How will we ever get away from plastics when they are ubiquitous for safety

Plastic seals food, sterile medical implements, medicine, beverages, etc… it’s seems like plastic is used as a way to seal things safely. Post pandemic rising, I see even more. My work used to be have plastic utensils in the cafeteria, for example, an already wasteful thing. Now, post-2020, every fork, knife, and spoon is individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper. I feel like the more my desire to escape plastic intensifies, the more plastic I see all around me everywhere.

How can we get away from plastic as a safety layer?

Chobbes,

I’m probably going to hell for saying this, but… I’m not that worried about plastic pollution? Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize single use items and plastic ending up places it shouldn’t, but if it’s the best option for food / medical safety or cheaply producing something with a lower carbon footprint… we should probably just use it without too much guilt? The world is almost certainly better because of plastic in my opinion.

time_lord,

You can buy bamboo utensils individually wrapped in wax and brown paper. For most one time use items we already have a non-plastic alternative, it’s just less convenient.

pinkdrunkenelephants,

It’d be better to come up with ways to efficiently break them down chemically so they can be remade into new plastic.

intensely_human,

I feel like the more my desire to escape plastic intensifies, the more plastic I see around me everywhere

Congrats you learned something about how your brain works. My advice is to stop freaking out about plastic.

intensely_human,

The answer is that we’re not going to get away from plastic

bartolomeo,

One way is to keep the plastic but make it out of something renewable instead of out of petroleum products. It can have the same short term properties but eventually disintigrate instead of turning into microplastics or releasing harmful particles when burned.

datelmd5sum,

What does the source of the monomer have to do with disintegration, microplastics and harmfulness when burned? PE is the most commonly used plastic in the world. It’s made out of ethylene, which is about as simple as a molecule can be. Nothing prevents you making renewable PE, except it’s cheaper to make from fossil sources.

bartolomeo,

They’re called bioplastics.

Leate_Wonceslace,
@Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

This maintains the problem of microplastics, which are now a ubiquitous chemical contaminant that we should be trying to reduce and remove.

bartolomeo,

They’re called bioplastics and they eliminate the threat of microplastic.

Leate_Wonceslace,
@Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Using renewable resources to make plastic does not by itself solve that problem; you need the resulting material to be substantially different from the original.

kaffiene,

Start with the easy wins and replace the others as options come available. We don’t have to fix everything at once.

bacondragonoverlord,

Well for one: most of the things listed already have a solution:

Food? Glassware and Metal containers. Or Even reusable single type plastic containers, like a tupperware.

Sterile medical supplies already are packed in a paper bag. The ones that are in plastic actually aren’t.

Medicine can also be packed into glass and metal containers.

Beverages can be put in cans or Reusable Glass bottles or you simply drink tap water. (I know in some countries that’s not safe but it should be)

And honestly your cafeteria is the most ridiculous example. Get a dishwasher and use real cutlery. Or bring your own cutlery from home. (Is it actually a cafeteria or just a glorified break room?)

knightly,
@knightly@pawb.social avatar

My only note here is that canned beverages have a layer of non-recyclable plastic on the inside to prevent chemical interactions between the contents and the metal. Glass bottles are fine though as (aside from plastic labels) they’re fully recyclable.

onion,

Even better, they are reusable

littlecolt,

Glorified break room with a shop area, convenience store food/snacks. Sometimes catering comes in from places but otherwise, yep, big break room. I never use their awful cutlery. I’ve been known to purchase pizza rolls because yum. And hey, those come.in a totally cardboard container lol

meekah,
@meekah@lemmy.world avatar

Man, I spent a short while in the states and what I miss most is Pizza rolls and the quesarito from Taco Bell. Ridiculously large milkshakes from sonics drive thru are probably also up there

littlecolt,

Bad news, quesarito is no more. The closest we have now is the grilled cheese burrito which is basically a burrito with cheese grilled onto the outside.

meekah,
@meekah@lemmy.world avatar

Aw man. I really liked the double layer tortilla with cheese sauce in between.

shalafi,

I loathe plastic waste, but here’s a conundrum I read about.

Elementary school kids learned about environmentalism, wanted to do better. They got the school to dump plastic utensils and plates in favor of steel. No brainer, right?

Turns out the energy cost for making the steel meant they would have to wash those items 1,000+ times to make up for the plastic energy production. Still, no brainer, right?

Then they added in the energy costs for washing those items 1,000+ times. Not remotely worth doing. (Factor in loss, it’s even worse.)

We got ourselves in a hella mess. Getting off plastic is going to mean cheap, clean and abundant energy. I mean shitloads of power. I’m all in for nuclear, at least as a stopgap.

Zak,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

The primary concern with single-use plastics is not energy consumption but plastic waste. That, of course raises the question of how to weigh one kind of environmental harm against another, and I do not have a good answer.

My instinct here is that not generating so much trash is the energy use in this case, but I can’t prove that.

bacondragonoverlord,

It’s a balancing act for sure. You have to understand what’s good for the climate isnt necessarily good for the environment. However I believe we have to understand that cleaning up the plastic in the world is imho harder than recapturing co2 since you can’t just build a big machine wherever you want and it does it’s job. Plastic you have to hunt down manually, and good luck doing that for micro plastics

But I don’t think your example works as well as eg plastic Vs glas bottles. Your energy dilemma can be solved simply by having photovoltaic panels and/or hooking the dishwasher up to a renewably generated hot water supply.

Also even in your calculations which I assume are not optimised 2000+ wash cycles is only like 6 years of use. And I still think that’s a no brainer.

dingus,

Tangentially related, I work in a medical laboratory, and the amount of daily trash we generate (not talking plastic specifically) is quite frankly horrifying. But there isn’t a good solution for my field.

rbesfe,

Sterile medical supplies already are packed in a paper bag. The ones that are in plastic actually aren’t.

Uh… What? Sterile medical instruments are absolutely packed in plastic, paper is too permeable and will lead to contamination. Even if it looks like paper it’s still lined with plastic. Have you ever worked in a medical setting before?

minyakcurry,

Me putting paper into the autoclave for the sake of the environment

bam13302,

I’m pretty sure it’s wax lined paper they use

Aleric,

Same for science. I have autoclaved thousands of things. Most get packed into something like these.

curiousaur,

Ban them and let the market figure it out. They always do.

Zess,

And forget all the people who will die in the mean time!

curiousaur,

That’s why you announce the ban a year or two before.

RBWells,

I don’t think individual shrink wrapping of utensils is a necessary use, every time I pull that thin plastic off something I think we are all going to hell.

But as others have noted, we don’t need to eliminate all use, we need to radically reduce use and find a technology to deal with the remaining amount.

BackOnMyBS,
@BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world avatar

And the plastic on some of those shrink wraps have a terrible squeak.

Oyster_Lust,
@Oyster_Lust@lemmy.world avatar

Everyone should read the Plastics Paradox. It’s good to be well informed.

PlasterAnalyst,

Single use consumer plastics should be banned.

Mango,

We have an enzyme that eats the stuff now. Everyone calm down.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

LOL, I got downvoted into oblivion like you for sharing the opposite view. Classic.

Mango,

How do you suppose that’s an opposite, and why are you stalking my posts?

shinigamiookamiryuu,

One dismisses the supposed importance of plastics, the other dismisses the importance of needing to remove them.

If I seem stalk-ish, it’s only due to how engaged in this place I am. No harm my friend (or at least I don’t think so).

Mango,

No. That’s not what this comment is.

surewhynotlem,

Where?

aelwero,

On Google. PETase if you want the nerdy stuff, or “plastic eating enzyme” if you want news articles.

surewhynotlem,

My point was that, while it exists, it doesn’t exist.

It can’t be released widespread into the wild to eat microplastics because it would severely damaged infrastructure. So while it’s a neat toy in the lab, and might make it’s way into waste disposal processes, it doesn’t exist where we need it to exist. And it can’t. So it’s not a solution.

aelwero,

It could be used at recycling centers, and at the largest “customers” of those recycling centers, the landfills…

Do you separate your plastics? The practice is waning. You see it done in less communities these days, specifically because there’s nowhere for that plastic to go, and it’s gonna end up in a landfill no matter how effectively or avidly you separate it, and people are realizing that and simply not bothering.

If there was a big ass bin somewhere that ate plastic, we could actually do what we’ve been pretending to do for 40 years and remove it from our waste disposal systems. We could separate plastic, and the plastic could get hauled off to the big plastic eating bin to be depolymerized… Hell, you could just run all the trash through it and landfill whatever got left.

Octospider,

… We’ve known of various organisms that consume plastic for over a decade. Nothing has come from it.

Mango,

Why not?

littlecolt,

I’ve played Stray, I know where that one ends.

DessertStorms,
DessertStorms avatar

Plastic isn't the problem, capitalism is.

JubilantJaguar,

IMO this is an unpopular opinion mainly because capitalism is a terribly polarizing word which now means different things to different people. On the left, it’s associated with imperialism and oppression. Among moderates and liberals it means the flawed ideology which beat something even worse, i.e. communism.

But the original meaning of capitalism was basically: accumulation. In other words, economic growth. And I think the jury is now in on this one. In the end, exponential growth is just not compatible with a living planet. The evidence is mounting on all sides. One example: the only period in recent history when the environmental indicators were all pointing the right way was the short deep recession that followed the financial crisis. That says an awful lot.

As a liberal I’ve changed my mind on this subject and I now agree with you.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

We did rather fine in ancient times without plastic. We will find a way.

AnyOldName3,
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world avatar

Lots more people died of easily preventable and treatable diseases, so fine is pushing it.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Yeah, that’s what a lack of medical knowledge does. Not sure how that’s dominantly related to plastic.

Mango,

No we didn’t.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Plastic was invented in 1907.

Mango,

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    shinigamiookamiryuu,

    I wasn’t sure what else you could be implying. We certainly survived from ancient times up to 1907, or we wouldn’t be here today, so it’s difficult to see how plastic is an absolute necessity. Helpful, yes, but not required for prosperity.

    Interactions like this certainly explain my ratings though :( Qucikest exile (for a lack of a better word) I’ve ever received.

    Mango,

    Let me kick your teeth in and infect you with COVID. Afterwards tell me how you got along fine because you didn’t die.

    Asudox,
    @Asudox@lemmy.world avatar

    Let’s not be rude against each other, okay?

    littlecolt,

    Narrator voice: We didn’t

    shinigamiookamiryuu,

    Plastic was invented in 1907.

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