From the plastics industry perspective, people wont get the warm-and-fuzzy they get from the façade of recycling if they are just throwing their plastic bags and bubble wrap into the trash, and they may think about it more, and thus use less plastic, suppressing demand. Part of the lie here is giving people the “feeling” they are doing good, even when they are ultimately not. I know, that’s pretty cynical.
Just accepting plastic waste as a normal addition to landfills is probably the best immediate solution - it captures the waste close to where it was generated, rather than pretending to recycle it and ship it elsewhere for someone else to deal with, causing pollution along the way. However, the effort today seems to be trying to stem the production of plastic at the start of the cycle, not manage it at the end.
Can you define what you mean by “ecologically sustainable” here?
I can think of a whole bunch of definitions, that fit into two main categories. By one set, sustainablity is much easier to accomplish than you describe; by the other, it’s completely impossible for anything to be sustainable, and what you propose won’t do it.
Damned if i know. As best as i can tell, the vast majority of plastics are totally benign when buried in a proper sanitary landfill. And while landfill space isn’t all that cheap near major urban areas, there is plenty of it if you go out far enough. So, yeah, there’s some shipping of waste. But there’s shipping to “recycle”, too.
When i make jelly, i reuse glass jars with metal lids. Even so, there are some that’s it’s hard to get the smell out of. Salsa jars are a nice size, but sometimes stink. Pickle jars and jelly jars are usually good.
(I kinda sorta can the jelly, but i keep it in the fridge. I figure that jelly keeps about a year in the fridge after you open the bottle, so it’s safe to have an imperfect seal. I imagine the same is true of kimchi)
I’m 65 yrs old and I remember products being advertised as being in “shatterproof” bottles (eg plastic) back in the 1960s and '70s.
This. So a bit of a hijack - It’s always been my opinion that regardless of what we do, we are a waste and garbage-producing species and, thus, the only real option is to reduce our population if we, as individuals, are to have relatively convenient lives. How we do that while decoupling from economic growth requirements, however, are beyond me. Sorry for the hijack.
I’m loath to blame the public, as they are the victims of the scam. They have been told two huge lies - 1) that recycling is working and so, we don’t need to change anything, and 2) plastic pollution is not that big a problem, and we shouldn’t panic. Both of those are stories that the public would like to believe are true.
And this is my chance to once again recommend the book, and the film “The Merchants of Doubt”, which documents the techniques used to get the general public to question the science outlining the harm of tobacco, flame retardants, DDT, acid rain, and now, climate change. Here’s the trailer for the film (which Facebook keeps flagging on me because it goes against their ‘community standards’ - that says more about their community standards than about the film!) - https://youtu.be/j8ii9zGFDtc?si=Ofoywq-EMlvyoBY_
I’m shooting from the hip here; my opinion is not well-researched. I’m sure we have Dopers, perhaps including yourself, that are seriously into this stuff and know the common academic definitions, stats, etc.
My POV is that
Humanity collectively should not exceed the primary carrying capacity of the environment, after deciding to leave a hefty fraction of it for Nature and all its critters & plants. Converting the whole Earth to a farm is not acceptable. Because it’s not sustainable. The whole-earth farm will crash eventually for some chaotic reason.
Substantially any material that is extracted needs to be reused. Single-use anything, be it a bottle, the plastic the bottle is made from, or the hydrocarbons the plastic is made from, need to be reused. If we’re mining or pumping anything other than due to population growth, we’re doing it unsustainably.
Dumping is the flip side of extracting. If we’re putting long-lived unnatural stuff into the air, water, or land, that’s not sustainable. Net zero really needs to be net zero.
e.g. If our population is stable we should not be mining iron. We have enough above ground already for everyone’s use. Plus/minus technological progress. It takes much less steel to make a 2024 car than it did a 1950s car. OTOH, it takes more plastic, so some incremental petroleum extraction to make the plastic would be expected and acceptable.
The bottom line is that is we are “using up” something, that finite resource will run out someday. Don’t do that.
To me that defines “sustainable”.
I totally see your point.
But even if we somehow stopped anyone / everyone from telling those lies, the public by and large will not change their behavior. Nor for AGW.
The individual sacrifice required far, far exceeds anyone’s commitment to their fellow human or future humanity. Some tiny fraction of wackos True Believers would accept the changes needed and actually live them. Everybody else would shrug their shoulders, whine about free riders, and carry on business as usual until, metaphorically speaking, we chop down the last tree on Easter Island, the only land we have.
I wish the facts were different. But IMO they are as I’ve described. You and others are welcome to cry in the wilderness, but substantially nobody is listening.
I don’t disagree that glass and metal are more useful and better for the environment, but those aren’t the only things that matter. I remember when soda and juice etc. came in glass bottles from 7 oz right up to the gallon size. I also remember broken glass all over the street. I remember how heavy those bottles were -which might not matter if you were going to put the bottles into a shopping cart and then into a car and then drive into your garage which has a door into your kitchen. Different if you were walking a half mile (or even a few blocks) home from the store. I remember the occasional dropped bottle breaking on the kitchen floor - sure , drinking glasses might also break but they didn’t have a half gallon of orange juice or soda inside them when they did.
The great forests of North America, discovered by European explorers, were not “natural”; they were there because the Native Americans killed most of the megafauna, allowing forest to grow over the mammoth steppe (a biome that no longer exists anywhere on Earth) and allowing the buffalo’s population to explode.
Now, I agree with you, that wilderness is very important. But untouched wilderness hasn’t existed in millenia (in most places) to centuries (for the most remote and harsh places). I would argue that even without industrialization, humanity had put many ecosystems and species on a course that would have ended in disaster regardless. I would support efforts for rewilding, which would include bringing (some) megafauna back to the places it has disappeared from. But at this point, to restore wilderness, just going away wouldn’t help; we need to actively manage and restore nature (even if that means it won’t be as wild).
With that in mind, does rewilding large swathes of our planet require substantial decreases in population? I would argue that the answer is actually “no”. At this time, we grow most of our food in open fields. This is incredibly inefficient in the use of space, nutrients, and water. We could grow an order of magnitude more food with an order of magnitude less water and nutrients, and multiple orders of magnitude less space, through greenhouses (and eventually, vertical farming). We could also make use of space that is not particularly productive for either humanity or nature, such as open ocean. These technologies (greenhouses, agroponics, aquaculture, etc) all exist today, at least in an embryonic form. We haven’t seen widespread adoption mostly because it’s so cheap to just fence in some open land and let nature do the hard work for you. At least, if you don’t qccount for the cost of externalities.
But eventually we will have to account for externalities (before they destroy us all). When that happens, and these technologies mature, we could sustain both nature and large human populations.
Well, by that definition, nature itself is unsustainable. And not just because the sun, base of nearly every single food chain, will eventually run out of hydrogen (and the core will cool, so geothermal vents aren’t safe either); but even on a smaller scale, natural features don’t last forever. Take the Amazon. That much plant growth requires fertilization, and this is provided by sandstorms that blow rich nutrients from the Sahara. The Sahara only has those nutrients because once upon a time it was full of massive lakes, which were teeming with life. As that life died, it settled to the bottom of the lake and eventually formed a layer of organic mud on the bottom. When the lakes dried, they formed massive salt flats, rich in nutrients that are blown across the ocean to the Amazon. But eventually, this material will run out, or weather patterns will shift, and eventually the Amazon rainforest will decline, the existing nutrients washed into the sea by the great river.
If there is iron in the ground, we aren’t using it, and neither is nature. If we can get it out without causing damage, I have no problem with that.
When it comes to pollution - where dumping stuff into the environment damages nature, we obviously don’t want to do that. But something like burying nuclear waste in a geologically stable pit under a mountain, I’d be fine with (though ideally we should reuse that waste as much as possible first).
We don’t have to be as “wasteful and garbage-producing” as we are, and indeed, that is largely a consequence of how much energy is freely available to extract and process resources with little effort or even awareness by the average person in an industrial society, but as a “keystone species” which has modified the biosphere to meet our needs through industrial agriculture and “factory farming”, draining of wetlands and destruction of diverse forestlands, extraction and processing of mineral resources with unmitigated environmental impacts, the establishment of vast urban and suburban areas, and the unintentional (or perhaps “obtuse”) fast emission of carbon dioxide, various bioactive complex organic and organometallic compounds, and various natural and byproduct toxins and radioisotopes (that are of little general consequence when sequestered underground and leech out at slow rates, but can be extremely harmful when extracted or produced and released in large quantities), we have a grossly outsized impact upon the environment compared to any normal ‘competition’ between species. Even thought the vast majority of that impact and waste is produced by a small fraction of the overall population, it is still far beyond the the overall biosphere to adapt, and furthermore even populations that are secondary or tertiary ‘beneficiaries’ of this surfeit of energy and processed resources have often grown beyond the ability to live sustainably within their local environment.
The “economic growth requirements” are an artificiality which is predicated upon the ability to utilize available stored energy resources to extract and process more resources at a geometric rate, or as it is succinctly referred to the “carbon pulse”. The problem is that there are not unlimited amounts of stored energy (either hydrocarbon or, despite what advocates try to portray, fissile and fissionable fuel) or accessible mineral and renewable material resources that can scale indefinitely, so short of comprehensive renewable energy and access to extraterrestrial resource, ultimately there has to be a limiting constraint to growth beyond just physical space, land for agriculture, and other simplistic measures of ‘carrying capacity’, even without consideration for impacts upon sustainability of the biosphere.
It is even worse than that. Changes in discretionary consumption—even extreme changes like giving up all unnecessary air travel and private vehicle use, shifting to a completely plant-based nutritional system, shifting all heating and cooling away from gas or coal to electric, et cetera—isn’t going to reverse or even stop climate change or abate any of the multitude of environmental impacts. And the fantastical notions of a global mass transition from internal combustion to battery electric vehicles, or that we’ll replace all fossil fuel electrical power production with a vast expansion of nuclear fission power (or the febrile expectation that someone is going to ‘figure out’ controlled nuclear fusion for power generation), or direct air capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are all demonstrably flawed. There is no simple set of fix-its that is going to reverse the impact of an eight billion strong species of megafauna which has occupied nearly every non-frozen solid surface on the planet and extracted and consumed resources at an ever increasing rate other than constraining growth and decreasing the population at a rate faster than will occur naturally, and that economists and business moguls all hate because it breaks their fundamental assumptions about how the (financial) world should work. But this is not a reality that anyone, and particularly democratically elected leaders and legislators.
No we don’t, however, where do we draw the line on allowable resource usage and/or waste? And who is the arbiter of the decisions regarding what is acceptable and allowable in order to continue existing population levels and growth?
In Montreal, for example, wood burning is no longer legal. However, I happen to like a wood fire in a fire place, wood stove, or outdoor fireplace. What about excessive electrical usage? Maybe we should discourage large, electrically powered rock concerts, except that I, and presumably millions of others, love loud hard rock and metal concerts.
On the other hand, if I wasn’t married I would never own a car and for my entire 40 working years have biked, bused, walked or ran/jogged to work (with the exception of a four year posting during which driving a single occupant vehicle was unavoidable).
I’m sure that everybody would be willing to sacrifice something to reduce our respective levels of waste, but I also have no doubt that one person’s acceptable sacrifice would be someone else’s unacceptable sacrifice.
It’s not a totally either/or situation. I can see your point about the disadvantages of everything having to be in glass bottles, but it’s not like they should never be used.
Personally, I get milk from a local dairy through a local co-op store, in half-gallon glass bottles that I rinse and return to the store when empty for the dairy to reuse. I cart those bottles back and forth on the bus, and have never broken one yet. Much happier with this situation than with generating an unending succession of empty plastic milk jugs to throw in the trash somewhere.
I agree with posters upthread who note that reusable, refillable containers in some form or other are an important part of any meaningful solution. It doesn’t actually take that much effort or resources to make a serious dent in the problem of single-use plastic-bag waste, for example, if people just develop the habit of keeping some kind of reusable bag handy.
A million at the time small and localized events contributed to the current problem. Another million small and localized events will help mitigate the harm, but not bring the environment back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Large, globally-coordinated efforts will also be necessary.
If any single word reductionism can be set forward as the blame, it’s capitalism. Modern-day capitalism grew directly from the mercantilism of the pre-IR trading days, when the ability to control manufacture, sale, and distribution of consumer items transferred from governments to manufacturers. (These fortunes were almost immediately reflected in the MPs elected to the British Parliament, which thereafter so shifted the economy to their benefit that a long series of revolts marked the 19th century. America saw a similar shift, but later in the century.)
By the latter half of the 19th century, allied fields like advertising, marketing, and merchandising (making goods in stores especially desirable) developed to push the every-increasing mountains of goods to an ever-more comfortable buying public through the new mass medias. We can pretend that radio, television, and websites created this fatal capitalistic need to consume, but they all merely built on an already firm base. Sometimes an increase in quantity is a power all to itself, though, and the franticness with which western consumerism was grabbed by other countries after WWII testifies to the power of these devices along with the seductiveness of the promise of an easier, more comfortable, more enjoyable lifestyle.
This is why the million local events that created the luxury of a life in which we can communicate these thoughts with one another from all over the world using expensive and futuristic equipment in mostly middle-class or better houses in cities and suburbs full of vendors providing every conceivable object of pleasure, health, and education cannot easily be reversed merely by moderating the forces that created it. Yes, “lazy selfish publics” are the blame, although they are encouraged in that laziness every single second by capitalistic endeavors trying to separate them from their money and captive governments reluctant to part from the fossil fuels that create power in several senses.
The answer to what to do about this is everything. Cut back individually. Get governments to move out of subsidizing fossil fuels. (And subsidizing coastal homebuilding though insurance, a personal peeve.) Maybe even try geoengineering. Everything. Anything. The solutions are as much economic, political, and social as technological. We were taught for 150 years to be lazy and selfish without ever mentioning those words. What can be taught can be untaught just as insidiously and covertly. It just hasn’t be properly tried. Yet doing so would be far less expensive and carbon-heavy than any of the alternatives.
That is fundamentally the problem, and even if we all agreed on what to sacrifice, I think we’d be collectively unwilling (or unable) to make those sacrifices if they result in mass unemployment, resettlement and restructuring of urban and suburban areas, and unavoidably mass famine (which will occur anyway with sufficient food stress, but nobody wants to be directly responsible for causing it). And because people are often unaware or only vaguely informed about the impact of so-called ‘externalities’ (which aren’t actually external to our system; they are just future costs and impacts) it is easy to make a decision for convenience and comfort.
And not to deny my own hypocrisy, I’m just as culpable as the average person in an industrial nation; for all I do to minimize travel, reuse/repurpose packaging materials, use reusable containers for food and drink, avoid single-use plastic bags and containers, buy locally produced foods and consumables, et cetera and am generally frugal with respect to consumption, I get takeout, use excess electricity, buy stuff online that has to be shipped across country, and so forth. Even if I made a concerted effort to minimize my ecological footprint to the extent feasible, I’d still have a dramatic impact compared to any other mammal, or even compared to someone in a developing nation just as a collective part of living in an industrial society. We (especially in the United States) could do a lot better about minimizing consumption and producing waste but even an order of magnitude of reduction doesn’t offset the fact that there are so many people consuming resources and producing garbage that a cumulative impact is unavoidable and not completely mitigable.
The problem with geoengineering—aside from running a massive and uncontrollable experiment on the highly dynamic system that is also our only habitable environment—is that anything that is seen as remotely feasible rapidly gets co-opted by energy companies and polluters as a means of offsetting their continuing outputs and keeping on with business as usual. This is an inevitable relationship because in order to scale up any kind of geoengineering or solar radiation management effort will take massive amounts of money—either directly through commercialized efforts or indirectly through tax revenues—but it then becomes an end onto itself to effectively ‘greenwash’ their business.
And realistically, very few of these proposed systems account for all of the energy and the carbon and ecological footprint necessary to effect them; blowing millions of tons of sulphur into the stratosphere on a continuing basis means a massive number of flights releasing carbon dioxide, as does producing and processing the material. When you start looking into the details of what is actually required to scale up these efforts on a global scale, most of them are obviously completely unworkable or counterproductive even when the basic mechanism is viable. Like carbon credits, replacing all hydrocarbon energy production to nuclear fission power, replacing all vehicles with battery electric cars, et cetera, it doesn’t scale up in the necessary timeframe or resource availability, and we can’t just spend our way or juggle numbers on a spreadsheet out of the problem of climate change.
I just saw this report right now, and wanted to pass it along.
"A new study documenting the scourge of plastic waste around the world has found that more than half of branded plastic pollution can be traced back to just 56 companies.
More than 20 per cent of all branded pollution is linked to four brands: The Coca-Cola Company (11 per cent), PepsiCo (five per cent), Nestlé (three per cent) and Danone (two per cent)."
Sounds to me like a couple of class-action suits might be in order!
Right. But note that aluminum cans are super recyclable.
Glass bottles are okay, and MUCH better than plastic.
For some reason this- along with EVs, and some other crazy things (covid shots)- are something that the MAGA crowd have turned into a hill to die on.
The lining is very thin and is burned off in the recycling process.
A lot of recycled fabric is used in the Red Cross, etc blankets.
I make both. But I have some large borosilicate glass bottles that I use to make my “sun tea” overnight. …in the fridge.
Coke does make those. The bottles are nicely re-usable.
BTW- you can buy drinking water in aluminum bottles also. If you keep water in your trunk for emergency drinking, always used those bottles.
The main culprit is plastic water bottles. Somehow the industry has convinced people that that is how you have to drink water, instead of out of the tap.
I am pretty certain civilization would break down if that occured. OTOH, I have dreams of a covid strain that makes males sterile.
Going thru middens has been part of archeology for a long time.
One word- rust.
They did not. Mostly climate change but yes, the humans helped. The Overkill hypothesis has been thoroughly and completely discredited. Not only that but the coincidence upon which it was based is now gone, humans arrived much much earlier in American.