[brocklobsta]

Plastic is just too good a material for too many use cases.

On a side note, I had a shower thought the other day. Isn't plastic one form of carbon sequestration? It doesn't decompose easily and holds carbon in place. If plastic is land filed then it will remain out of the atmosphere. I know this is an overly simplistic view, but given plastic is a byproduct of oil refinement, I don't see too much to hate.

[woodruffw]

I don't think we can count it as carbon sequestration, at least not in a useful sense: we burn lots of energy to pump it out of the ground (i.e., where it actually is sequestered) and to refine it and mold it into shapes. Throwing it into a dump is probably better than burning it, but the best thing of all would be to only extract the bare minimum we need.

[culi]

Look at East Palestine. Those chemicals are chemicals used to make a type of plastic.

PET is made of ethylene glycol and dimethyl terephthalate. Ethylene glycol in particular is known as a teratogen (a chemical which causes physical deformities).

In addition, there is a big difference in forever chemicals that are now geographically distributed throughout the world, especially the ocean seabeds, vs having it all in one place. And the environmental and health effects of certain microplastics are still being studied but research in mice and rats shows they accumulate in the liver and kidney and induce significant alterations in blood biomarkers for neurotoxins

[aziaziazi]

That’s will do the job for you, not your kids. Not an expert but pretty sure most of our plastics degrades pretty quickly with by the UV, wind and rain.

Also the article is focused on PET, I don’t think your shower is made from this crap.