I just read a sci-fi book (Hyperion) where a character is surprised to learn that an existing civilization was still petroleum based, and the response was that it wasn’t needed as a fuel, it was needed to make plastic products.
This story is just plain sad. Reading things like this really remind me of just how much plastic we use in our household and honestly don’t really have an alternative for a whole lot of it. I realize sachets are a different problem, but the overall use of plastic and alternatives still apply. I don’t see this having an easy solution for any company, much less Unilever.
There are just so many products using plastic, I honestly don’t think it will ever stop. We’d be better off finding a way to reuse more plastics, or break them down in a better way without further affecting the environment.
It’s basically impossible to cut out plastics because every product is based around using shitloads of the stuff.
In some cases an easy (or good) packaging alternative doesn’t really exist.
Packaging is one thing, then you know it’s plastic. I have a big problem with “hidden” plastics, like Micro beads in toothpaste, shampoo and a lot of other household products.
I stopped eating chewing gum when I found out it’s mostly single use plastic you are chewing and most of it ends up in the environment.
Anthropocene in full swing.
This should probably be in the “no shit Sherlock” but I guess nobody ever bothered to test bottled water for plastic before.
It’s not just the plastic bottles either, it’s in the water going into the bottles from the filtration process.
I’m sometimes so depressed at the impossibility of avoiding plastic packaging. We do what we can; we basically eat only fresh fruits & vegetable produce, no packaged stuff. When I do buy processed foods, I try to buy in glass or aluminum. But lots of stuff only comes in plastic. Condiments come in plastic. Spices and other things — olive oil, vinegars — often come in plastic. Water and milk come in plastic. Cleaning products only come in plastic. I’ve made the switch to buying shampoo and conditioner in bar form, rather than in plastic containers. But still, when I look at my trash and recycle bin, they’re full of plastic of the allegedly recyclable and laughably recyclable variety. Sometimes the only thing in my trash is fruit/vegetable refuse and plastic.
Tired - Microplastics
Wired - Nanoplastics
Also, if we are getting into sub 1 um size, literally everything will have plastics in it, including the tap water you drink over the bottled stuff. (Most bottled water comes from a tap somewhere anyway)
Are there established health impacts from consuming nanoplastic? I feel like part of me assumes that’s bad, but if I think about it, I’m not sure I know of what exactly it would do. It’s not like it’s some kind of super reactive material.
What happens to us as a result of this sort of exposure? Or is that still something that is up in the air?
Its unknown - but when you’re ingesting huge amounts of tiny organic polymers that could mimic proteins and others polymers used by a living thing, it’s always safe to bet on Cancer!
Ya, I imagine it affecting cancer rates, although likely less than a ton of other stuff we put in the environment.
Also, how much of it are we actually ingesting? I mean, we’re talking pretty tiny overall amounts still, aren’t we? Like, we’re not eating a pound of plastic a year, in nano particle form, are we?
I’m not even talking about the health risks of plastic here. I’m talking about the sheer, profligate waste of the entire exercise. Why is there no concerted effort to move to genuinely biodegradable packaging?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247
Ingested Microplastic (MP) particles can harm the human body. Estimations of the total mass of ingested MP particles correspond to 50 plastic bags per year (Bai et al., 2022), one credit card per week (Gruber et al., 2022), or a median value of 4.1 μg/week for adults (Mohamed Nor et al., 2021).
Those seem like dramatically different values. The article suggests the crazy high numbers (one credit card per week) are garbage, which sounds right, because I can’t imagine eating that much plastic without knowing it.
Looks like the last part of that abstract is the important part:
It concludes that Senathirajah overestimates m i,MP by several orders of magnitude and that m i,MP can be considered as a rather irrelevant factor for the toxic effects of MP particles on the human body.
So, we’re talking about an overall consumption of very tiny amounts, and that it probably isn’t a relevant factor to our health, which is good to know.
However, looking at it a bit more, I’m wondering if its conclusions still hold, if every liter of bottled water contains 250k plastic particles.
I suspect you know the answer to why such efforts get torpedoed.
But here, it seems to be that opponents believe businesses are terrible problem solvers and the general public are stupid and/or too poor to afford reusable bags. Remember when paper bags were the default?
I’m really amazed at how few people want to use reusable bags at the grocery, considering just how goddamn annoying the plastic bags are. They’re so thin, they often get filled with only one item, they spill all over the back if you dare make a turn in your car, more trash to deal with… but almost no one here uses them. I think I’ve seen two other people in my whole life besides me who have.
It’s been interesting to see how this has changed in my community. There were relatively few reusable bag users until they started imposing a $.05/bag fee for single use plastic bags. Suddenly, more than 50% of the shoppers were carrying their own bags.
I like having some single use plastic bags around (they make useful garbage bags for small bins and for in the car), but, recognizing that most people just throw them away, I’m happy our town passed the bag fee a few years ago.
Wegmans, being NY based, got rid of plastic bags. So, if you’re shopping there, even in PA, you either bring your own bags or you pay for paper bags.
One of the biggest problems with plastic bags, is that people dramatically underestimate their strength, and then they underload them, necessitating way more bags.