[_qwfv]

Great. Regulation and reduction of plastic production is long overdue.

There are some places where it makes sense to use plastic, but we're far, far overproducing the stuff because it's convenient.

It's fantastically difficult to recycle in practice, burning it produces toxic smoke and carbon emissions, and putting it into the waste stream results in a bunch of it getting dropped on the sides of roadways.

[galangalalgol]

Is there a good list of what things we can reasonably replace? As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions.

Edit:. Looking around, electrical insulation, seals, and shock absorbers are the three things that I cant think of a good replacement for. Some seals like for weather proofing you could use spring bronze.

[Pfhreak]

Large, durable plastic use is less of a concern, if I understand correctly. Plastic use around food (and packaging in general), for instance, has a lifespan of approximately 6 months. Compare to the 13 years for plastics used by the automotive industry.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782

There's TONS of packaging that could be replaced by other materials -- particularly materials that can non-toxically decompose in the environment in a reasonable time frame.

[lstamour]

Anything that can be made from paper, should be. Primarily bags, shipping containers, product packaging, etc. I've seen Amazon replace plastic bubble wrap with paper-based bubble wrap, for example. They use really fine bits of paper and presumably glue to create the "bubbles".

Instead of using plastic to wrap shipping containers, you could use a more re-usable material. Or perhaps we could come up with cardboard "rings" or other techniques to keep stuff together instead of wrapping it in plastic.

We might have to use more soap or other sterilization techniques, but where practical, using glass containers and aluminum cans would still make sense. I'm certain that if plastic single-use containers were eliminated in convenience stores for a country, we'd see a switch to cans, glass and waxed paper instead, almost overnight. Same as in alcohol stores, perhaps.

[maxwell]

True to a point, but plastic and the cloud were transitioned to for many things a few years ago because of "saving trees". And then overused to the point of surpassing paper's previous carbon output.

Calling to mind palm oil, adopted as more healthy and sustainable. And then also over-done.

Disposability seems a deeper issue: a retreat to forest products doesn't seem the solution.

The fish-catching clear plastic rings that you throw away, or cut up, are bad, the cardboard packaging coated in paints is bad, but the craft beer heavy duty Paktech rings [1] and Roberts' Craft-Paks [2] seem harbingers of a more reusable + indefinably recyclable future, regardless ultimately of the specific materials involved.

A piece of the wider craft brewery innovation of the '10s in the U.S. [3]

1. https://paktech-opi.com

2. https://shop.robertspolypro.com/collections/craft-pak

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-b...

[galangalalgol]

Cans for food is iffy, without the liners doesn't it disintegrate the metal? Jars work well and can be reused. Bring back deposits!

[shard]

Cans for food is actually one thing I would like to see addressed with an alternative. With how ubiquitous cans are, it was a source of plastic in contact with foods that is difficult to avoid.

[perl4ever]

I wonder if tiny bits of solidified glue (plus paper, wood fibers, etc) in the environment are much better than tiny bits of plastic?

[redisman]

Yes. Nature has evolved ways to dispose of those (unless it’s a synthetic glue that doesn’t decompose)

[perl4ever]

What characterizes a "synthetic" glue, chemically?

Don't glues generally involve polymers, like plastics?

[robscallsign]

> As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions.

Respectfully, CV boots on car suspensions have a lifespan of several years, same with phone cases potentially.

As a first step I'm more interested in replacing the things that hundreds of millions of people discard multiple times a day. Starting off by thinking about CV boots and phone cases strikes me as being precipitously close to the "we can't replace everything so lets replace nothing" path.

[galangalalgol]

Not at all, I agree packaging and liners should never need to be plastic. Lets ban them now. Glass and ceramics can replace almost everything that metal can't. Recycle the metal and reuse the glass/ceramic. I was just astounded how few things really needed to be plastic.

[WheelsAtLarge]

The big problem is that there has been little to no effort on what to do with waste plastic. It's cheap to produce but it looks like it's expensive to deal with the waste. Right now it costs money to discard it so people and companies do their best to shift the burden to some one else.

Plastic is an important part of our modern society but we need to use it and get rid of it wisely.

[blihp]

Don't throw away your phone every couple of years and that phone case will last many, many years. Think of anything plastic that you throw away. The items you list are durable goods and are likely environmentally better and less toxic than what was used prior to plastic.

[datavirtue]

There is a process being developed where plastic can be recycled back into an oil be burning it and condensing the vapors/smoke into a liquid (capturing it). This is also very good news given the issues we have with recycling. This process would make it much easier since you would not have to sort.

[bogidon]

Curious if we can put said oil back into the earth we extracted it from, or if there are reasons that ecologically would be a bad idea. It’s interesting to me thinking about restoring the environment to a state prior to human interference.

[hateful]

The fact that there isn't a standard form factor for phones is a big part of the problem IMO.

[ArkanExplorer]

Phones are re-sold and re-used. They would account for a minor fraction of plastic use. It would be completely unreasonable to set a standard form factor and disrupt the market for an evolving product category.

What could use a standard form factor would be packaging, especially for glass jars and bottles which could be endlessly re-cycled.

[belinder]

Hopefully reduction of plastic production does not lead to reduction in plastic recycling.

[lstamour]

As TFA says:

> Plastic recycling was invented by the plastics industry in the 1970s to assuage environmental concerns without substantially reducing plastic consumption, according to Max Liboiron, an expert on plastic waste and a professor at Memorial University.

> It has never worked. Despite decades of effort, only about nine percent of Canada’s plastic waste is currently recycled, according to the 2019 ECCC-commissioned study.

[mediaman]

It is true that most plastic is not recycled. It is not true that recycling does not work.

California has 87% of its plastic beverage bottles recycled.

British Columbia implemented an extended consumer responsibility policy that allows the mixed-stream plastic to get recycled through an automated sortation, shredding and sortation system. Their recovery rate of plastic beverage containers was 73.9% in 2017.

Paper produces vastly more carbon than plastic for most disposable items. The existential risk to humans is climate change, more than litter.

We need to control litter and excess plastic by increasing recycle rates. The unwillingness to adopt better recycling infrastructure is due to unwillingness to adopt taxes to fund the conversion (the cost of converting mixed streams is greater than the market price of the output commodity), not because it is technologically infeasible.

The constant theme of recycling that works is government policy that increases the cost of plastic packaging, and uses those funds to stabilize markets or invest in the expensive equipment that it takes to process the material. But it's worth it to do that compared to the wasteful, CO2 blasting approach of "just switch to paper."

[belinder]

Right. My point is if we stop producing plastic we are still going to have a lot of plastic waste. Perhaps we could invest instead in actually making recycling work for the waste we already have

[harles]

I think the point is that plastic recycling has never worked and there’s no pathway to making it work in general - regardless of investment.

[29athrowaway]

Reducing and reusing are much more important than recycling.

[Pfhreak]

Not sure why it would?

[Mediterraneo10]

If there is less demand for plastic in general, then that means there could be less demand for recycling (properly sorted) old plastic to produce new plastic goods.

[Pfhreak]

We recycle less than 10% of our plastic. And of that, very little goes back to producing the same products -- plastic is typically degraded when recycled and converted from food packaging down into benches or clothing, both of which will shed microplastics into the environment before being sent to the landfill.

Plastic recycling is not an eternal loop like metal recycling can be. It's almost entirely downcycling when it happens at all.