There is a way to get rid of some of the plastic in your life. Check out ETEE for a way to make some home products that you probably currently buy in plastic bottles. Buy a refillable bottle for water from Clearly Filtered. It comes with a carbon filter, so when you’re out and about and run out of water, you can fill it from any source and have it cleaned with your filter. There are many available shampoos now in bars, and the one I use from ETEE gives my hair more body than the volume shampoo I used to buy from Aveda. Go back to using powdered detergent for washing clothes and for your dishwasher. If we all start doing this, eventually, companies might get the message that we want them to stop using plastic.
Little changes add up. I use reusable mesh bags for produce instead of yet another plastic bag--and if you're not buying wee things like green beans, put those three apples and two onions directly on the counter. Why use a bag at all? They have, unfortunately, all been slapped with a sticker with the code the cashier needs to know broccoli from bananas.
My wife objects to my putting produce in the cart w/o the obligatory plastic bag. I ignore her complaints. The cashier doesn't even bat and eye. Bagging groceries is another problem. My wife has cloth bags to put the groceries in, but that bag seldom gets into the car. We're trying to fight the fight, but there are a lot of obstacles.
I try very hard not to purchase products in plastic. Sometimes it's easy; beer comes in cans and glass bottles which are fully recyclable, and the dairy we patronize uses returnable glass bottles. Other times it's damn near unavoidable. Meat from the butcher shop comes in butcher paper but almost every other place packages it in foam trays with plastic wrappers. Our local recycling operation says that the plastics they accept are all recycled but there's no way to know if the places that claim to recycle them actually do; they may be like Exxon.
I've read that plastic waste will soon outweigh marine life in the oceans of this planet. Microplactics have been detected in the air, on mountain tops and at the North Pole. I've actually purchased organic veggies sold in plactic bags and containers. We certainly need to reduce the use of plastic. There are no good alternatives I'm aware of. I say dig a deep hole and bury it at least until some genuinely helpful technology (nanotech?) is developed. What does CHATGPT offer for solutions? George Carlin always used the phrase "We're circling the drain" in regards to the fate of humanity. But now the drains are using plastic pipes. Maybe rearranging the deck chairs on the USS Titanic would be a better metaphor.
Thank you Sandy Bell. Also "Plastics: A Global Crisis and What We Can Do" by yours truly is available on climatefriendlylifesyle.substack.com. Where ever you can get good information on actions you can take, please follow through. Big Oil is doubling down on plastic production as green energy sources become more abundant and cheaper.
I don't know why everyone wastes their time talking about recycling, as though that approach had every produced a single success. The key to solving the plastics crisis (and all other waste crises) is to use scientific common sense, the one approach that has never been tried. Stop designing plastic items for discard and design them for perpetual reuse. This is the way that you can have reduced creation of plastic. The manufacturers hate this concept because designing for discard insures repeated sales. But for god sakes, forget about recycling. That will get you nowhere. Look at zerowasteinstitute.org. Scientific research is required for solving any problem and research into reuse methods is the key to progress in this field also.
Not so surprising:The biggest lying corporation(Exxon) teamed up with the biggest lying politician(Trump) to tell us that climate change is fake news and that what they say is gospel.Now America and the world will suffer the consequences.Are Americans dupes or dopes?
In the country many people burn their garbage and throw plastic into the fire, anything actually to avoid the expense of a dump fee and a day of travel. They don't realize that the burning of plastic releases cancer causing dioxins into the atmosphere. Some don't want to realize this because it will cost more money for the proper disposal. But isn't that where the industrialists (esp. Fossil Fuel Corporations) count on the government and community volunteer organizations to clean up behind while they move on to some bigger money making schemes that stress and poison the planet . Oh money got made! Don't Dump On Me
Using less plastic is not a realistic solution. While laudable it is impossible to eliminate it from your life. Try to get out of the grocery store without plastic. Impossible. Are you driving a car? Even electric cars are full of plastic. Use paper trash bags instead of plastic? I can almost guarantee that compostable trash bag will be full of non-recyclable plastic when you take it to the curb in a (plastic) garbage container.
There are many essential uses for plastic in our life styles but to reduce, reuse and recycle are the best way to approach the problem. Even though plastic overwhelms the County Recycle Program, the local people show caring and support by dealing responsibly with waste instead of just dumping it on our wildlife (eating plastic kills) . The production and disposal of waste in our wasteful society is what the government should be regulating since it sanctions the paperwork purgatory that a corporation is.
One-third of your approach is a complete failure. Recycling is nothing but a scam. But there is zero research into reusing. How can anyone expect that the difficult and interconnected question of optimal and maximal reuse can be figured out by seat of the pants guesses. Scientific research into how to reuse every single commodity should be an active focus of every university research department.
It's "Beyond Belief". My town of Falmouth i is doing everything it can to ban plastics and it is working to some extent We even got rid of the roadside recycled "nip" bottles. My wife and I do everything we can to minimize our plastic intake, but it's not easy. Remember the scene in the film, "The Graduate" where the graduate is pulled aside by a well-wisher and is given a piece of advice, "Plastics!" as if that was somehow to be pursued as a lifelong career. Harry Shearer, on his show "Le Show" uses a doctored version of that scene by making the advice "Microplastics".
Polymers are a fabulous invention. There is no way that a modern society can run without them. Forget the approach to not use any plastic. That is now impossible. Instead what we need to do is to design every product to be reused over and over. Today they are designed to be used once and thrown into a garbage can.
It's a lesson that our wastefulness is teaching each one of us. We need government regulations on the production and use of plastics, as with so many of our hard won environmental protection regulations that are becoming a thing of the past in regard to the monster machines of the fossil fuel industry corporatists harvesting our natural resources and dumping their waste on the living. The politicians and various agency officials are poised to give permits to harvest our National Parks and Federal Lands with Senator Manchin's ( l-WV) 'Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024'. Water For Life! Stop Hydraulic Fracturing Now! Don't Dump on Me!
Many people like to urge regulation but they have no idea of what the regulations would regulate. So all they do is urge more recycling which is a total waste of time and an abdication of scientific thinking. The sole point of any regulation should be the imposition of scientific research into methods of reusing every commodity perpetually.
Using less plastic is a great, albeit, very difficult to attain, goal. Throwing it away merely increases the amount left in our atmosphere. Maybe, some effort, by someone much smarter than me , could be made to do small-scale break down of plastic to be recast into building blocks similar to cinder blocks?!
You don't need to break it down or destroy it. You need to reuse it over and over. There is a goal worth working for. But there is no research anywhere into this outcome.
Interested in how it might be, that it could be reused, without changing its form. Obviously, bottles can be used multiple times, and milk jugs can be reused, but, what about bags, and packaging?
Heated and extruded into solid blocks? Used instead of sand, in concrete paving?
There must be a way to reconfigure all but the bags, and they should be outlawed!
Bo Bowley: Thanks for at least thinking about it. All your comment demonstrates is the need for research into reuse. Reuse is not trivial, the way that most people imagine. Industry pushing recycling has inculcated the absurd notion that the way that used articles are treated should be immediately obvious without any serious work. When I talk about reuse, I am invariably bombarded with questions of the ilk: " Well how would you reuse xxxxxxxxxx?" And they mention their favorite conundrum. As if I must surely be a repository, a Wikipedia of all the world's answers and they will never have to do any work to find any answers. Recycling is the only effort that depends on magic, with no work needed. In the real world we do scientific research to come up with solutions to problems.
Your easy imagining that plastic objects should be essentially destroyed into low grade, throw away forms to claim to be barely reusing the bare materials, is an illustration of the low grade of popular thinking as a result of having brain pollution from too much recycling. That is not reuse. There are many ways to change the design of all plastic articles to make them robust and reusable as original items. But you must free your mind of the concept that destroying articles and reexpressing them as mere low grade materials is worthy of being called reuse. It is not. JUST ONE SIMPLE EXAMPLE, NOT A COMPLETE SOLUTION. We are making cloth bags all over the place. Well, plastic can make an excellent bag that is designed for a longer life than a cloth bag. First make it 20 mils thick, replace the sharp corners with cleanable smooth corners, think about replaceable and repairable handles, add in compartments for frozen goods for example, reinforce all the weak corners that tend to wear first, give it the possibility of taking wheels etc. Start thinking about possibilities, open your mind and the possibilities will start flooding in. And this is just a first concept. Imagine what could be done with some funded, deep, scientific redesigning which allows trials and tests of different designs.
Well, I humbly stand at the foot of Mount Olympus, dwarfed in the glare of the brilliance shining from the all-knowing! I’m just…”DUH!” So, the solution isn’t recycling. It removing plastics from our planet, but creating bags of heavier plastic to replace biodegradable bags of cloth?! Damn! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that! Just too dense, I guess. Please excuse me, your Highness.
Bo: I don't understand what is it in my explanation that generated all the snark. I guess it was the arrogance (in your mind) of my suggesting that things could be different from what YOU are used to. I run into this mental rigidity all the time because new ideas are not given much respect in this country, outside of scientists. What is wrong with a heavier bag of plastic that will last a hundred years while giving yeoman service providing an easily cleaned smooth surface, specialized features and easy repair and maintenance? Do you realize that a bag like that would replace twenty thousand of todays 0.5 mil monstrosities while offering superior reusable functionality of all of them? It seems that you just have a hatred of plastic in any form and no response other than a total ban of all plastic will satisfy you. Well wake up and smell the coffee. Polymers are a brilliant invention for a modern society and are here to stay. My favorite example is the use of PVC insulation for wires. Close your eyes and imagine a forest of hundreds or thousands of wires such as you must have seen somewhere, with every wire going to its intended location as it nestles up against hundreds of other wires. Without plastic insulation this would be impossible. There are a million other examples. We are not going to morph into a world without plastic. What we must do is design it all more intelligently. I was careful only to suggest that you START thinking about new designs. I didn't say that I was offering the acme of intelligent design. That would require hard research. I guess thought is a burden too far.
As for your mention of "biodegradable" with its obvious "greenness" in your mind. Did you ever stop long enough to contemplate what you are actually assuming? I guess not because waste solutions are all arrived at the same way. Throw some shit on the whiteboard and see what sticks. Something which is degradable in any way is just a way to build discard into a product. Degrading is not reusing. Biodegrading is no better than other forms of degradation. Not only does practice indicate that the degradation is not actually going to happen (see below) but you are talking about growing millions of tons of fibers with all of the negatives that implies and then planning on throwing them away after one use (probably).
Are you aware that there are literal mountains of fibers of unwanted cloths in Ghana and in Chile in the Atacama desert, much of it surely biodegradable, because we produce so much more than we can use in a reasonable way. Cudgel your brain and try to come up with a solution to the irresponsible creation of clothing fashions that results in millions of tons of fibers being piled up because there is no further use for them. Learn more at my website at zerowasteinstitute.org under PROJECTS>CLOTHING.
As for my bona fides, I ran the company I founded called Zero Waste Systems Inc. for ten years, finding new ways to reuse every single waste chemical that Silicon Valley produced and then much more. Hundreds of tons and millions of dollars worth of chemicals we kept out of dumps. That was the first use in the world of the term Zero Waste. I've thought about the waste problem a lot more deeply and for longer than you have.
The plastic itself can be cast into walls, fencing, lattice there are companies making picnic tables from recycled plastic. A lot more should be done more people need to care about clean air and water on God's green earth before they become commodities. We only have another month to do something before the government gets focused on price gouging the secret service to protect the president at his own place
I was hoping for jailhouse arrest. 20 years ago he would have been convicted or extradited to Russia for being a commie minion, welcome to the new a.b.normal
There is a way to get rid of some of the plastic in your life. Check out ETEE for a way to make some home products that you probably currently buy in plastic bottles. Buy a refillable bottle for water from Clearly Filtered. It comes with a carbon filter, so when you’re out and about and run out of water, you can fill it from any source and have it cleaned with your filter. There are many available shampoos now in bars, and the one I use from ETEE gives my hair more body than the volume shampoo I used to buy from Aveda. Go back to using powdered detergent for washing clothes and for your dishwasher. If we all start doing this, eventually, companies might get the message that we want them to stop using plastic.
Little changes add up. I use reusable mesh bags for produce instead of yet another plastic bag--and if you're not buying wee things like green beans, put those three apples and two onions directly on the counter. Why use a bag at all? They have, unfortunately, all been slapped with a sticker with the code the cashier needs to know broccoli from bananas.
My wife objects to my putting produce in the cart w/o the obligatory plastic bag. I ignore her complaints. The cashier doesn't even bat and eye. Bagging groceries is another problem. My wife has cloth bags to put the groceries in, but that bag seldom gets into the car. We're trying to fight the fight, but there are a lot of obstacles.
I try very hard not to purchase products in plastic. Sometimes it's easy; beer comes in cans and glass bottles which are fully recyclable, and the dairy we patronize uses returnable glass bottles. Other times it's damn near unavoidable. Meat from the butcher shop comes in butcher paper but almost every other place packages it in foam trays with plastic wrappers. Our local recycling operation says that the plastics they accept are all recycled but there's no way to know if the places that claim to recycle them actually do; they may be like Exxon.
You are wasting your time worrying about recycling. Recycling never worked for solving anything.
Much of the plastic we try to recycle apparently ends up in the landfills.
Because recycling is a scam!
I've read that plastic waste will soon outweigh marine life in the oceans of this planet. Microplactics have been detected in the air, on mountain tops and at the North Pole. I've actually purchased organic veggies sold in plactic bags and containers. We certainly need to reduce the use of plastic. There are no good alternatives I'm aware of. I say dig a deep hole and bury it at least until some genuinely helpful technology (nanotech?) is developed. What does CHATGPT offer for solutions? George Carlin always used the phrase "We're circling the drain" in regards to the fate of humanity. But now the drains are using plastic pipes. Maybe rearranging the deck chairs on the USS Titanic would be a better metaphor.
Throwing out some black plastic kitchen utensils. Thanks for the beyondplastic link. We use glass leftover containers these days:)
Thank you Sandy Bell. Also "Plastics: A Global Crisis and What We Can Do" by yours truly is available on climatefriendlylifesyle.substack.com. Where ever you can get good information on actions you can take, please follow through. Big Oil is doubling down on plastic production as green energy sources become more abundant and cheaper.
I don't know why everyone wastes their time talking about recycling, as though that approach had every produced a single success. The key to solving the plastics crisis (and all other waste crises) is to use scientific common sense, the one approach that has never been tried. Stop designing plastic items for discard and design them for perpetual reuse. This is the way that you can have reduced creation of plastic. The manufacturers hate this concept because designing for discard insures repeated sales. But for god sakes, forget about recycling. That will get you nowhere. Look at zerowasteinstitute.org. Scientific research is required for solving any problem and research into reuse methods is the key to progress in this field also.
Not so surprising:The biggest lying corporation(Exxon) teamed up with the biggest lying politician(Trump) to tell us that climate change is fake news and that what they say is gospel.Now America and the world will suffer the consequences.Are Americans dupes or dopes?
In the country many people burn their garbage and throw plastic into the fire, anything actually to avoid the expense of a dump fee and a day of travel. They don't realize that the burning of plastic releases cancer causing dioxins into the atmosphere. Some don't want to realize this because it will cost more money for the proper disposal. But isn't that where the industrialists (esp. Fossil Fuel Corporations) count on the government and community volunteer organizations to clean up behind while they move on to some bigger money making schemes that stress and poison the planet . Oh money got made! Don't Dump On Me
Using less plastic is not a realistic solution. While laudable it is impossible to eliminate it from your life. Try to get out of the grocery store without plastic. Impossible. Are you driving a car? Even electric cars are full of plastic. Use paper trash bags instead of plastic? I can almost guarantee that compostable trash bag will be full of non-recyclable plastic when you take it to the curb in a (plastic) garbage container.
There are many essential uses for plastic in our life styles but to reduce, reuse and recycle are the best way to approach the problem. Even though plastic overwhelms the County Recycle Program, the local people show caring and support by dealing responsibly with waste instead of just dumping it on our wildlife (eating plastic kills) . The production and disposal of waste in our wasteful society is what the government should be regulating since it sanctions the paperwork purgatory that a corporation is.
One-third of your approach is a complete failure. Recycling is nothing but a scam. But there is zero research into reusing. How can anyone expect that the difficult and interconnected question of optimal and maximal reuse can be figured out by seat of the pants guesses. Scientific research into how to reuse every single commodity should be an active focus of every university research department.
Beyond plastics and Judith Enyk (sp) are valuable resources, please connect
Leave us not ignore Coca-Cola's hypocrisy in this area.
It's "Beyond Belief". My town of Falmouth i is doing everything it can to ban plastics and it is working to some extent We even got rid of the roadside recycled "nip" bottles. My wife and I do everything we can to minimize our plastic intake, but it's not easy. Remember the scene in the film, "The Graduate" where the graduate is pulled aside by a well-wisher and is given a piece of advice, "Plastics!" as if that was somehow to be pursued as a lifelong career. Harry Shearer, on his show "Le Show" uses a doctored version of that scene by making the advice "Microplastics".
Polymers are a fabulous invention. There is no way that a modern society can run without them. Forget the approach to not use any plastic. That is now impossible. Instead what we need to do is to design every product to be reused over and over. Today they are designed to be used once and thrown into a garbage can.
It's a lesson that our wastefulness is teaching each one of us. We need government regulations on the production and use of plastics, as with so many of our hard won environmental protection regulations that are becoming a thing of the past in regard to the monster machines of the fossil fuel industry corporatists harvesting our natural resources and dumping their waste on the living. The politicians and various agency officials are poised to give permits to harvest our National Parks and Federal Lands with Senator Manchin's ( l-WV) 'Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024'. Water For Life! Stop Hydraulic Fracturing Now! Don't Dump on Me!
Many people like to urge regulation but they have no idea of what the regulations would regulate. So all they do is urge more recycling which is a total waste of time and an abdication of scientific thinking. The sole point of any regulation should be the imposition of scientific research into methods of reusing every commodity perpetually.
Using less plastic is a great, albeit, very difficult to attain, goal. Throwing it away merely increases the amount left in our atmosphere. Maybe, some effort, by someone much smarter than me , could be made to do small-scale break down of plastic to be recast into building blocks similar to cinder blocks?!
You don't need to break it down or destroy it. You need to reuse it over and over. There is a goal worth working for. But there is no research anywhere into this outcome.
Interested in how it might be, that it could be reused, without changing its form. Obviously, bottles can be used multiple times, and milk jugs can be reused, but, what about bags, and packaging?
Heated and extruded into solid blocks? Used instead of sand, in concrete paving?
There must be a way to reconfigure all but the bags, and they should be outlawed!
Bo Bowley: Thanks for at least thinking about it. All your comment demonstrates is the need for research into reuse. Reuse is not trivial, the way that most people imagine. Industry pushing recycling has inculcated the absurd notion that the way that used articles are treated should be immediately obvious without any serious work. When I talk about reuse, I am invariably bombarded with questions of the ilk: " Well how would you reuse xxxxxxxxxx?" And they mention their favorite conundrum. As if I must surely be a repository, a Wikipedia of all the world's answers and they will never have to do any work to find any answers. Recycling is the only effort that depends on magic, with no work needed. In the real world we do scientific research to come up with solutions to problems.
Your easy imagining that plastic objects should be essentially destroyed into low grade, throw away forms to claim to be barely reusing the bare materials, is an illustration of the low grade of popular thinking as a result of having brain pollution from too much recycling. That is not reuse. There are many ways to change the design of all plastic articles to make them robust and reusable as original items. But you must free your mind of the concept that destroying articles and reexpressing them as mere low grade materials is worthy of being called reuse. It is not. JUST ONE SIMPLE EXAMPLE, NOT A COMPLETE SOLUTION. We are making cloth bags all over the place. Well, plastic can make an excellent bag that is designed for a longer life than a cloth bag. First make it 20 mils thick, replace the sharp corners with cleanable smooth corners, think about replaceable and repairable handles, add in compartments for frozen goods for example, reinforce all the weak corners that tend to wear first, give it the possibility of taking wheels etc. Start thinking about possibilities, open your mind and the possibilities will start flooding in. And this is just a first concept. Imagine what could be done with some funded, deep, scientific redesigning which allows trials and tests of different designs.
Well, I humbly stand at the foot of Mount Olympus, dwarfed in the glare of the brilliance shining from the all-knowing! I’m just…”DUH!” So, the solution isn’t recycling. It removing plastics from our planet, but creating bags of heavier plastic to replace biodegradable bags of cloth?! Damn! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that! Just too dense, I guess. Please excuse me, your Highness.
Bo: I don't understand what is it in my explanation that generated all the snark. I guess it was the arrogance (in your mind) of my suggesting that things could be different from what YOU are used to. I run into this mental rigidity all the time because new ideas are not given much respect in this country, outside of scientists. What is wrong with a heavier bag of plastic that will last a hundred years while giving yeoman service providing an easily cleaned smooth surface, specialized features and easy repair and maintenance? Do you realize that a bag like that would replace twenty thousand of todays 0.5 mil monstrosities while offering superior reusable functionality of all of them? It seems that you just have a hatred of plastic in any form and no response other than a total ban of all plastic will satisfy you. Well wake up and smell the coffee. Polymers are a brilliant invention for a modern society and are here to stay. My favorite example is the use of PVC insulation for wires. Close your eyes and imagine a forest of hundreds or thousands of wires such as you must have seen somewhere, with every wire going to its intended location as it nestles up against hundreds of other wires. Without plastic insulation this would be impossible. There are a million other examples. We are not going to morph into a world without plastic. What we must do is design it all more intelligently. I was careful only to suggest that you START thinking about new designs. I didn't say that I was offering the acme of intelligent design. That would require hard research. I guess thought is a burden too far.
As for your mention of "biodegradable" with its obvious "greenness" in your mind. Did you ever stop long enough to contemplate what you are actually assuming? I guess not because waste solutions are all arrived at the same way. Throw some shit on the whiteboard and see what sticks. Something which is degradable in any way is just a way to build discard into a product. Degrading is not reusing. Biodegrading is no better than other forms of degradation. Not only does practice indicate that the degradation is not actually going to happen (see below) but you are talking about growing millions of tons of fibers with all of the negatives that implies and then planning on throwing them away after one use (probably).
Are you aware that there are literal mountains of fibers of unwanted cloths in Ghana and in Chile in the Atacama desert, much of it surely biodegradable, because we produce so much more than we can use in a reasonable way. Cudgel your brain and try to come up with a solution to the irresponsible creation of clothing fashions that results in millions of tons of fibers being piled up because there is no further use for them. Learn more at my website at zerowasteinstitute.org under PROJECTS>CLOTHING.
As for my bona fides, I ran the company I founded called Zero Waste Systems Inc. for ten years, finding new ways to reuse every single waste chemical that Silicon Valley produced and then much more. Hundreds of tons and millions of dollars worth of chemicals we kept out of dumps. That was the first use in the world of the term Zero Waste. I've thought about the waste problem a lot more deeply and for longer than you have.
Good idea! Some country folks make wire frame walls and fill the space between with recycled plastic, then stucco it for the finish.
I saw a kid in Africa on a CBS morning show making sidewalk bricks out of waste plastic. Maybe we will have that technology in America someday
Great idea! How about wire fence walls filled with recycled plastic then a stucco finish?
The plastic itself can be cast into walls, fencing, lattice there are companies making picnic tables from recycled plastic. A lot more should be done more people need to care about clean air and water on God's green earth before they become commodities. We only have another month to do something before the government gets focused on price gouging the secret service to protect the president at his own place
Yes! Excellent ideas! The President elect put under house arrest for his crimes was the outcome that l was hoping for in 2024.
I was hoping for jailhouse arrest. 20 years ago he would have been convicted or extradited to Russia for being a commie minion, welcome to the new a.b.normal