[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.

[smegger001]

Reusable syringes if you autoclaved and chemically sterilized to the point even prions were distroyed wouldn't be the worst thing.

I prefer glass bottles and they are far easier to recycle. (Not that my cities waste collection bothers to do so and I have to go out of to do so).

[lazide]

The issue with both is what happens when someone screws up the cleaning and sterilization (or flat out skips it).

New material has never been exposed to anything dangerous, so dangerous contamination never needs to be removed.

It’s a big reason why plastic is so rarely recycled anywhere that it touches food or goes into someone’s body.