A Million Bottles a Minute: World's Plastic Binge 'As Dangerous as Climate Change' (theguardian.com) 216
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports: A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20 percent by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change. New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade. The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised "on the go" culture to China and the Asia Pacific region. More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International's global packaging trends report. Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.
I'm guilty (Score:5, Insightful)
They fit in my cupholders and they are the cheapest way to buy spring water, assuming you get them on sale. I bought two flats of bottles for $3 and then they went down and I bought two more for $2 each.
I do bring them home and put them into the recycling bin, so to me the solution is to make that work. But I'd be equally happy to pay a few cents more per bottle to get compostable ones.
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Compostable, or very recyclable. The problem comes with people who don't put them into the recycling stream, and enforcing that with deposits like in the northeast isn't a real solution, I mean, it does get the homeless to clean up the streets for you, but most of the world (especially the oceans) doesn't have a homeless population scavenging for returnable bottles.
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Except for one thing... what to do with all of these Rats?
Are you a fucking millennial? Everyone who isn't a fucking millennial knows what to do in this situation.
We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
"But aren't the snakes even worse?"
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
"But then we're stuck with gorillas!"
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
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Actual solutions to any environmental problem don't rely on leaving it up to individuals to make the right choice. There's a reason our military, infrastructure, law enforcement, and public welfare programs aren't funded exclusively through donations.
If you really care, vote to eliminate plastic bottles from sale in your town or somethi
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Re:I'm guilty (Score:5, Insightful)
They fit in my cupholders and they are the cheapest way to buy spring water
What, you think the bottled water you buy comes from a fresh mountain stream? Well let's just assume for the sake of argument that it does. You can get just as clean (or better) water by simply running your tap water through a decent RO filter. It will cost you a lot less in the long run. And unless you live in a shithole place, your city's tap water is probably more than safe enough to drink right out of the faucet.
Anyways yeah, that's what I do, run tap water through a RO filter and put it in a sturdy water bottle. You can probably find one that fits in your cupholder.
btw I don't do this to save the earth, I do it because it's cheaper and because (I'm 99% certain) it's safer than trusting Nestle or Pepsico or whoever it was that bottled the "spring" water. And no I'm not against saving the earth, I would be all for it if it were in danger. But it's not.
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What, you think the bottled water you buy comes from a fresh mountain stream?
Stream? No. That would be disgusting. Spring water is collected directly at the source, of course. I haven't been to any of CG Roxane's operational facilities (Roxane being the brand I bought on this occasion, and Crystal Geyser being the brand I usually purchase, both of which are owned by CG Roxane) but I've seen some of Calistoga's. I used to wash my produce, my car, and my ass with water which I got for free as part of a neighborhood water system, and which is now being put into bottles by Calistoga Wat
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I was doing that and I was getting a lot of headaches in spite of eating a lot of salt.
Perhaps the salt is at fault?
Most modern nutrition contains to much salt already, no point in adding more.
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I'm still eating a lot of salt, and most of it is pink himalayan hippie salt because that's what my lady likes so that's what we have. But I also eat normal salt when I go out somewhere, because that's what they use.
I don't eat a lot of processed foods, so adding salt to my food is a reasonable thing to do. I mostly cook things from scratch, except bread. I've never been better than bad at yeasted breads.
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3 slices of bread cover the demand of salt for your body a whole day. ... never checked it :D
Well, that is what I was told
I only put salt on tomatoes (because they are no so bad you actually should not eat them) and on cucumber. Hm, and in rare cases on french fries.
Most food simply has to much salt. E.g. a tin can of "insert random food".
But that rose salt is kinda funny, reminds me at a kind of lame joke, more funny in german I think:
"Look, the use-by date of this package of Himalaya salt is about to expi
Re:I'm guilty (Score:5, Insightful)
You might also mention the health benefits of not ingesting plastic or other petrochemicals that have leached out of the plastic bottle into that magnificent spring water. Pthalates and many other plastics are well-known endocrine disruptors, and at the least appear to cause androgyny in various species and may well be part of earlier onset of puberty, obesity, and other conditions.
Not drinking water that has sat for weeks or months in plastic bottle spares you all that.
No to mention that your municipal water supply (in developed countries) has to meet much stricter standards on what is in the water than do most bottled water companies.
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Yeah, but it's that or up to 23 ppb of hexavalent chromium from the local groundwater. Yay, industrial pollution.
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Chromium != hexavalent chromium. Chromium 3 is a required mineral. Chromium 6 causes stomach cancer even in fairly small quantities.
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Get a coffee thermos. Refill it from the tap, at a tiny fraction of the price, and protect the environment and our wallet. Or save a soda bottle, which tend to be much tougher than those stupid "spring water" bottles, and rinse it out, and fill it from the tap. Lasts months, even years.
Explaining to people that, instead of buying a Starbucks coffee, they can just buy the cheapest, worst coffee and drop a Milky Way bar in it for much less money and the same nutritional value is also fun to do to the hipsters
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What is "spring water"?
Is that like Coca Cola taking a local river running it through a carbon filter and putting it in a plastic bottle for sale? Or maybe it's like the fancy way of saying "Our product doesn't meet drinking water safety standards" like in most countries.
I too have a plastic bottle. I bought it 2 years ago and I fill it up from the tap for superior quality water. Sometimes I run it through a carbon filter first.
Yes but why? (Score:2)
One thing to notice is that one if the first players in the still bottled water market was "Evian" - "naive" spelled backwards.
How did they convince you to buy the bottled water? How has that become the new normal? How are they taking all of us for suckers?
Re:I call BS (Score:5, Informative)
There are two problems with this. One is that even a thin layer of leaves will keep the plastic bottle safe from UV. The other is that most plastics are made with toxics, they don't magically disappear when they break down in the sunlight.
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You do realise that there is more than one kind of plastic, right?
Re: I call BS (Score:3)
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Great, another crusade. Thank god we have people like you to tell us how to live.
We're trying to tell you how not to die. Probably most of us do not actually care about you, I know I don't, but you're taking us with you. If we were doing that, you'd kill us. Guess what?
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The age old way of dealing with garbage has been to toss it in the river. So it flows downstream. Into the oceans.....
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Unfortunately, you're the one full of BS. While they might break down with direct exposure to the sun, they do so very slowly, more slowly than you have observed. As they break down they release toxins that never even existed until this material was created into the environment and food chain. It also gets broken down into small bits and pieces that small lifeforms end up consuming. Small fish and even smaller organisms, eat this crap, then larger organisms eat them and so forth. You know, like how mer
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You have ethylene dust that eventually gets into the ocean
Ethylene is a gas, not dust. And ethylene is biologically active, so it does get turned into carbon again.
Breaking down != Degradable (Score:5, Interesting)
I have NEVER seen a cheap piece of plastic last for more than a couple years out baking in the sunshine. It disintegrates on it's own. {...} but it all reverts back to good ole mother earth.
Yes, under the sun (and lots of other environmental factors, including mechanical action) a bottle will disintegrates.
But THIS IS NOT reverting back to good old mother earth.
It is just breaking a big plastic object into finer plastic dust.
Which brings its own bunch of problems:
- this plastic dust disperse wide
- this plastic dust has a higher risk of getting ingested by marine animal
- this plastic dust also collects organic compounds more easily
- once ingested by marine animal, due to higher amount of organic compound stuck on the plastic dust, these animal accumulate more pollution.
(There a movie called "A plastic ocean" currently touring festivals that explains this better).
And thus, TFS :
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore.
That's actually a myth. You're nearly NEVER going to find whole intact plastic bottles in remote places because the above phenomenon.
The reality is actually much grimmer :
- with the naked eye you're not going to see much (again, artificial islands of collect plastic junks are a myth).
- but if you make lab analysis of the environment, you'll see that :
-- most local marine animals have ingested an alarming amount of plastic dust in their bodies
-- and they'll have probably concentrated some polluant at higher dose.
Otherwise the Tennessee River which I grew up on would be totally lined with styrofoam.
It is a *river*. It wont never stay lined with anything for a long time : eventually everything will get carried away by the current and broken down in smaller particles (also some substance like steel *will* degrade (to rust, etc.) while other like glass and plastic are too chemically stable. At least glass will break-down into sand (basically : glass dust)).
Once carried away by the current they will eventually find their way into the seas, then into the ocean, when they'll finally get caught into some current that will keep them in some cycle forever.
Heck, there are some woods, cedar for example, that will last longer than a plastic bottle exposed to the elements.
Actually wood isn't such a bad exemple.
But not for the reasons you think.
(No: it won't last longer than plastic bottle. It will *keep its shape* for a longer time than plastic [that's why life invented it in plants : because it's structurally sturdy]. But eventually, decomposers [bacteria, funghi, etc.] will manage to digest it. It will actually end up back into CO2)
But some eons ago that wasn't the case. It took some time between life inventing wood (somewhere in the Devonian), and bacteria coming up with a way to degrade it.
Of course all this juicy stored chemical energy was going to end-up being used as a food source for some microbes.
The same situation is happening again. We human produce tons of a nearly indestructible component (plastic) but that is still rich in stored chemical energy (the fact that you can actually burn it into CO2 is a sign).
Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics.
Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
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Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics.
Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
In a couple of centuries? You wrote that sentence immediately after the sentence about plastic-eating bacteria already known to exist? We should be so lucky that it would take a couple of centuries, but it won't. Evolution is really real, folks, and in bacteria, it's fast. Plastic is an organic compound, and it is right-this-second literally biodegradable.
The problem is not going to be what to do with all the plastic dust in the environment. The problem is going to be what substance do we use to replac
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You really need to research this better.
Hint: How quickly is your stick build house eaten away by bacteria?
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I'm sorry to scatter your illusions: http://www.nature.com/news/bot... [nature.com]
A simple search for "plastic in the ocean photos" gives you an overview.
Or this one: http://ocean.nationalgeographi... [nationalgeographic.com]
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According to the nature infographics, most of the bulk weight in plastics consists of big pieces. As you go down to sub-millimeter size, the total amount of plastic goes down. This means that smaller pieces are disappearing.
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What we see in fish and bird stomachs seems to disagree (german news was full with dead whales, fish, birds beaching around europe who died to plastic - albeit relatively big plastic - trash).
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I have an assload of stainless steel bottles which were purchased from a variety of sources, and at a variety of prices but not exceeding $20 for any given example even though I've had some of them for more than a decade. Many of them came from thrift stores for a buck or two. But they don't fit in the teeny tiny cupholder that Audi saw fit to grace my A8 with, and there's no good place to add a larger cupholder.
I may try finding a stainless cupholder mug, the kind with the soda-sized ass and the vat-sized
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Even as I speak the Syrians are starting a campaign to fix this.
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That's a nice solution for you; it's a very fortunate thing for you that you live in a land with an unspoiled, clean underground aquifer.
Some countries, like India, have no clean aquifers anymore; the ground water is infected, so well water must be filtered before drinking it. You can trust the filters in your home to work, but you can't trust that any old source of "drinking water" is properly filtered (there are many schemers about.) So when you're out in public, you buy bottled water. And then you dis
Re: Drill your own well (Score:2)
Re: Drill your own well (Score:4, Insightful)
Rain water can be indeed excellent. It is essentially distilled water, the purest water there is.
But rain is unpredictable. Rainwater is sometimes contaminated by bird droppings, dust, critters, etc. Maybe you can build enough water storage to get you through an extended drought, but then again, are you sure it will be enough?
I would suggest that a well is more reliable and sustainable. Waste water can be recycled in a never ending circle. The water you wash with and flush down the drain today may well be the clean/filtered water that you pump back out of the ground several months from now. This does not require rain occurring regularly. This does not require massive amounts of water storage containment.
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5*5*2 = 50 cubic meters. Or in other words, 1765 cubic ft. A well in a decently moist environment will typically yield water within 50 to 100 feet. That's a heck of a lot less dirt to move, you get filtration and underground storage capacity automatically, and you take up far less surface area (letting you grow more crops, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking rainwater. It's fantastic. If you could catch it up higher, you could gravity feed your house and get free water without ANY energy usage. A smal
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If your neighbors take a cholera shit, the microbial life in the soil will compost it and break it down to harmless base nutrients. I doubt your neighbors are taking a heavy metal enema twice a day, but if they are, no big deal, the soil is an extremely fine grained filter with slow percolation. By the time the water makes its way down into your well, most contamination like that would be left behind in the upper layers of soil.
How deep you drill is up to you. As you go deeper, you have more and more filter
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Even if some neighbor drills a hole down to the "water table" and dumps contaminated materials straight down their hole, you've still got many feet of spongy filter material between your well and theirs filtering out contaminates. The water is not free flowing between wells. Any water moving between wells must pass through highly compacted soil/sand/etc that exists between the two holes.
Water moves through sand quite freely, even when compacted, because of the nature of sand; it's made of many little pieces of silicate, and it never fits that tightly together that water can't flow through it. That's why we add sand to soil if we need to increase drainage and the problem isn't clay. (Adding sand to clay helps nothing, and in fact it just makes the problem worse by increasing the mineral content when you actually need more organic material.)
In fact, many wells and even springs are "under sur
Just please don't release bacteria (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that some seemingly smart person will propose one day to release bacteria into the oceans that can digest plastic and eat it. Just that person will cause us more trouble than we ever wanted. The reason we use plastic is because it can't be digested by bacteria. If we teach bacteria how to do it efficiently we'll get the bill sooner or later by not being able to continue to use plastic for most of its purposes, like containing food, or to keep the bacteria out from medical equipment (non sept
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I'm pretty sure that some seemingly smart person will propose one day to release bacteria into the oceans that can digest plastic and eat it. Just that person will cause us more trouble than we ever wanted. The reason we use plastic is because it can't be digested by bacteria. If we teach bacteria how to do it efficiently we'll get the bill sooner or later by not being able to continue to use plastic for most of its purposes, like containing food, or to keep the bacteria out from medical equipment (non septic stuff is always packaged inside plastic, that's not for the cool looks), etc.
Someone already contemplated this in this 1973 sci-fi novel Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters [amazon.com], specifically as a way to deal with plastic bottles, but things get out of hand when the bacteria mutates and starts consuming other types of plastic, like electrical insulation.
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In 1975 there was a discovered bacteria that consumed plastics...
Just because there is a bacteria that consume plastics does not automatically result in it propagating everywhere. Having something like this living in the landfills would be great since they can produce methane that can be collected and used for powering other stuff.
Packaging is a disaster (Score:2)
We live in the over-packaged world - everything that is sold and used comes with packaging that often eclipses the amount of material (and labor) for the product itself. This problem will not solve itself, unfortunately.
FWIW, me and my family have not bought any bottled drinks in at least 10 years. Refillable bottle it is - much cheaper too.
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I guess he was hoping to sell them to a collector or something. I suggested a movie studio (Netflix - Stranger Things) for use as props.
It used to be that
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diet Pepsi
Ie, undrinkable right from the day of manufacture.
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We live in the over-packaged world - everything that is sold and used comes with packaging that often eclipses the amount of material (and labor) for the product itself. This problem will not solve itself, unfortunately.
Edible Packaging! It solves World Hunger, too!
If the material for the Edible Packaging is sourced from a Soylent Green factory, then we've solved the Overpopulation Problem, as well.
Recycling (Score:2, Informative)
That's great you can recycle them. Just like aluminum cans there's no reason not to do it. Of course the problem is made to seem that no one does, but clearly people do recycle. Hence the scare quotes, large numbers, and references like halfway to the sun. 500 billion bottles sounds large but that's less than 100 per person per year. Or one every three days. Few people are going to think that's a problem.
So educate people to recycle and stop saying stupid shit like it's worse that climate change.
The real problem we have is (Score:5, Insightful)
Overpopulation. The planet has 7.5 billion people, all of whom want to live the good life as seen in Hollywood movies and TV. One estimate has us reaching 10 billion by 2050. If there were only a billion, some plastic waste and CO2 emissions might not be such a problem. But the existing 7.5 billion folks are already destroying the biosphere, and that is today, where only a few percent (like the US, Western Europe) are enjoying the wonderful lifestyle. Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak. It will only get worse. In the long run, however, it will probably be a self-correcting problem, if you know what I mean.
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Uninhabited Pacific islands disagree. They yearn for someone to populate them and clean up the plastic bottles.
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In the long run, however, it will probably be a self-correcting problem, if you know what I mean.
Death is inefficient; it will just be a miserable life that everyone endures, in heat (think Thailand/Columbia), smog (think Beijing) and garbage. People will stay indoors (home, office and malls) most of the time, if they can afford it.
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Most parts of Thailand are not particular hot. ;D ).
Either they are to high, in the north around Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, or have to much wind, at the coasts e.g. Phuket.
No idea about Columbia (would need to check a map
The points where it really gets hot are big continental planes like Siberia, Mongolia, parts of China, "central" Africa around the equator.
"tropical Paradies" like Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand not necessarily become much hotter, the water around them is dampening the heating.
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Have you thought that maybe it's even harder to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop reproducing? When this has been tried in places India and China, it resulted in forced sterilization, abortion and other human rights violations.
On the other hand, reducing per capita carbon emissions is something that can be done with economic policy. Implement carbon taxes so that people pay their fair share of environmental costs, and have incentives for research into alternative energy, etc.
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No, I haven't thought that and I'm a little amazed that you are thinking that since so many were convinced before you were even born.
Graph 1.3 is worth a look:
https://ourworldindata.org/fer... [ourworldindata.org]
I know it was a trendy topic of authors in the 1970s ("Future Shock" etc) but it was already well out of date by then.
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I know it was a trendy topic of authors in the 1970s ("Future Shock" etc) but it was already well out of date by then.
It's a trendy topic right now that fertility goes down over time, and will stay low. That will be out of date in a few generations, as evolutionary pressures start taking over. Couples who choose not to have any children are extinct in one generation, and couples with 4 children will replace them.
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Overpopulation. The planet has 7.5 billion people, all of whom want to live the good life as seen in Hollywood movies and TV.
The bastards! How dare people want to live the good life!
The birth rate for those wasteful U.S. and Europeans has been dropping for some time now. Japan's birth rate is plummeting. Even Catholic Italy can't keep making enough new Italians.
It would appear that the very thing you complain about is the answer to growing population. Achieve the good life as seen on Hollywood movies and TV and the breeding slows down. It's a win-win for all concerned.
Re:The real problem we have is flavor (Score:2)
When Ocean Spray Cran Grape switched from glass to plastic, the flavor went to shit. I don't feel overpopulated, but I can tell when packaging affects flavor. Down with plastic, back to glass.
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I'll bet you live in a metropolitan area. When you do, it's easy to imagine that the whole world is overpopulated.
Here in Texas, for example, we have about 18 million people in a triangle about 200 miles on each side, from Dallas to Houston to San Antonio. That's less than 10% of the total area of Texas, but more than 2/3 the population. Texas has one county of 600 square miles, with a population of less than 100.
The thing is, we've all clumped ourselves together in tight spaces, that we think the whole wor
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Just because there aren't people actually living in a given place doesn't make it "untouched". Not by a long shot.
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My point was that we have an illusion that the world is much more crowded than it actually is, because of where we choose to live.
Yes and no... (Score:2)
Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak
Do you think convincing 0.5 billion people would be any less futile?
Yes overpopulation is a problem and a multiplier. But convincing them to not use any of the many pervasive modern conveniences of the 21st century that happen to also be or cause environmental pollution (yes I'm including green house gas)... I've said this for years and i'll keep saying it because I've never failed to come to the same conclusion:
These problems need to be fixed at the source, you can't expect people to not drive it's just no
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The planet has 7.5 billion people, all of whom want to live the good life
No. The problem is not so much over population as it is that we have a stupidly warped view of what the "good life" is. To me the good life is drinking water from a tap, safe and with better standards than something that I pay 1000x the cost of.
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The total number of children in the world is around the same as in the 1960s. The population is increasing because people are living longer and birth rates globally have been in decline since before you were born.
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where only a few percent (like the US, Western Europe) are enjoying the wonderful lifestyle
You don't travel much, do you?
We have basically the same life style everywhere on the planet meanwhile. A few exceptions in countries like Somalia etc.
Go where you want, people have AC if they want to, usually enough food, refrigeration, a car or two, TVs, internet, mobile phones, and probably a higher speed connection than you have.
Sure, there are still Tuareg or Bushmen, but they live that life because they enjoy it
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I'm always amazed at the sheer violence of the reactions to this observation. Yes, we do have way too many people. Go travel the world for a bit, and have a look around - everywhere you go there are people crawling about. And the rest of the creatures inhabiting this world, not that they have any rights to OUR planet of course, have been relegated to tiny, tiny reserves - reserves that are under constant pressure because we need to fit in ever more people and nobody is willing to say "enough is enough". Ind
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How about you off yourself and your whole family? One person can make a difference! Let it begin with you.
That only increases the percentage of people who don't care about overpopulation, making the problem worse.
World uses lots of oil (Score:5, Informative)
This sounds like a lot, but in reality it is a small fraction of the oil used per hour by humanity. The average weight of a PET drink bottle is 12.7grams, so a million bottles a minute is about 12.7 metric tonnes of plastic a minute. Assuming 100% conversion efficiency from crude into PET (ie other distillates are utilised for other purposes) that is about 90 barrels a minute or 129600 barrels a day.
World crude oil usage is about 100 million barrels a day. So plastic bottles are about 0.13% of daily oil consumption. Even if we stopped using them altogether, the impact would be trivial. Also, many countries burn plastic waste to generate energy, so removing bottles as fuel will potentially cause an equivalent increase in other fossil fuel usage.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help the environment. Just pointing out that this is not going to be a panacea.
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Typos are fun (Score:5, Funny)
"Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports:"
If those naughty islands would only behave properly, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem.
Hush (Score:2)
That's our future descendants' power source, after the coal runs out (because nuclear power, like keeping that fork you're holding out of your eye, is simply too much for the human race to handle; and 'renewables' are putting us back at the mercy of the elements...).
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Maybe not the human race but after reading about TEPCO management and the multiple chains of failure at Fukishima I don't think I'd be trusting them with real cutlery. Message for people in power - your idiot nephew is not someone who should be trusted near anything that can cause people serious problems when it fucks up, no matter how much money it keeps in the family. Leave it to
Worse than climate change HOW? (Score:2)
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but evidence that plastics do much any serious harm to life is nil.
My third result for "evidence that plastics do much any serious harm to life" [sic] is Plastics, the environment and human health: current consensus and future trends [nih.gov] which might be of some interest to any persons who want to know if discarded plastics cause environmental harm.
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Duh (Score:2)
That's why the climate change myth was invented in the first place. Plastic was losing its popularity, and something just had to be done about that.
We produce way to much garbage. (Score:2)
That's a plain and simple fact.
The metaarticle is spot on. We are drowning in plastic.
The problem with plastic is, that it is also a very large third world problem, as any sense about protecting the environment often is dimished there more than it is in some parts of the first world.
We need what I would basically call a total ban on garbage, including plastic waste. Direct recycled sturdy standardised bottles can be made out of plastic, but reusing them has to become a standard. s to become a standard.Plast
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Because cleaning and sterilizing bottles happens through magic. No water, bleach or other cleaning agent is necessary.
"If I were King"
Then you'd have magic. But you're not and you don't.
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If I were King, I'd push for a ban of 95% of all Garbage (wrappings) we produce including a total ban on one-way plastic bottles.
How about just banning non-compostable packaging? Again, except for sterile medical supplies, which can have a thin plastic layer. But even that should be UV-compostable, and the packaging should use a printed layer to protect the plastic layer from light.
Ever thus--sardine-can litter in 1880s Wyoming (Score:5, Interesting)
...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
Not a huge issue for me (Score:2)
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No need. All we need to do to clean the oceans is to stop throwing stuff in there. Nature will quickly break down whatever's already in there.
How funny and stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've never been to Vietnam, but south China (Guangdong, HK) is definitely cleaner than it was when I first visited the region 10 years ago.
Equivocation Fallacy (Score:2)
Conflating climate and pollution. It's all propaganda.
Container Deposit (Score:2)
Strong container deposit legislation [wikipedia.org] pretty much solves this. E.g. "90% of all PET bottles, 63% of all aluminium cans and 86% of all glass bottles sold in Estonia were returned". Finland says "aluminium cans have a recycling rate of about 94% and PET bottles 92%".
Make the containers worth something, and amazingly they stop being thrown about.
Alternate headline (Score:2)
Climate change found to only be as dangerous as pollution by plastic.
If you expect people to believe you when you say that some problem is the worst ever, you can't then claim that another problem is also the worst ever. I'm pretty sure that nobody who thinks that this is "as bad as climate change" would be willing to compromise on some climate change measures in order to stop pollution by plastic, even though that's what you do when you think that two problems are equally bad.
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Five cents per bottle here. There are people who survive by collecting them.
5 cents does nothing, I remember when it was 2 cents per bottle and in today's $ that is 0.15. The deposit should be at least 50 cents per bottle, that will reduce the pollution in two ways, stop people from buying bottled water and give incentive for recycling.
I do not buy bottled water and I think at least in most of the first world it is no different than tap water (yes there are areas where it is needed, Flint anyone). But I see nothing changing in this regard
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The deposit should be at least 50 cents per bottle, that will reduce the pollution in two ways, stop people from buying bottled water and give incentive for recycling.
You know how Mexicans responded to large deposits on glass bottles? At least at roadside kiosks, by decanting from the bottle into a plastic bag when serving. The bag can't be recycled, even if you get it clean, because it's not marked for recycling.
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Our neighborhood is going to charge 6 euros for each time they have to empty the grey waste bins. Plastic/metal/cardboard/paper/organic waste is picked up separately and is free of charge. For us, that's a big incentive to separate out all the plastic.
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And yet you were able to get to the shop to buy them in the first place.
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But now he'll have to go twice!
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https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini... [pinimg.com]
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There's nobody on a deserted island to make use of any plastic bottles that are there.
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sure there are, we just haven't heard from them yet because of the latency in transporting messages over the ocean inside plastic bottles.
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Water-soluble water bottles? I like it.
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Yeah, that record-tying high was in Iran, but we don't like Iran, so that's good, and therefore not evidence of climate change.
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If you aren't a religious environmentalist, your bottled water isn't a sin.
If you don't care about the environment you live in, then you're no better than a rat or a pig. You shit where (and while!) you eat and then you roll around in the shit, fat and happy.
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You fail history. Not so far back, they had bounties to get rid of vermin like rats and snakes. Do you know what people did? They bred rats and snakes to turn in for the bounties.
When the bounty got canceled, they fine free market advocates doing this dumped the vermin (alive) since it wasn't profitable to kill and dispose of them via the bounty anymore.
Once you get a plastic bottle breeding program going, I think the world is going to have a completely different set of problems than people using them to scam recycling booths.