[scotty79]

Oil wells literally pump out stuff from purely natural dinosaur landfill. Coal mines extract material from tree landfills that happily accumulated waste for millions of years.

Give us a million years or two and we'll figure out what to do with plastic as well. Either we are gonna do it or some other species.

[llamaimperative]

Wait so which of those dead organisms that decompose were like plastic? Answer: None.

Interesting pattern in this thread of anti-alarmists thinking they’re privy to some special knowledge but actually it’s stuff everyone learns in like 5th grade (btw it wasn’t literal dinosaurs, but whatever).

[lazide]

At the time - wood. Wood was literally like plastic, and didn’t bio degrade.

Which is why we have veins of coal.

Near as anyone can tell.

[llamaimperative]

Which type of wood particulate is suspected of being endocrine disruptive and is being found bioaccumulating in the reproductive organs of ~every organism on earth?

[scotty79]

Coal was and still is responsible for so so many death. And it comes from biosphere landfill we dug up maybe too soon.

[llamaimperative]

Good response if the argument was natural == good, but it's not. Lighting coal on fire is also bad. Coal didn't suddenly zap into existence and then to global prevalence in air, food, and water within decades.

[lazide]

The argument is that burying things like plastics in a landfill is better than natural equivalents. Which you still seem impossibly locked into ignoring.

[lazide]

Wow, really trying to move the goalposts here eh?

Tannins, when they first were evolved, almost certainly. And they still are used by plants to kill pests, albeit it’s steadily been losing effectiveness and the typical biological arms race has been going on a long time.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannin]

Again, I’m not saying plastics are awesome or perfect or whatever, and there aren’t problems.

I’m pointing out that if you think ‘putting it in a hole in the ground’ is somehow worse than the ‘natural’ solutions that’s ridiculous.

Especially since ‘letting it sit where it was made and have things eat it’, or ‘accumulate in a hole until it gets buried’, or ‘get washed into a swamp or the ocean and accumulate until they get eaten, subducted, or broken down’ is a classic natural way for waste to be handled in nature. And there are plenty of natural things that are super nasty that this literally happens with all the time, and kills lots of stuff.

And nature regularly has huge die offs, poison events like red tides, etc. from purely natural causes. So clearly this isn’t a ‘solved problem’ in nature.

If we even had a single event like that for humans related to plastics (or even an identifiable single event in animals where we could see it), we’d be having a very different discussion.

If you were arguing for literally not producing plastic at all, then it might be a different discussion - but that seems to be clearly impossible at this point, and not what anyone is arguing.

[llamaimperative]

Uhhh that's not moving the goal posts except if you're starting from your own strawman. Burying gigantic amounts of plastic isn't suboptimal because humans bad/nature good/plastic ugly/etc., it's bad because of the actual effects that we're seeing in nature.

Tell me: how frequently do you think entirely new tannins are introduced to an ecosystem? How global are these new tannins introduced? Are plants suddenly producing a new tannin and spreading it across the entire globe within 50 years? Because we're producing totally new molecules in gigantic amounts and spreading them across the entire globe at a rate that is far too fast for us to even understand what the long term effects are, never mind for organisms to evolve to a new equilibrium in their presence

The lack of co-evolution is the issue. The tendency to invent, mass produce, and disseminate new molecules across the entire globe year after year at a rate much faster than evolution is the problem.

I don't know why you're harping on this "things die in nature" point. No one is disputing that.

[scotty79]

We are still in the first million years of plastics on Earth, give it time. You'll see that after mere million years of producing plastics there won't be a new molecule introduced every decade or even every century.

[lazide]

And what effects are we seeing in nature because we bury plastics?

Because all the effects you are talking about near as I can tell is because we aren’t burying all the plastics. We dispose of them in other ways, or don’t at all.

Because when they’re buried, they don’t interact with anything anymore.

Literally.

So seriously, WTF?

[scotty79]

I'm not anti-alarmist. I think we are screwed. And need to triage. Global warming first. If plastics save us some CO2 then we should use them. We will deal with them maybe next century. Same goes for nuclear. Sustainable farming and other things. Trying to solve all problems at once will ensure that we fail with solutions to all.

[llamaimperative]

I agree with prioritization but seriously disagree with your low-risk assessment of plastic. We have very good reason to suspect these compounds are disruptive to endocrine systems and we’re finding them bioaccumulating — even inter generationally — in almost every organism we look at.

Those two pieces of information by themselves should dramatically shorten your window of when this stuff will bite us, I.e. there’s good reason to suspect at least that our current obesity and fertility crises are significantly exacerbated by( if not totally caused by) plastic poisoning. It is absolutely not a given that we have time to solve this problem.

[scotty79]

I agree there are potential risks. So we shouldn't be mucking around with trying to recycle or burn it. Just set up a good system for storing it inertly under ground.

I wouldn't go as far as blaming plastic for any of our specific ailments because there are so many better candidates for primary cause in each case but I agree that the potential for some harm is there.

For example with obesity. Japanese don't suffer from it and they use heaps of single use plastics and eat a lot of marine based food that could accumulate microplastics. They just teach their kids to like broccoli instead of stuffing them with industrial grade corn syrup to shut them up.

[llamaimperative]

I'm pretty sure OP wasn't suggesting that we light it on fire or try to recycle it. They were suggesting that we use some of the materials that our biosphere has naturally figured out how to recycle whenever possible. I'd suggest that we increase the price of plastics to try to account for these externalities, similar to what we should do for HFCS (and sugar generally) per your comment.

Plastics' reproductive harm is very well established in marine life and early studies in mammalian life is pretty much in line with it. This stuff is almost certainly very bad, and we're using it for absolutely everything due to its rather fantastic properties and extremely low cost.

Agreed for obesity, there are more significant (and more addressable) causes -- but that's still quite far from "these are inert."

[lazide]

Really? Because I don’t see how one could argue that in context.

Do you see us going back to Glass and metal reusable syringes?

Or newspaper, for meats and other foods?

Or non-vulcanized rubber for tires? (Aka natural latex)

Or sheep skin condoms?

Or glass bottles for everything?

Or tarpaper and twine wire insulation?

Or unlined tin cans for food? (Anything acidic would be uncannable)

Or any of a million other basic ‘background’ things we use or interact with daily? Like hell, computers?

And thats even ignoring that crude oil is a natural substance that even seeps from the ground on it’s own in many places.