[MyPasswordSucks]

We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.

Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.

[dpacmittal]

Let's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.

[smolder]

What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.

[grufkork]

I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...

[lmpdev]

This is probably the most important comment ITT

The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use sledgehammer methods like a “plastic tax” - which you’ll find very difficult to pass outside of more developed jurisdictions like the EU

[AnIrishDuck]

The economic term for this is "externality" [1].

A pigovian tax is one solution, though it suffers from issues like the one you describe.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

[yread]

Collecting, sorting and burning is not that expensive

[tsimionescu]

Burning is much worse than burying plastic - as it releases much of its mass as CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, and likely other pollutants as well.

[BurningFrog]

For CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You can burn trash to generate electricity too.

At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of the emissions.

One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the environmentally impact of things we personally touch. People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups, while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of sight.

[ddoeth]

In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.

Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.

I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1339439/plastic-waste-ma...

[numpad0]

I don't disagree with anything on this chain but I think things like hypothetical miles deep landfill can't be worse than burning, it'll stay there for million years and the next iteration of life to do the same discussion as being done here.

[sandworm101]

We also vastly overestimate the amount of trash created by the human race. Last time i did the math, a 1km cube could contain basically all the trash currently in every landfill a few times over. The plastic pollution problem is containable, literally. We just need to stop certain countries from dumping it into rivers.

[tsimionescu]

I'm just saying that plastic waste shouldn't be burned, regardless of how much or little we produce.

[nick__m]

Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But burning in facility design for that is really clean.

Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that they will eventually diversify.

Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull, without plastic millions of peoples would die every year from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death of everything is better than preventing a billion death.

And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is clear.

[tsimionescu]

I didn't say destroy life, I said destroy our civilization. With current global warmig trends, countries like Bangladesh will be rendered virtually uninhabitable by the end of century, leading to gigantic mass migrations that will likely lead to wars and other issues.

[tsimionescu]

> Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does.

I also wanted to answer this. This is non-scientific BS based on literally nothing. Risks don't work like this: unless you can quantify them, you can't act on them. Any activity has some potential risk of unknown catastrophic effects. Maybe there is some chance that after a threshold, flushing our toilets will cause tidal effects that rip our planet apart - it's unlikely but it's possible. So let's all stop flushing our toilets. And stop using 5G if we're there, some people think that has a high risk of causing cancer or whatever.

[infogulch]

Burn it with plasma gasification to reduce it to the simple molecules to eliminate all the pollutants. CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.

[tsimionescu]

> CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.

By what possible measure? Despite clear, well documented science, including very clear dire economical impact, and all within an extremely clear and short term time frame, with escalating effects already visible literally everywhere in the world, we have had almost 0 progress in combating global warming. The best we've done is slowing the rate of acceleration - as in CO2 release is still accelerating, just not as much.

Plastic waste has environmental impact, especially in the oceans, but nowhere near to the level that 2-3-4 degrees warming will have. And that is what we are currently on track for by the end of this century.

[ozim]

I think few cents do represent it. Production alone per piece is more like really small fraction of a cent.

[pineaux]

Came here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.

[Ray20]

I think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization costs with near-zero impact on the environment.

[jplrssn]

If it were that easy there wouldn't be a garbage patch the size of Texas floating in the Pacific.

[BurningFrog]

We produce uncountable billions of plastic bags. What specifically is the huge cost?

[ben_w]

Environmental. Those billions of not degrading bags end up in places that harm the ecosystem.

[BurningFrog]

I think they overwhelmingly end up in landfills, where they have no material effect on any ecosystem.

I'm no chemist, but they don't really react chemically with anything in nature, as I understand it.

I know it feels dirty and unnatural that they just lie there, but in practical terms I don't think they do any substantial harm.

[ben_w]

"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be limited to just developed nations — I visited Nairobi a decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".

However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p, increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because it's just so easy to just not care enough about free things to make sure they end up in landfill (or recycling): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...

[hollerith]

Most plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming amounts. They get into the human body through food and water.

You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics" does not ring any bells?

>[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with anything in nature

Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics bioaccumulate.

[croon]

Two scenarios here: 1) They don't react with anything, meaning the billions of tons we produce keep increasing. Forever. 2) They do react, break down, get into the soil, water, blood, people, and have studied detrimental effects, and many more yet unstudied.

[andrepd]

Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.

[bell-cot]

That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing.

If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.

[tsimionescu]

Note that burning plastic is one of the worse things you could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where it does far more damage then if you just bury it.

[bell-cot]

In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.

[tsimionescu]

The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.

[Ray20]

Disposing not cost that much. Plastic disposing is CHEAPER than it's production.

[quickthrowman]

It does not cost a dollar to burn or bury a single plastic bag, there’s no reason to be hyperbolic.

[card_zero]

> super-easy to mold

Or "plastic".