Conversation

Plastic has plenty of issues, but the vague bs attempt to connect it to climate is especially bad. Plastic mailer packaging for instance is generally far lower carbon than more aesthetic paper/cardboard that the EU in particular loves.
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(referring here to the kind of mailer you get e-commerce items in, grocery bags are similar but separate case, industrial is separate etc etc)
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Things people have poor intuitions about: - mass/density of materials - embodied carbon - invisible breakage/loss cost prevented by good packaging - number of reuses required to make a reusable item beat single uses - gap between visibility and actuality
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It’s kinda like how people routinely overestimate the number of immigrants they’re hostile to Overindexing on aesthetics is the root cause of a lot of shaky conclusions
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Probably the biggest concerning issue with plastics is microplastics endocrine disruption. It’s unrelated to climate impact where it’s somewhere between a rounding error negative and probably net positive through breakage/loss prevention.
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Article goes deep, but the headline takeaway is: you want to design plastics for recyclability by minimizing mix-ins, labels, dyes, adhesives, etc, keep them consistent and pure for easier separability into high-grade feedstock. Beyond that, chemical recycling techniques.
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These are two largely orthogonal factors, right? One is energy cost to create, which is low for ie a plastic grocery bag and high for a cloth one. The other is reusability, which is the opposite for plastic vs cloth bags.
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I’m talking about single-use mailers, but plastic generally wins the reusable use case too. The number of uses required to recover higher cost of cloth is usually far higher than people realize and most people discard sooner.
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