Assuming that plastic ban was carried out (say in china) how would it affect imports and exports, what would the alternatives be, and would it even be feasible? If so, why has no nation even attempted a ban, even if slightly more expensive isn’t aluminium, glass or carton a way healthier alternative?
An all out ban? Catastrophic without a lot of time to prepare, years at least, probably a decade or more. So many people rely on medical devices at least partially made of plastic. Polyester and nylon are in all kinds of things, pretty much all cheaper fabrics. Most shoes have plastic. Lots of plumbing and construction in general uses PVC, even electric wiring is often coated in plastic. All cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes. Nearly all electronics. Weapons of all types, from pistols to missiles.
I think the only way to do it without killing people would be a phased approach that starts with the most common and least essential plastic goods, but even then it would take a lot of time to implement alternatives.
Surely it can be done, but not any time soon and definitely not in the imperial core. I could see China doing it long-term, like a decades-long plan to slowly reduce plastic use in manufacturing, shipping, etc.
Seems about right, most waste comes from the use of plastic in consumer good right? I’d assume they could be replaced with at least some warnings or pushes?
Fishing nets, plastic clothes, and car tires are the primary contributors of loose waste. Consumer plastics tend to find their way to landfills rather than the ocean.
It’d be catastrophic.
It sounds like you’re mostly thinking of plastic containers though, which… well it’d still have to be carefully phased, because food comes in those, and it’d be better to still allow a little plastic film for safety seals, but yeah, it’d be entirely possible to switch back to bottles and cans. It’d probably cost like $0.10 more to produce per item or something trivial though, so corporations would never allow it.
A policy I like to daydream about is, after ending CO2 emissions, massively subsidizing lumber production until it makes sense to make disposable containers out of wood. All the wooden garbage in landfills would sequester carbon, so we could slowly get back to pre-industrial CO2 levels.
glass bottles you have problems with them weighing way more and breaking during shipping so for that to be “worth it” we’d have to come up with some way to equate the additional emissions and losses with whatever the plastic is doing.
plastic means a substance that can be moulded to shape, and does not mean ‘made of oil’ as many people likely assume.
Oil is portrayed as a miracle substance, it can be turned into plastics, into medications, into whatever. But it’s all missing the point, humans have poured squillions into chemistry labs to make oil do these things, and from this we could easily make a lot of these things from hydrocarbons that dont involve fracking, drilling and couping democratic states
plastic is in the position it is in because it is cheaper for industry, not because it is convenient, though it may feel that way.
when coke came in glass bottles, coke demanded the bottles back, they cost coke money.
we could transition to a largely plastic free world, there are things that would likely still need to be made from so-called bioplastics, a lot of things contain ‘plastics’, i’m thinking seals for plumbing, glues, and etc.
Anyway, plastic is cheap and convenient (ie disposable), recycling often uses more resources than extracting raw materials. Dont hold your breath.
they may take our plastic, but they will never take the microplastics in our blood, because it would not provide an 18% profit for the company who “win” the government tender
There would be a fuckton more broken glass everywhere for one thing
Just ban all single use beverage containers, of any material. You gotta bring your 64oz stainless steel jug to the depot to fill up on cola from now on
You really wanna watch me drink an entire gallon of Mr. Pibb in one sitting?
I’m sorry, it’s for the good of the land
Obviously the answer is public soda fountains. No need to have a tankard to drink your Mr. Pibb, you can just have a sip at the fountain and go about your day!
I was just thinking today about the logistics of banning disposable takeout/delivery containers entirely and replacing them with durable, reusable ones. The customer would drop them off at collection points scattered about your town/city where they would be collected, sanitized, and redistributed.
I actually looked it up, and apparently Seoul has a pilot program like this that they launched this year:
if it’s like shopping bags you’d have to use each container a few thousand times to make up for the extra energy used in production and the attrition rate of ones that are damaged or incorrectly thrown away.
This was touted a lot way back when, but suddenly capital has decided they have infinite amounts of energy for data centres. So in hindsight this feels a bit like a red herring / BP protip
in an ideal world we don’t have consider the ‘lifetime energy cost’ because we ideally use energy from sources that don’t ruin the world we live in
i think the BP part of it was caring about consumer use of shopping bags to begin with, plastic used in packaging that never gets to a shelf would be a better target of regulation if you had a government that wanted to actually do anything on that vector.
From what I recall the math on shopping bags isn’t quite that bad—well, cloth tote bags are awful and don’t come even close to breaking even (that might be where the “few thousand times” figure comes from), but the math can work out on certain kinds of more durable plastic bags. However, plastic grocery bags use barely any plastic to begin with whereas most takeout containers use a substantial amount, so I think the break-even point is more favorable in this application. But even so, it’ll only work if you have strong incentive programs in place to make sure containers get returned (e.g. large deposits), a wide network of drop-off points (to prevent extra trips from being taken, especially car trips), and a unified system (to prevent inefficient fragmentation of said drop-off/sanitization system). It’s not an automatic win, but I think it’s worth studying the feasibility of such a system.
That said, this is all in service of preserving treats with the minimum amount of inconvenience to consumers. In a degrowth scenario, it’d probably be a lot better if we had more communal cafeterias and stuff like that, since it’s more energy efficient to ship, store, and cook large batches of food and you don’t need a complex city-wide logistical system to wash dishes. In that pie-in-the-sky scenario we’d also actually take infection control seriously and have stringent filtration and ventilation systems, Far-UVC, contact tracing, masking on public transit, and so on. Because no fucking way are you gonna catch me dead sitting down to eat in a restaurant in this day and age
…just spaced out a bit for a second there thinking about how much nicer the hellish nondescript suburbs would be if they replaced the stroads with streetcars and tree-lined bicycle and pedestrian lanes
we’d also actually take infection control seriously
You wouldn’t need to for very long, because you’d eradicate a large number of diseases
i wonder if recycling rates are any different in the rebate states
communal cafeterias and stuff like that, since it’s more energy efficient to ship, store, and cook large batches of food and you don’t need a complex city-wide logistical system to wash dishes.
yeah i liked that at uni, especially since it was attached to the dorm
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Everyone else has covered the important stuff, so I’ll cover something less important that is an area of interest of mine.
The toy industry would be devastated - plastics are an incredibly useful material for toys, pretty much all of the technical innovations in the world of toys that don’t have to do with electronic components are drawn specifically from the increasing capabilities of plastics over time. Something as simple as the modern action figure would be far more difficult to produce to the same level of quality if they were forced to use wood or metal exclusively again - the articulation would suffer, the durability would suffer, the ability for that articulation to hold tension over time would suffer, the ability for paint to stay on the figures would suffer, and there’d be a lot more difficulties with avoiding sharp edges and breakage from the forces you can expect children to put their toys through.
Problems like this would exist for basically every single toy on the market - they’ve all benefited massively from plastics, and if there is ever restrictions on the use of plastic (as there probably ought to be) then we’d see a massive devolution in what toy manufacturers are capable of.
Obviously this doesn’t actually matter - the world was fine before action figures and would be fine after them, much as some people like them, and physical toys are arguably on the way out anyway in favor of screen-based entertainment for children (I consider this a bad thing, but, it’s pretty clearly happening.) so a plastic ban may not change much in the end.
The world existed before plastic it can exist without it.
This is a bad argument because the world also existed before penicillin.
Plastic is a lightweight byproduct of petroleum refinement.
You’d need to stop using petroleum, because what are you gonna do, let the waste just pile up? Burn it?
You’d need local handling of cleaning and recycling of alternatives because the alternatives are all heavier.
Good luck transporting the alternatives without petroleum, an energy dense fuel that is stable and easily transported.
You don’t get to keep electronics either, because those are widely made of plastic.
Your manufacturing has to go back to lubricated metal, wood or animal byproducts for everything because now you can’t just have two nylon contact surfaces good for ten billion cycles.
burn it?
That is what happens with gas.
2025 was a new record with ~150 billion cubic metres of natural gas burned off
It would not be fantastic
life would be GLORIOUS.
of course it’s not actually that simple, but on a broad consumer level a shitton of plastic is totally replacable. rubber replacement plastics will not be easily replaced with genuine rubber because that’s already scarcer than demands, and plastic is simply the best material for a few things.
i also think carbon capture should be tooled into plastic production, trees are cool but plastic’s ridiculous longevity is actually good in the context of retaining carbon
be like germany during the nazi era
