# What commonplace, seemingly innocuous things might someday be banned? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 7, 2026, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102 "2026-04-07T20:48:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![jnglmassiv](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f07891/32.png) [@jnglmassiv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jnglmassiv)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2026, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/62 "2026-04-08T23:08:00Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Were CFL lamps banned, or just outcompeted by LEDs? My understanding is that the mercury content couldn’t be eliminated and they were regulated to household extinction via hazmat reasons. That this happened at the same time LEDs were becoming available and competitive for sure made it fairly painless to do so, though. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2026, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/63 "2026-04-08T23:09:26Z")
Yes, our commercial vans are doing 60k to 100k miles per year and on AVERAGE are going 300k miles before they are replaced. And then most of them go on to a second life at some less well capitalized and safety conscious company. Of course they are maintained rigorously and that is not cheap. And these are not predominantly highway miles. They are driving to stores and customers, sometimes dozens of them a day. ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2026, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/64 "2026-04-09T20:02:49Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Or rather, the fact they didn’t kill too many grannies cheaply is _not_ proof they weren’t hoping and trying to do just that. I don’t know, it seems from memory that in the US anyway, they killed them expensively by intubating them and putting them on ventilators in hospitals. Wasn’t that the panic, that there weren’t enough hospital beds (and workers)? ---
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2026, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/65 "2026-04-10T00:32:29Z")
I’ve always thought self driving cars had their place- limited access roads, like Interstates and freeways. Seems premature to put them in crowded urban settings with j walkers, pot holes, animals, and trash blowing around. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2026, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/66 "2026-04-10T01:14:52Z")
And you’ll also see people saying “Sure, Waymo works fine on urban streets, but they’d never work on interstates or rural areas”. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2026, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/67 "2026-04-10T10:36:21Z")
It’s interesting the framing of this thread and many of the responses – that banning (usually more of a phasing out and/or regulating) is inherently Dystopian or nannying. I’ve lived through quite a lot of these changes and they have almost always been good IME – I have no love lost for smoky clubs and leaded petrol. One I would _like_ to see is unrecyclable plastic. Hopefully I will live to see a time when people find it bizarre that products used to be sold, even single use products, that could only really go in a landfill or be incinerated (either because of the type of plastic, or from being a mixture of materials that can’t be disassembled). And yes I am including the “fake” recyclable plastics: we should only mass produce using plastics that can be economically recycled, or it’s the producer’s problem to figure out how to collect and recycle. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2026, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/68 "2026-04-10T10:42:02Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > It’s interesting the framing of this thread and many of the responses – that banning (usually more of a phasing out and/or regulating) is inherently Dystopian or nannying. It’s more that society is moving in a dystopian direction, and so things will be banned for dystopian reasons. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2026, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/69 "2026-04-11T00:57:55Z")
I don’t think a lot of things can be economically recycled because of the sheer problem of gathering dispersed material back again to centralized processing facilities. For one example aluminum is considered recyclable enough that people find it worth their while to scavange cans and return them to recycling centers, because aluminum has such a heavy cost of primary production that recycling it is economical. _Steel_ cans are another matter: the recycling centers that will pay cash for aluminum will barely touch steel unless someone brings in like a hundred pounds at a time and accepts next to nothing for them. In my city recycling is mainly a program to reduce the volume of primary waste that has to be disposed of at cost; it would never actually pay for itself. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2026, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/70 "2026-04-11T01:13:01Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > One I would _like_ to see is unrecyclable plastic. Odd as it may sound, we need to seriously increase the amount of waste that goes into landfills, rather than recycling it. That’s what carbon sequestration is. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2026, 12:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/71 "2026-04-11T12:10:11Z")
That’s simplistic to the point of being completely wrong, I’m afraid. Landfill sites are [major methane sources](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724041299), methane being one of the most problematic atmospheric carbon sources. They’re not nice inert carbon stores. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2026, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/72 "2026-04-11T21:46:33Z")
If only because most plastics are manufactured from petroleum, meaning that they hadn’t been part of the carbon cycle for millions of years before they were produced. ---
**Author:** ![Spiderman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spiderman/32/230_2.png) [@Spiderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiderman)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2026, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102/73 "2026-04-13T18:06:27Z")
> [@Crafter\_Man](#): > > Very poor utilization. For the vast majority of car owners, their cars are driven a very small percentage of the time. This is wasteful and costly. A much more efficient system would have fewer cars, but each car would be on the road \>95% of the time. There is simply no need for that. Fleet utilization will be near/at 100% at rush hours & in the afternoon, getting kids home from school, to practice/games, to part-time jobs but there’s very little traffic overnight. It would cost both less in fuel & in wear to park the unused vehicles overnight. Car seats are not the easiest thing to install (I know people who do those car seat safety checks; the stories they tell), nor would people want to carry them around every time they got out of a car. Yes, a certain percentage of the fleet could have them permanently installed but that means your group can’t use that vehicle if you have four (or five) people while another family has to wait for a vehicle with one or two car seats frees up for their use. Additionally, who’s going to clean up the car seat when the baby spits up, as babies are known to do? There’s no driver. The occupant wouldn’t want to lug cleaning supplies around with them, & it might require removing the cover & laundering it anyway. Additionally, this _will_ become a red state/blue state thing as most city fire & EMS services are staffed by paid/career professionals whereas many suburban & most rural departments are staffed by volunteers. They would need to have a vehicle at their house so they could get to the firehouse/scene of the emergency when their pager goes off. Having to wait 20 mins (or more) to assemble crews is a recipe for death & destruction of property, including additional properties that would light up with delayed FD response. While we’re at it, can these driverless cars handle the plethora of rural 1½ lane roads & bridges? Which of those two vehicles is going to back up/pull over when there’s another vehicle nose-to-nose to them & not enough room to pass? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-commonplace-seemingly-innocuous-things-might-someday-be-banned/1029102.md?page=3)