[mlyle]

> Biodegradable or not means much less than it sounds like

Long-term stability of plastics means that the problems from microplastics today could still be problems in a million years. It's worse than nuclear waste in that regard: at least the hottest isotopes degrade quickly and the less hot still halve on a predictable schedule. Currently, for a lot of plastics, all you've got removing them from circultion are UV degradation and weathering processes, along with processes burying them in sediments for unknown periods.

But the microbial environment could at least confine this to be a very bad problem for our time, instead of forever.

[hanniabu]

Companies will just create bacteria resistant plastic and continue to fuck us

[freemint]

And nature (maybe with our hand) will catch up. It's playing cat and mouse with a mouse that stands still once the plastic is produced.

[trulyme]

"and continue to provide what we want", you mean? It's not the companies that are the (sole) problem.

[soperj]

I don't know. For a while the major toothpaste companies were putting plastic beads in toothpaste as grit. I would say that's a company issue.

[heurisko]

It's the 21st century version of lead in makeup.

I'm certain in 100-150 years it will be viewed in the same way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian-era_cosmetics

[hackarimoo]

The problem is the system. You can expect one or two persons to act rational, but at the scale of 100s, 1000s, millions, it's just crowd dynamics following statistical processes, just as the market itself is.

If we want anything to change, we need systemic changes to what behavior is incentivized by the world we live in - and I can not think of anything that would do the job other than abolishing or at least heavily restraining capitalism.