Let's not fall all over ourselves defending the manufacture of plastics.. it's a self-justifying dinosaur industry. We can go a lot farther with cellulose and chitin and friends, polymers made in factories aren't particularly special from a chemical structure/function standpoint-- unlike PFAS type stuff, their bioincompatibility is just due to our laziness. The big advantage with plastics is that we're good at making/shaping/customizing them quickly and cheaply. It can very much all be done with biocompatible/harmless chemicals. That it isn't, is an accident of history: the early Chemistry research that produced the synthetic polymers used today made no attempt whatsoever to be biocompatible.. everything since has built on that, and not enough collective fuck has been given to dismantle and rebuild that infrastructure.
And just to get out ahead of it-- can we also not blame plastic consumers, who after all are just trying to eat, and probably don't want to poison themselves.
You can pretty much blame wars and the US military for that. (I’ll dig up sources when I get on my computer) The gist is that the military funded R&D in preservatives and packaging still used today. Stores took advantage of it because it meant they could carry more inventory without worrying about rotting.
Because banana peel is not very good packaging, or compared to man made. Good enough for its own purpose. I've vacume sealed bananas with plastic and they stay fresh for maybe even a year, that's the difference.
This line of reasoning is often used to defend individually wrapped cucumbers, etc.
I watched a documentary recently that compared frozen food to internationally shipped food and found significant nutritional loss in the shipped "fresh" food. As such, I think plastic preserved apparently fresh food could be an explanation for part of the obesity rise. One potentially consumes more calories to get the other nutritional factors that have broken down compared to eating food that can only be delivered actually fresh.
(Given that improved shipping life also turns the market for a vegetable global, I also think more people are priced out of buying produce that once had to be sold locally than are helped by less produce waste in the richest market the produce can now reach.)
This makes me wonder how many deaths the widespread use of plastics in packaging has saved over the years from improvements in nutrition (reduced spoilage lowers net food costs and increases food availability) and reductions in food-borne illnesses.
The death rate from food-borne illness is pretty low now (with advances in processing, transportation, packaging, phase-change refrigeration, and surveillance of outbreaks).
We might be able to have our cake and eat it to with better/different packaging, of course.
Similarly: how many deaths can be attributed to pollution from coal plants powering the energy-costly Haber-Bosch process? (Without which the population never could have exceeded 3 billion people.)
To remind people, Haber-Bosch process produces fixed nitrogen in the form of ammonia from hydrogen. In the US, almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas (not coal), although other fuels are more common in places like China.
We used to use hydroelectric power to make hydrogen (using electrolysis) for Haber-Bosch, but gas reforming of methane ended up being much cheaper in the 1950s once that process became invented and widespread.
Between 25 and 33 deaths per TWh generated [1]. It's about 40% of the world's generation capacity. It totals right around 45,000TWh/yr (3890MToe). [2] So that works out to approximately 1.125-1.4 million people per year dying from coal power. I've seen other reports point to around 800K.
The actual measure here is “preventable deaths”. Yes, every birth will (so far) result in a death. But there is a big, big difference between dying at 82 because a power plant enabled your birth, and dying at 63 because the emission from the power plant caused you to die from a heart attack or cancer. That 19 years would certainly matter to you and your family! And that’s before we consider what other ill effects you might have suffered because of those emissions.
100%; that’s exactly my point (though I admit I sent readers off in the wrong direction on the surface).
Billions lived at all and tens of millions died an early death? That’s a pretty great trade if your only choice is to take or pass on that as a sole, binary option.
It seems very hard to weigh the cost/benefits of something like this especially when the evidence for the possible health costs are so difficult to collect. Think of all of the possible confounding factors that could result in these health outcomes, the fact that not all plastics are the same (phthalates are not the only compound of concern), and the fact that most probable adverse health outcomes are not acute (we have pretty strong evidence plastic packaging isn't acutely toxic), but would take a long time to develop which further increases the difficulty of forming any type of causal relationship between plastics exposure and health outcomes.
I remember doing some consulting work for a medical device a couple of years back (embedded software) where they were really really struggling to design flexible tubing that would pass a bio-toxicity test.
In practice it seems plastic flexible tubing uses a lot of plasticizers (BPA included) to make them flexible.
My point being that, even if you avoid the packaging and the relabeled cosmetic 'perfumes', it still seems that the flexible tubing you would find in most coffee vending machines and water filtration systems (and many other consumer applications that do not require medical regulation) is probably choke-full of plasticizers.
One of my first graduate tasks in a previous life involved managing the impact of switching to phthalate-free flexible tubing. We went nowhere near biological systems but were struggling to get hold of the stuff anyway.
It got to the point we were redesigning components to take into account vastly decreased maintenance intervals.
Whilst I don't want to defend the plastics industry, I have to find my delivery today funny: a small plastic part carrying a prop 65 warning. The part is made of polyacetal, and so contains no flourine, amine or cyano groups, no aromatics, not even a double bond.
Or even some household piping like PVC and PEX though with low exposure: “Phthalate exposure from drinking water via cPVC or PEX is low when compared to other dietary sources. Nonetheless, a shift from cPVC to PEX pipes in households would decrease potential exposure to phthalates.” [1]
> cpvc isn't that common in household pipes, is it?
From what I have read it seems CPVC is used for residential hot water lines when copper is not being used (and copper is expensive).
I was assuming cPVC and PVC were the same but that is not the case. cPVC is more specialty when compared to PVC since it can handle a higher temperature and pressure, and costs a bit more [1].
For that to be true you would need chemically inert pipes, I can't really think of a material in common use that meets that specification. Opening the inquiry a bit to the less common materials:
Pure Soda Lime Glass
Synthetic Quartz
Diamond
Although these materials are poor choices for many reasons, they would be very unlikely to leach anything into the water more harmful than carbon or silicon atoms.
This depends on local water hardness but generally is a stronger effect in hot water pipes because of the inverse temperature solubility of calcium carbonate.
Municipal water is definitely tuned to make a passivation layer on the pipe work.
you're not wrong that it would be preferable to have tubes that didn't need plasticizers, but generally water isn't going to sit in the tubing in a soda fountain or whatever for that long. Prolonged periods give a lot longer time for chemicals to leech, there is a "rate" component here, and the natural flow of liquid also means there is a larger volume of liquid involved, diluting things out.
which isn't to say that it isn't a problem either, but in relative terms here, what I'm saying is that water that sits in a plastic Nalgene bottle for a couple days probably is more concerning to me than water that passes through a few feet of plastic tubing inside a vending machine and never sits still for more than 10 or 15 minutes.
Although of course I suppose given the plastic tubes are more flexible than a hard plastic nalgene bottle, they may also have higher levels of plasticizers...
So maybe I'm showing how little I know here, but isn't these sorts of use cases exactly where you'd want to use silicone rubbers? Or do those have problems I'm not aware of? (other than being slightly spendy of course)
The goal is to onboard the insurance companies as a powerful lobby against the petrochemical one.
It's one of the most decried industry (the insurance one) but one of the nicest thing about it is that it almost always have its interests aligned with those of its customers (in group) and thus can act as one of the most powerful stabilizing force in society.
I am not sure about that. Widespread ill-health that is managed not cured is funded by raising the rates. They got plenty of actuaries to take a "neutral position" with whatever bad shit is a public health disaster.
I think there is a only a few band of middlebrow jobs in the US where employers are cost sensitive. I think most shit jobs won't give you good benefits either way (by various legal mechanism), and most good jobs will buy at at any most price or there will be elite rebellion.
Thus, I conclude demand is is mostly (piecewise) inelastic enough that the increased profitability you speak of is thrown into serious doubt.
Meh, even in a socialized/single-payer/public/whatever system, someone at some point has to pay for it. Whether that's you right now, or the taxpayers collectively over time. More sickness means more money spent on trying to heal and care for sick people.
Wait until you hear how much Benzene (& similar chemicals Toluene and Xylene) are in gasoline. A little off gasing from plastics is tiny compared to exhaust in traffic or fumes while refueling.
And do not mistake "unscented" for "fragrance free." The latter actually means what it says. "Unscented" just means the fragrances in it are perceived as neutral
Plastics are terrible for there planet and for us as humans. However, they’re cheap, made everywhere and easy to make, can be made into whatever shape you want for an endless set of use cases, and weigh little.
At least for humans, it’d be great if we could somehow remove all the chemicals or find magic ones that are totally non-toxic, cheap, and easy to produce. Seems unlikely. We’re also not going to a world filled with wood and metal for all the reasons listed in the first paragraph. Seems like an untenable path unless someone invents something that is way better on the points that matter, or it’s regulated out of existence at great pain.
This seems to be a favorite of media these days. I assume in an effort to get more clicks.
In the past, if the media said "The President may have have committed perjury", they'd actually lay out the evidence - President testified X, but documents suggest X is untrue.
Today it seems like "may have" is just a cop out for generating smoke where there is no fire. And when someone comes back and says "you actually have no evidence that's true" they say "well, that why we said 'may have'".
They did "lay out the evidence". They even linked to the study. In comparison, your comment went far off course and left the very concrete topic at hand and article far to the side.
Exactly, all-cause mortality studies always seem so prone to confounding factors. The abstract of the linked paper doesn't mention if they tried to control for anything. Granted they do acknowledge this - "He cautioned that the biological connection between phthalates and early deaths has not been established, so the study does not prove phthalates were the direct cause of these early deaths."
At least they report science in a scientific way. I find it much worse when papers are sold as the "new definitive knowledge" by some newspaper and then you open the actual article and find a tiny sample size and autors thenselves listing dozens of warnings that could make their paper inconclusive.
Just curious, Did they control for the fact that people with elevated level of phtalates may be consuming more ultra processed food that are just extremely bad without any plastic?
Most packaging are an abomination, all the junk food you can buy in supermarket (ie 70% of food products) are wrapped in 2, 3 or even more layers of plastic and ink soaked paper, all of it being toxic to some level and environmentally detrimental.
Some products don't even need plastic packaging but are wrapped in plastic to avoid ink migration from their outer marketing shell.
I'd like to see a globalised effort to standardise packaging, either at national or continental level, imagine a standard set of containers manufactured by state sponsored companies, all of it being 100% recycled or reused, sellers get to chose between a few colors/fonts and a few types of packaging (frozen, liquid, solid, fresh food, &c.).
Correlation... no causation was mentioned in abstract.
From a nature paper: “Individuals are primarily exposed to HMW phthalates via ingestion of food contaminated through processing or packaging [19], as well as via inhalation in buildings containing PVC flooring or other materials [20,21,22].” — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9
From abstract of paper reference by The Guardian: “Multivariable models identified increased mortality in relation to high-molecular weight (HMW) phthalate metabolites”.
US "environmentalism" is utterly baffling when it comes to packaging. Case in point: I can no longer get plastic bags (which, by the way, have been biodegradable for the past 15 years or so), yet much of the stuff one buys in a typical US grocery store is _already_ enclosed in non-biodegradable plastic. Sometimes in 2-3 layers of it. What the fuck is the point of not providing the _biodegradable_ plastic bags? Wouldn't it be better to require from the manufacturers that stuff they supply is not wrapped in three layers of plastic to begin with, instead of inconveniencing the shoppers for no benefit whatsoever?
"biodegradable" just means the plastic is broken down into tiny plastic bits, not that it somehow magically dissolves into harmless liquids. All you get from "biodegradable" is more microplastic.
Here's an article that summarizes the issue better than I ever could: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/krogers-plasti.... And if that wasn't enough, Kroger also had collection bins for used bags, which I did use routinely. It's performative bullshit. I'm not sure why they're doing it. It certainly doesn't help them sell stuff.
Sorry for not including this in my original post, but I'm mostly on your side with this one. I despise the EUs ban on small disposable plastic items as well, because all replacements are utter garbage barely able to fulfill their purpose, while not doing anything at all regarding the pure volume of plastics used. Banning the source of 0.001% of all disposed plastic is, in my opinion, completely pointless, when there are much bigger fish to fry. Really, all I wanted to tell you is that biodegradable plastics are a marketing scam you shouldn't fall for, just like plastic "recycling".
Besides, I adapted the habit of always carrying two foldable plastic boxes in my car and two folded paper bags in my messenger pouch which I use since +5 years now anyways.
The reason they are doing it is fairly obvious and laid out in the article you linked: People don't give a fuck. Its enough to pretend to care about the environment so people can blissfully ignore the real changes and get a fuzzy feeling of having done something. Politically, it's much easier to enforce such a ban on plastic household items than trying to get the industry to change, who will object much more vehemently and with much, much more leverage than the average consumer.
Now that I think of it, some months ago I had a discussion about this ban with a women who legitimately thought plastic waste was somehow linked to global warming, as in more plastic waste => more global warming. Anecdotal of course, but it makes me wonder if this misconception (or close ones) are spread in the wider public perception or if this was just an outlier.
My dream situation would be to have standardized glass containers for most things, that I could then bring back to the store, and paper or _really_ biodegradable plastics for everything else. I'm sure it's doable with today's technology if we just stopped pretending to care and started to _actually_ care. But pretending to care is more profitable, so I'm not holding my breath.
And just to get out ahead of it-- can we also not blame plastic consumers, who after all are just trying to eat, and probably don't want to poison themselves.