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Chile Becomes First Country In Americas To Ban Plastic Bags (ewn.co.za)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Eyewitness News: Chile's Senate has passed a bill that will prohibit the use of plastic bags in stores, with a vote in their House of Representatives overwhelmingly in favor of the measure, with 134 supporting the bill and one abstention. According to The Independent, the new law would give large retailers one year to phase out the use of plastic bags, and smaller businesses two years. This makes Chile the first country in the Americas to ban plastic bags, and officially recognize how important such a ban would be in the effort to reduce unnecessary single-use plastic waste.
At first, the measure was only meant to ban plastic bags in Patagonia, but it was approved by both the senate and president for the entire country. The Association of Plastic Industries registered Chile as using 3,400 million plastic bags per year, or 200 per person. Telesur reports that the Minister of the Environment, Marcela Cubillos, said the country needs a larger cultural change for people to start replacing plastic with reusable bags.
At first, the measure was only meant to ban plastic bags in Patagonia, but it was approved by both the senate and president for the entire country. The Association of Plastic Industries registered Chile as using 3,400 million plastic bags per year, or 200 per person. Telesur reports that the Minister of the Environment, Marcela Cubillos, said the country needs a larger cultural change for people to start replacing plastic with reusable bags.
And I can post as an AC thus foiling your plans for revenge .. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
That's great and all, but where am I supposed to put pet waste? I can't flush litter box bombs down the toilet, because the litter will clog it. (I've tried) Damned if I'm going to use a reuseable bag for that...
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
Everyone knows there are no countries in America, they are states. Duh.
I think it must be a Brit. They write thousand million instead of billion, and billion instead of trillion.
The ocean pollution problem apparently comes from ten rivers located in Asia. North and South America are not killing whales. This is just another pointless feel-good move to show that "they care" in Chile.
According to Oxford dictionary, a billion is now a thousand million in both British and real English.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
They write thousand million
Letting a perfectly good milliard go to waste.
Does this mean that Hillary Clinton won't be allowed in the country?
Bold Kohath. Don't you know that such heresies will get your karma burned at the stake?
The irony of it is that when grocery stores switched from paper bags to plastic bags (was that in the 1990s?), we were told that it was for the environment. Specifically, we were told that it would save trees, and that the plastic bags were biodegradable.
I hope I don't get expelled from the congregation and shunned by the faithful.
Because they want to go to environmentalist heaven.
The problem, here, isn't the bags: It's the people who can't bother to dispose of them properly. Can we ban the lazy, inconsiderate people, instead?
So they're banning something immensely useful because people don't know how to get rid of them properly?
And they'll replace these billions of bags with... what? - Probably something equally bad for the environment, just in ways people have no control over...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Anything that makes life easier the progressives love to tax.
In my neck of the woods they still ask...
My stock response?
"Save an Oil Well! - Paper, please."
Started this shortly after the unmitigated New Horizons disaster.
Fred In IT
They sort of are...the sun degrades them into tiny tiny bits, fish eat them and then you eat the fish. It's the cycle of life from Disney's "Lion King" franchise, just with toxic petroleum products.
Have gnu, will travel.
The ocean pollution problem apparently comes from ten rivers located in Asia. North and South America are not killing whales. This is just another pointless feel-good move to show that "they care" in Chile.
That's pretty much my assessment - macro sized plastic from third world countries, and microsphere plastic from developed places.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/1...
http://www.digitaljournal.com/...
Cites provided because the prominent search results blame countries that already recycle a lot of plastic. Making someone in those countries feel guilty about themselves, while doing nothing about the Pacific Rim countries will accomplish exactly nothing.
This is not to say plastic in the oceans is not a problem. It's that completely eliminating the first world contributions to the problem will stall out at a 10 percent reduction.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
According to Oxford dictionary, a billion is now a thousand million in both British and real English.
Indeed UK used to have so called 'long scale' but now sticks with short.
More on names of large numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Another link with some historical details: https://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/u...
To me the long scale seems more logical 'ards' as thousands (10^3) and 'lions' as millions (10^6), but unification is more important in this case, and we all know which one will win.
They are starting to realize a lot of the freshwater microplastic is from large businesses putting compostables in plastics bags which get ground up and spread on fields.
We recycle all our plastic bags here... it isn't hard. However given that their are always going to be assholes throwing them out the car window, I suppose it is better to phase them out. Which means I need some sort of mnemonic for remembering to put the reusables back in the car. And better reusables than the crap ones the grocery store sells which can't hold three 2-liters without ripping the side because they sewed the handle support into a single ply of cloth... and usually straight through foil on the thermal bags, which goes first since it cannot stretch. Stupid.
Someone had to do it.
Thank you for the redundancy. Is a billion still a thousand million in American English?
Soft drinks are a much worse waste of plastic. Every day at lunch i have a bottle. The weight of a bottle far exceeds that of a plastic bag (a hundred times?). A bag is an environmental problem as they travel and get places but really bottles are much worse problem surely? Soft drink companies really need to think about this as they have to be the worst offenders by a huge margin. Capitalism sure!y has to take some blame as if someone made it expensive to create these then a solution would be found? Future generations will look at us with shame and we obviously are just ignoring it but know better.
To me the long scale seems more logical
Indeed.
With the long scale, it's easy to understand what the name represents: ...
billion = 10^(6 * bi) = 10^12
trillion = 10^(6 * tri) = 10^15
septillion = 10^(6 * sept) = 10^42
With the short scale, it's harder to remember, as it's two operations: ...
billion = 10^(3 + 3 * bi) = 10^9
trillion = 10^(3 + 3 * tri) = 10^12
septillion = 10^(3 + 3 * sept) = 10^24
Also, with we need the long scale to fully appreciate the following gruk:
Nature, it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.
-- Piet Hein
At any rate, "thousand millions" is unambiguous in both scales, so highly recommended.
If I have a discussion with, say, a non-techie on, say, power usages, and most of the figures we quote are of the order of magnitude of some hundreds of kiloWatts, then it makes perfect sense to treat an outlier as several thousand kiloWatts, and not as a few Megawatts, it seems to me. An engineer would immediately folow me making a jump into Megawatts, a non-techie not necessarily so.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And thats the problem. Sure, maybe 10% of people re-use them (and thats probably being generous) but the other 90% just toss them and therein lies the problem. Yes it'll be a bit of inconvenience for you but frankly thats just tough, we're all going to have to make sacrifices in the future to stop the enviromental damage we're doing and having to buy bin liners will be the least of them.
They're quite common in some places and for smaller loads work fine. For bigger supermarket visits you can buy a proper bag that will last years.
3,400 million ... apparently the person writing this has never heard of the concept of billion.
What an odd way to write that.
Apparentley the person who wrote that is an ignorant Xenophobe who doesn't know that other countries do things differently than his.
No sig today...
I live in a "bagless" community. It's not that bad and "bagless" is a serious misnomer.
First of all there are the exceptions. You still get bags at the produce aisle in the grocery store, at the liquor store, and several other places. The local bylaw that implemented this had to be amended once or twice to increase the number of allowed exceptions. Reusable bags (themselves made from recycled plastic) are sold everywhere.
The main thing is to remember to bring your reusable bags when you go shopping. And if you forget, you buy a couple more reusable bags on the spot. So it's not about banning bags, it's about reducing the number of bags, and mainly about reducing the number of "single use" bags.
It's made a difference too. There are noticeably fewer bags blowing around as litter and garbage, which is a win in my book. Few things make an area look worse than thousands of bags choking a street, a field, or a grove of trees.
If you're not a "religious" environmentalist, you are ignorant and/or suicidal.
Most people, at least in the western world (apart from the US, where some people seems to think nature is a communist plot), are environmentalists no matter where they are are on the political spectrum. It's a matter of survival.
Stores in and near Portland, Oregon stopped supplying plastic bags. The reason appeared to be that International Paper (world map) has a plant near Portland.
Paper is far more damaging to the environment. First, a huge truck must go to a place where there are trees. The trees are cut and trucked to a processing plant. The plant uses poisonous chemicals to make the paper.
The problem appears to be that there is not sufficient identification and recycling of waste. Plastic should not be allowed in streams and rivers.
Paper buried in trash areas can eventually degrade, but that usually doesn't happen because there is usually not enough oxygen to support the breakdown process.
# billion x thousand million and
# three digit separation x special 10 thousand name (lakh/man)
IMHO, long-scale (billion being a million of millions) allows for a wider span of terminology; for instance, a trillion would be 10^18, whereas in short-scale it would mean 10^12, thus exhausting names earlier.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage
# decimal point x decimal comma x decimal "other character"
IMHO both dot and comma creates problems, but living with two standards (hence, not really standards) creates even more trouble.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system
# parentheses x RPN
RPN is immensely more useful, IMHO.
Both Galculator and "Qalculate!" have it. With Galculator copy-on-select copies the decimal separator while Ctrl-C removes it. Being a former user of "Qalculate!" on KDE, I still haven't figure how to display decimal separator with gtk...
# prefixes (mega-, kilo-, centi-, milli-) x various special units (inch, foot, yard, mile)
# SI x non-SI
Obviously as most of the world is already using them or is going to adopt then sooner or later, prefixes are better. Using non-SI units also makes science texts less scientific, considering they fail to be understood by most (for instance, when using temperatures in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius) -- if one understands "making science" as necessarily growing the knowledge pool with contributions from everyone.
# national languages x neutral international language
This is expensive to deal with, creates a lot of confusion and limits comprehension by non-native speakers.
Presently, English is considered an international lingua franca, but it does not work well in many settings -- for instance, in poorer countries lacking teaching services or in other places for political reasons. To see how bad it is, imagine a former time when French was the prevalent standard or, alternatively, what would happen if Chinese becomes the most used internationally.
95% of the plastic in the oceans comes from Africa and Asia.
It's a matter of survival.
Environmentalism has only been a thing since the 1970s. It became a religion in the 1980s when it transcended rational conservation and became about advancing the sanctity of "the Earth" rather than making choices that were best for humans.
Before 1970, end-times Earth apocalypse wasn't a threat to survival. Now you're enlightened, so now survival requires daily rituals and observances and sacrifice.
This feels like writing "horseless carriage" instead of "car". When will we have a short, recommended word for "thousand millions"?
"CMPC is a Chilean pulp and paper company, being one of the biggest in Latin America. ... Revenue: US$ 5.1 billion (2017)"
Another plant: CELCO Valdivia Pulp Mill pollution: "The company had been dumping more dioxins and heavy metals than had been approved by the regulating agencies into the river from a waste tube that had been approved by the authorities. It had also been producing far above levels approved in its Environmental Impact Assessment, and was cited for multiple violations of environmental and health laws."
"In July 2007 CELCO agreed to pay CLP$614 millions to Valdivian tourism companies to avoid legal actions for supposed losses of the tourism sector of Valdivia due to contamination of Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary."
"The Secretary of State for the Environment said that, despite having large financial and technical resources, CELCO had an extremely poor environmental record."
However given that their are always going to be assholes throwing them out the car window, I suppose it is better to phase them out.
Phase out the assholes? I find your views interesting, and would like to subscribe to your blog.
That's a trick statement, since empirical environmentalists don't even have the concept of sin, so you're correct, of course. Ah, but empiricists do have the concept of "losing strategy" and whoops, the issue comes right back. It's almost as though people hate to see plastic bags up in their trees. Here you are, being so clever and dispassionate and happy to see your trees decorated with plastic, and there they are, getting all indignant without even bringing mysticism into it. It's almost as though they have .. aesthetics?
I think you should double down and totally lord your artless world over them! Teach them the value of suffering, ugliness and pollution. Explain to them how accepting "worse is better" is a way to "build character."
to the supermarket
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not suicidal, just homicidal. Old rich people have nothing to fear.
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How much oil is used to make plastic?: "Although crude oil is a source of raw material (feedstock) for making plastics, it is not the major source of feedstock for plastics production in the United States."
Natural gas is less polluting. Still a problem, but not as much of a problem as using oil.
It's almost as though people hate to see plastic bags up in their trees.....It's almost as though they have .. aesthetics?
Poor people can’t afford your whimsical aesthetics.
registered Chile as using 3,400 million plastic bags per year, or 200 per person.
3,400 million ... apparently the person writing this has never heard of the concept of billion.
What an odd way to write that.
Apparentley the person who wrote that is an ignorant Xenophobe who doesn't know that other countries do things differently than his.
Nope, what is apparent is your ignorance that all English speaking countries use 'billion' consistently, and have done so for a very long time now. And the fact that countries that don't speak English use entirely different concepts is irrelevant because the post was written in English.
The comments so far that I have read anout how this is bad are basically reduced to "This is an inconvinience for me." and then tryt to find another reason. So here is how it works in places where they are already doing this.
Instead of using a bag one time, you take a cotton bag that you can use many times over years. You take it with you when you go shopping. Sure, you will forget it a few times, but most people are not snowflakes and will start to remember, just like you remember to take your phone with you.
Where I live most people can not use the bag for trash anyway. You need to buy special bags for special garbage. So there is no gain there.
The single use items need to stop. I just bought 4 microSD cards and the amount of garbadge I got with it is immense. I get a SD sleeve (or whatever it is called) that I do not need. They are placed in a plastic that I do not need inside an even bigger plastic that is put inside a carton. That was the put inside a box that was filled with filling paper. 4 microSD cards Could have bneen send in an envelope, yet they decided to use the size of a small shoebox. I guess 99.9% waste.
I also use 1 use-based items, because I am as lazy as the rest (and perhaps even more so as I do this at work), yet I changed my behaviour in using plastic bags and I did not try to sweasel my way out of it and find excuses. I adapted my behaviour and after a month it was ok.
So now when I go shopping, I take two small nags that are both the size of a wallet with me. I always have at least one with me at all times in case I suddenly need it. Something like this and yes, they exist in other materials as well, but you need to search foir yourself as I am lazy and my shift is almost over.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Good job Chile!!!!!!!
Chile has taken leadership and did the right thing, now who's is next!?
3,400 million plastic bags
Wow, that's nearly 3,400,000 thousand bags!
Get ready for a new renaissance in the lumber industry. Paper sacks are coming back (along with deforestation, yay!).
It's a milliard. We already have it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Environmentalism has only been a thing since the 1970s.
Or for the past couple thousand years. But close enough, eh?
But then what am I supposed to do with the cat poop?
Since when is Patagonia in Chile?
It got modded +5 so I assume there's a joke here but I'm lacking context.
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if you mean recycling they were just being shipped to China and dumped in landfills there. If you mean "thrown in with the rest of the trash" isn't the issue that they're filling up landfills?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I guess they don't get the unintended consequences of things like that. When they did that in California, they eliminated the only refuge for the homeless to dispose of their waste in a sanitary manner.
It's why there's so much human feces all over the streets and sidewalks in San Francisco and San Diego these days. And where the hepatitis outbreaks came from.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Greedy people, especially conservative 5 digits like yourself, have to be incentivized to follow green policies. The only thing that incentivizes people and companies like that is money. Why can't going green be profitable? Why wouldn't a free market capitalist NOT want to make money off a service that they have to provide? You guys force the government all the time to reimburse you for expenditures related to many policies, green or not. You guys throw a shit fit until you get paid and then you'll go ahead extract these nickel and dime fees any fucking way. I'm looking at you airlines and telecomm.
So please spare me this greenwashing bullshit. This situation is a WIN-WIN and you hate that. You've been proven wrong yet again that eco friendly policies aren't or can't be profitable. You want to take this positive and shit all over it because you hate being a loser.
You are wrong and should feel wrong for being wrong.
... without a raft (*sic) of disposed plastic to choke spewing Trotsky progressives ? I mean, you find them under-foot everywhere: street corners, Uni lecture halls, urinals ... without a quickly available YANK-N-GAG the lib'rul drool would all but clog-the-subways ... poison trout-streams ... rust-away gun-barrels of casual CC'rs .. and smatter the nephews poo-bear rag. It's so natural to gag-the-spewer & throttle SJW bleeding hearts! So please my friends think of the children and let my plastics roar 10-4.
Old farts indeed fear nothing ... or if anything only ... not having time to eliminate Rawlsian warmist sluts.
HIS ignorance? Tell that to the Brits and their million million bullshit. THAT is proper English, since you wanna be a douche about it.
this is a lie, argentina did it like ten years ago...
I think it is better we focus on engineering bacteria that secrete plastic digesting enzymes. More exactly engineer one of the enzymes that bacteria already secrete. There have been reports of certain species of Pseudomonas that have been selected to digest plastic. There are also bacteria that reside in the Indian meal moths that create holes in plastic bags. All we really need is a dedicated initiative to apply focused engineering efforts to create highly efficient enzyme systems to digest plastic and release that bacteria into the wild (yeah, go ahead and say environmental testing, I am not sure how we could test for safety).
A link follows to a map of the ten rivers. Trigger alert! Daily Mail ahead, Do Not Soil Yourselves: link
I suspect we're going to see a lot fewer of these plastic patch, oceans are full of plastic stories now that the bulk (90%+) of the problem has been credibly traced to Asia. Doubtless they'll try to attribute it all to "western consumption herp derp," but it's still a speed bump and will reduce coverage dramatically.
So... problem solved! We now return you to your regularly scheduled Carbon anxiety stories.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!