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A Million Bottles a Minute: World's Plastic Binge 'As Dangerous as Climate Change' (theguardian.com)
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports: A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20 percent by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change. New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade. The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised "on the go" culture to China and the Asia Pacific region. More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International's global packaging trends report. Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.
They fit in my cupholders and they are the cheapest way to buy spring water, assuming you get them on sale. I bought two flats of bottles for $3 and then they went down and I bought two more for $2 each.
I do bring them home and put them into the recycling bin, so to me the solution is to make that work. But I'd be equally happy to pay a few cents more per bottle to get compostable ones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm pretty sure that some seemingly smart person will propose one day to release bacteria into the oceans that can digest plastic and eat it. Just that person will cause us more trouble than we ever wanted. The reason we use plastic is because it can't be digested by bacteria. If we teach bacteria how to do it efficiently we'll get the bill sooner or later by not being able to continue to use plastic for most of its purposes, like containing food, or to keep the bacteria out from medical equipment (non septic stuff is always packaged inside plastic, that's not for the cool looks), etc.
That's great you can recycle them. Just like aluminum cans there's no reason not to do it. Of course the problem is made to seem that no one does, but clearly people do recycle. Hence the scare quotes, large numbers, and references like halfway to the sun. 500 billion bottles sounds large but that's less than 100 per person per year. Or one every three days. Few people are going to think that's a problem.
So educate people to recycle and stop saying stupid shit like it's worse that climate change.
Overpopulation. The planet has 7.5 billion people, all of whom want to live the good life as seen in Hollywood movies and TV. One estimate has us reaching 10 billion by 2050. If there were only a billion, some plastic waste and CO2 emissions might not be such a problem. But the existing 7.5 billion folks are already destroying the biosphere, and that is today, where only a few percent (like the US, Western Europe) are enjoying the wonderful lifestyle. Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak. It will only get worse. In the long run, however, it will probably be a self-correcting problem, if you know what I mean.
This sounds like a lot, but in reality it is a small fraction of the oil used per hour by humanity. The average weight of a PET drink bottle is 12.7grams, so a million bottles a minute is about 12.7 metric tonnes of plastic a minute. Assuming 100% conversion efficiency from crude into PET (ie other distillates are utilised for other purposes) that is about 90 barrels a minute or 129600 barrels a day.
World crude oil usage is about 100 million barrels a day. So plastic bottles are about 0.13% of daily oil consumption. Even if we stopped using them altogether, the impact would be trivial. Also, many countries burn plastic waste to generate energy, so removing bottles as fuel will potentially cause an equivalent increase in other fossil fuel usage.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help the environment. Just pointing out that this is not going to be a panacea.
"Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports:"
If those naughty islands would only behave properly, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem.
diet Pepsi
Ie, undrinkable right from the day of manufacture.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Some states do that. They have a deposit on all plastic bottles. They talked about doing it in other states and 'certain political officials' stated that it would be a burden on the poor. When it was asked why don't they remove the deposit on pop, they reply, "The poor shouldn't be drinking pop, water is better." - So let me get this straight: The poor should buy water which is more expensive then pop. Even though they're owned by the same company. -- Sorry for the tangent but this type of thinking is why many states or even cities don't have appropriate recycling programs.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
There are two problems with this. One is that even a thin layer of leaves will keep the plastic bottle safe from UV. The other is that most plastics are made with toxics, they don't magically disappear when they break down in the sunlight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You do realise that there is more than one kind of plastic, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unfortunately, you're the one full of BS. While they might break down with direct exposure to the sun, they do so very slowly, more slowly than you have observed. As they break down they release toxins that never even existed until this material was created into the environment and food chain. It also gets broken down into small bits and pieces that small lifeforms end up consuming. Small fish and even smaller organisms, eat this crap, then larger organisms eat them and so forth. You know, like how mercury builds up going up the food chain. Eating a contaminated shrimp isn't as bad as eating a contaminated tuna which has eaten 100s of pounds of those contaminated shrimp.
No, it doesn't all revert back to good 'ol mother earth, it sits in our environment in ever more microscopic forms for 100s or 1000s of years. The first plastic ever created is still with us. The leaves that fell off the trees last year are completely gone and have returned back to mother earthy. We will be fucked by plastic created today long after our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand have died, if Earth even makes it that far.
I have NEVER seen a cheap piece of plastic last for more than a couple years out baking in the sunshine. It disintegrates on it's own. {...} but it all reverts back to good ole mother earth.
Yes, under the sun (and lots of other environmental factors, including mechanical action) a bottle will disintegrates.
But THIS IS NOT reverting back to good old mother earth.
It is just breaking a big plastic object into finer plastic dust.
Which brings its own bunch of problems:
- this plastic dust disperse wide
- this plastic dust has a higher risk of getting ingested by marine animal
- this plastic dust also collects organic compounds more easily
- once ingested by marine animal, due to higher amount of organic compound stuck on the plastic dust, these animal accumulate more pollution.
(There a movie called "A plastic ocean" currently touring festivals that explains this better).
And thus, TFS :
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore.
That's actually a myth. You're nearly NEVER going to find whole intact plastic bottles in remote places because the above phenomenon.
The reality is actually much grimmer :
- with the naked eye you're not going to see much (again, artificial islands of collect plastic junks are a myth).
- but if you make lab analysis of the environment, you'll see that :
-- most local marine animals have ingested an alarming amount of plastic dust in their bodies
-- and they'll have probably concentrated some polluant at higher dose.
Otherwise the Tennessee River which I grew up on would be totally lined with styrofoam.
It is a *river*. It wont never stay lined with anything for a long time : eventually everything will get carried away by the current and broken down in smaller particles (also some substance like steel *will* degrade (to rust, etc.) while other like glass and plastic are too chemically stable. At least glass will break-down into sand (basically : glass dust)).
Once carried away by the current they will eventually find their way into the seas, then into the ocean, when they'll finally get caught into some current that will keep them in some cycle forever.
Heck, there are some woods, cedar for example, that will last longer than a plastic bottle exposed to the elements.
Actually wood isn't such a bad exemple.
But not for the reasons you think.
(No: it won't last longer than plastic bottle. It will *keep its shape* for a longer time than plastic [that's why life invented it in plants : because it's structurally sturdy]. But eventually, decomposers [bacteria, funghi, etc.] will manage to digest it. It will actually end up back into CO2)
But some eons ago that wasn't the case. It took some time between life inventing wood (somewhere in the Devonian), and bacteria coming up with a way to degrade it.
Of course all this juicy stored chemical energy was going to end-up being used as a food source for some microbes.
The same situation is happening again. We human produce tons of a nearly indestructible component (plastic) but that is still rich in stored chemical energy (the fact that you can actually burn it into CO2 is a sign).
Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics.
Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Some 90% of the plastic in the Pacific has been traced to Asia, specifically China and Viet nam. Now, the poster of this tries to lay the blame on the west claiming that our selling bottled water is to blame. This is no different than those that blame America for China's gov choosing to build new coals plants and continue using more than 85%coal for electricity. Now, the Chinese and Viet nam gov continue to throw their garbage out because it is cheaper and easier. Since both gov are communist/totalitarian, Both gov could order their citizens to clean up. But neither does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If your neighbors take a cholera shit, the microbial life in the soil will compost it and break it down to harmless base nutrients. I doubt your neighbors are taking a heavy metal enema twice a day, but if they are, no big deal, the soil is an extremely fine grained filter with slow percolation. By the time the water makes its way down into your well, most contamination like that would be left behind in the upper layers of soil.
How deep you drill is up to you. As you go deeper, you have more and more filter material that dirty surface water must pass through before becoming your clean well water. Of course, the trade off is higher energy expense to lift water from deeper wells. Test the water as you drill and decide if it's clean enough or drill further.
Dirty water dumped by industrial neighbors in the next state over? Not likely to matter much at all. How much contamination from your neighboring state do you think is going to get into your well water when it would have to pass through literally MILES of filter material in a mostly horizontal direction? Gravity does not favor horizontal movement of such contaminates. You would have to be pumping an absolutely EPIC amount of water (and dirt) to be able to get anything to move from a neighboring state into your well.
A common misconception about water wells is what the "water table" looks like. "Water table" makes it sound like if you go deep underground, suddenly the soil ends and free flowing water like a river or lake begins, resting on top of a table of impermeable earth. A layer of pure water sandwiched between layers of dirt. That's completely baloney and ridiculous. There is no "table" where one material ends and the other begins.
Think of a wet sponge that's been sitting around for a while. The top is generally dry due to evaporation and as you go downwards, the sponge is more fully saturated with water due to gravity pulling water downwards. If you drill a hole into the earth (the sponge), soil around your borehole will start oozing water into your hole because pressure from the weight of all materials above are squeezing water out like when you squeeze a wet sponge.
Even if some neighbor drills a hole down to the "water table" and dumps contaminated materials straight down their hole, you've still got many feet of spongy filter material between your well and theirs filtering out contaminates. The water is not free flowing between wells. Any water moving between wells must pass through highly compacted soil/sand/etc that exists between the two holes.
Conflating climate and pollution. It's all propaganda.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Rain water can be indeed excellent. It is essentially distilled water, the purest water there is.
But rain is unpredictable. Rainwater is sometimes contaminated by bird droppings, dust, critters, etc. Maybe you can build enough water storage to get you through an extended drought, but then again, are you sure it will be enough?
I would suggest that a well is more reliable and sustainable. Waste water can be recycled in a never ending circle. The water you wash with and flush down the drain today may well be the clean/filtered water that you pump back out of the ground several months from now. This does not require rain occurring regularly. This does not require massive amounts of water storage containment.
These people don't realize anything. I can't believe we seriously have "plastic deniers" too now. Any excuse to not take responsibility or have to change any tiny aspect of their life for the betterment of the entire world...