuals to put in the effort to achieve any kind of positive outcome. That will has been continually undermined and attacked by anti-science rhetoric driven by economic and political interests, culminating in our modern "alternative facts" anti-reality bubbles so many people seem lost inside of.
People need to move beyond hope into action, populations need to value education, learning, and the discipline to undertake massive endeavours if the knowledge gained through careful science is to have any value at all to humanity.
I've seen a lot of such articles from the mushroom community lately. Is it possible that the mushrooms are somehow promoting themselves? Through human surrogates?
How else do we explain Oregon? Meanwhile, the cacti are getting no articles. Who will speak for Lophophora?
Pyrolysis of trees can produce charcoal (biochar) which is stable in soil for thousands of years (and potentially stable in other locations for much longer). I wonder if you could pyrolyse mushrooms to produce similar products.
If I understand this correctly, mushrooms can eat the carbohydrates in oil and oil products. I wonder what happens to metals mixed in the oil, do mushroom suck those in as well or somehow filter them and leave in the ground?
Old oil well and refinery sites in the developing world are full of ponds with a mix of water and oil/oil products that often come as a result of cleaning processes. Over time, due to evaporation and dust, these turn into asphalt like hard substances. Mushrooms could be a low cost solution to removing those over time, the slow speed of growth won't that much of issue as with fresh oil spills.
That's cool, but nothing can "eat" CO2. Eating implies a gain of energy, but converting CO2 to whatever is going to be a loss of energy. Plants use CO2 to get carbon and store energy, but converting that CO2 still costs energy. Unless of course the fungi are performing nuclear fusion with the carbon and/or oxygen.
I'm in Japan here's plastic waste heaven, so I fear to see extreme hates for plastics for food here. Are these plastics really bad if they are correctly burned or recycled? (I expect recycle is limited so primary to be burned)
I think the main problem is that it's still a slow process and it will be hard to scale it up to the levels we need to get rid of our single use plastics.
Ideally, we'd throw a sack of spores on a huge heap of plastic and few years later it would all be gone. Getting there will surely be a long process and require a whole lot of research.
