Even if the tech is secure there are still thousands of foreign employees working in those companies. It's not uncommon for people to be sympathisers of their homeland. And it's not symmetrical since very few westerners work for Alibaba, Huawei etc.
Pollution needs to be stopped at the source. I worry that this will be used by marking assholes, the same ones that invented the so called 'recycling' logo on plastic packaging, to keep on filling the planet with waste as usual. Hey look we don't need to ban anything, make lifestyle changes or assume chemicals are unsafe until proven otherwise because look there is this magic machine that can 'annihilate' our waste.
I put my plastic packaging in a recycling bin that is picked up by the municipality. Everything seems to come in plastic packaging but I try to avoid it where possible. I grow my own vegetables. They like to tell me I'm doing the right thing but I know it all ends up in some poorer country. The consumer doesn't really have any sway at the bottom of the cliff. Ban at the source.
I think we need a stricter regulatory mechanism for proving the safety of products that can pose a substantial risk to health or the environment, akin to that of the FDA.
Right now, it seems like you can put something relatively unproven on the market, and by the time we realize it’s unsafe, everyone has become dependent on it.
In response, companies cook up an analog that does the same thing, and the market switches to that.
Eventually, we discover that the analog suffers from very similar issues, and the entire process starts over again.
The bans should (and could) extend to classes of compounds, instead of just some exact compound. They manage to do it with psychedelics, that they haven't with these problematic compounds is probably because industry has a larger sway on legislators than drug enthusiasts.
I recommend watching The Poison Squad documentary which digs into the reasons the FDA was formed in the first place. The meat packing industry used to sell a lot of spoiled food containing chemicals unsafe for human health.
Strong arguments, ideally legislation would ensure plastics break down and if not, some sort of breakdown cost incorporated into the goods. But that stifles industry and innovation. Maybe we can have incentives for packaging that breaks down, I believe the technology exists at this point in time.
I _think_ you are not being sarcastic, but apologies if I am misunderstanding. Allowing industry to externalize costs does not promote innovation. It does the opposite, as offloading those costs to others is effectively subsidizing the behaviour.
Yes on the sarcasm, you bring up a great point. True "innovation" would take into account the optimal outcome, but sometimes that has to be legislated in. As in many industries where regulation improves outcomes for society.
Incentives are good but you still have to watch out for greenwashing lies. If you take a look at carbon credits for instance there is an incentive to plant trees but what happens in reality is quite different; the industry is full of frauds such as not planting out forests that are on someones books.
Sure you can use cardboard for a a lot of things but liquids and pressurized goods like soda are difficult. I don't think there is a way to have a biodegradable coke bottle. We need go to standard sizes of glass or s/s packaging. It will require infrastructure and it will cost some money which of course the companies won't like.
If there exists a use of "«break down»" intended to mean "biodegrade", the term remains too close to "crumble".
You would not eat a bottle, but having tiny chunks of plastic around makes "you eat 5 grams of plastic - one credit card - per <period>" fully credible (i.e. you want it to stay big to stay out of the body - you want materials not to shed themselves around). Crumbling plastic just creates microplastic. Which is relevant, because some actors seem to have confused the goals - transforming vs pulverizing.
In the case of plastic, you have a chemical issue. The linguistic issue - the ambiguity and the "poor choice", that plastic will more easily "break down" in chunks, not in de-structured carbon etc. -, can point to that.
We are already seeing some material variations that are strongly ineffective for their intended purpose, and that will contribute more to the diffusion of microplastic instead of (re-)cycling.
We bought some eco "bamboo" plates for our toddler because he keeps breaking ceramic plates. But they just mix some bamboo fibres into the plastic. It does feel a bit nicer to touch than normal plastic, but I'm not sure how it is more eco-friendly. It's still plastic that's going to end up in a dump.
(That being said, I don't worry too much about the material of something that gets years of use)
Having just looked at boxes in my kitchen I counted 5 different logos that look the same at first glance, except they're not. 3 arrows with a number in the middle, one circular arrow, 3 arrows with no number, and they're the ones I remember.
It's a hard one because cardboard containers and wooden utensils are objectively better. But clearly also serve the interests of reducing political will for legislation against plastics.
The other way is to reuse very inert materials like stainless steel or glass. Outlaw all the silly marketing designs and make them standarized like shipping containers and buy them back from the consumer. It used to work this way before plastics came along anyway. Beer and milk bottles would be swapped for instance.
Right now we have 4 items we can basically recycle.
Glass -> fairly straight forward to recycle
Metal -> fairly straight forward to recycle
Paper -> depends and very water intensive but kind of OK and not totally terrible if it is just burnt. But nearly as all over the place as plastic.
Plastic -> All over the place and dozens upon dozens of differing types rules regulations and depending on your local area how much is actually 'recycled' (a lot less than you think)
Then on top of that we are to reduce, reuse, recycle. The manufactures have skipped the first two steps and blame us for it.
Plastic is the worst of them to recycle it has the least recyclability. I have seen estimates from anywhere for 5% to 10% of the total plastic stream. Then customer shaming and deceptive tactics to make me feel bad for this. The bottom line is plastic is the worst for recyclability yet we use it for a good portion of our containers. We are worried about plastic straws and yet a good portion of the food I buy comes in a plastic container. Instead we should be putting pressure on the upstream to give us containers that they and we can reuse.
It's worth separating out the packaging waste in statistics e.g. if you buy a plastic doll in plastic packaging, the doll might account for most of the plastic.
If you buy a plastic lawn chair there may be no packaging, but still a sizeable lump of plastic.
Plus global averages hide variation in package recycling (and reclamation) rates are surprisingly okay in developed nations, even in the US which you'd think is culturally incapable based on the anecdotes you hear. It seems like big cities where lots of people live are doing better than less dense areas where relatively few people live, which keeps the stats high.
Probably because the marketing industry has tricked us into this way of thinking. The traditional model of buying good quality 'goods' and passing them through generations is not good for business. They even managed to sell bottled water and a lot of people drive SUVs to go to the shops. I bought a couch recently and I could not find one with washable covers. Companies love selling tacky shit that we'll have to replace in a few years and it's terrible for the planet. I feel there should be a tax on fragile, low quality junk or perhaps a 10 year warranty or disposal costs baked into the price. The external cost of the pollution (microplastics, e-waste etc) is not factored into the price of anything. I try to buy used if I can but admittedly it's not always easy to make the trades compared to buying from a retail box store.
> Probably because the marketing industry has tricked us into this way of thinking.
There's no trick about it. Lots of people like new things. Lots of people get new phones, new cars, new TVs, new clothes, new video games, and yes new furniture.
Almost nobody cares about the griping of a few curmudgeons complaining about what they think is tacky or terrible for the planet -- not even most self-proclaimed environmentalists you see flying around the world with the latest gadgets and expensive clothes.
> There's no trick about it. Lots of people like new things.
I think you missed OP’s point. Why do you think lots of people like to buy new things? They weren’t born with an instinctive desire to do something that happens to directly profit companies.
I didn't miss OP's point. Go back to before there was a marketing industry, before there were corporations even. People liked shiny things. Greed, gluttony, envy, these are all part of the human condition. We had these things inside us before we came down from the trees.
