[HN Gopher] Deep dive into plastic monomers, additives, and proc...
___________________________________________________________________
Deep dive into plastic monomers, additives, and processing aids
Author : sizzle
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-06-25 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pubs.acs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pubs.acs.org)
| EGreg wrote:
| The only way to end industries that profit off externalities is
| by imposing Pigovian Taxes AND redistributing the proceeds back
| to the people. That last part is important to avoid Yellow Vest
| protests, while making the industry non-competitive with the
| alternatives:
|
| Non-Biodegradeable Plastics
|
| Factory Farming
|
| Fossil Fuels
|
| Our cars are all built to be locked into the hydrocarbon
| monopoly. Why not open up to a free market of energy generation
| with solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear like all our other
| appliances?
|
| Carbon Tax and Dividend bipartisan proposal, and Alaska's
| Permanent Fund, are the two most "successful" examples so far. We
| need MORE!
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| What freightening is that as oil as an energy sound declines so
| will the price of oil and therefore the price of plastic.
|
| Whether you believe in humans being the driving force behind
| climate change or not, the fact is oil and its byproducts
| generate pollution. Pollution that's harmful to living things.
| suyash wrote:
| This is why I dislike the current version of 3D printing. All it
| creates is cheap, poor quality plastic objects more and more. We
| need organic (recyclable) material that can be manipulated,
| printed and available just like plastic.
| tfolbrecht wrote:
| PLA is biodegradable. For the things I print, I usually smooth
| them with PVA as it's biodegradable. As far as pigments go, I
| have no clue what's in most commercial stuff I think they're
| the main caveat for truly biodegradable 3d printing.
| ainiriand wrote:
| It is biodegradable, that is correct, it just takes around 80
| years to do so.
|
| Can you justify it?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| 80 years is not the issue. It's the stuff that will be
| around forever, and in the oceans, that's trouble.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| we consume a credit card worth
| Choco31415 wrote:
| Per lifetime? Per year? Per kilogram of food? Can you give a
| bit more context to this comment?
| throwawaysea wrote:
| The claim is that humans consume the equivalent of a credit
| card sized amount of plastic a week. See this article from
| ABC: https://abcnews.go.com/US/humans-consume-equivalent-
| credit-c...
|
| This "credit card" bit got popularized in news media because
| it was mentioned in this brochure put out by the World
| Wildlife Fund (WWF) on plastic ingestion: https://awsassets.p
| anda.org/downloads/plastic_ingestion_pres...
|
| Their claim in turn comes from this study from the University
| of Newcastle that was prepared specifically for the WWF
| (which suggests a potential conflict of interest), according
| to the list of references in the WWF brochure above. However,
| I'm not able to find the actual full paper anywhere, and this
| page last noted that it was being reviewed for publication:
| https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured/plastic-
| inges...
| andrekandre wrote:
| from that abc article Since 2000, more
| plastic has been produced worldwide that all the preceding
| years combined, and about a third of the plastic ends up in
| nature, according to the report.
|
| is that accurate...? what changed after 2000 to enable
| this??
| Cerium wrote:
| I think that the sentence is saying that in the period
| between 2000 and present day more plastic has been
| produced in the period from 2000 to -inf. A similar
| statement can be made about most human industrial
| products - cement production has a curve that appears to
| have more area post 2000 than pre.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Per week on average according to a study "K. Senathirajah, T.
| Palanisami, University of Newcastle, How much microplastics
| are we ingesting? Estimation of the mass of microplastics
| ingested.Report for WWF Singapore, May 2019"
|
| Obviously it varies person to person but if you drink water,
| breathe air or use table salt, you are still ingesting
| plastics on a daily basis.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Regulating and managing consumer chemicals after the fact is no
| longer sufficient, and in some cases counter-productive.
|
| For example, bans on long-chain PFASs (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl
| substances) has meant industry has just switched to short-chain
| PFASs, which are _more difficult_ to filter out of water:
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004
|
| We need to establish a whitelist of acceptable compounds and
| force industry to work within that for anything that will shed
| into the environment, be exposed to foodstuffs, or be worn by
| humans.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Until that happens, start with your home.
|
| How many pollutants do you voluntarily introduce into your own
| environment-habitat?
|
| (And for every pound you buy, several pounds of byproducts are
| shed during production.)
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| That's the point, its impossible.
|
| We cannot force individual consumers to become chemists, and
| interrogate every material they come across.
|
| In many cases the materials are completely unknown. Is the
| PFAS used on a Big Mac burger wrapper listed in its
| ingredients?
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Hold on. I'll get started on that as soon as I finish my
| bachelor's degree in chemistry and build a lab where I can
| test all the substances that I bring into my house. You have
| such great ideas. No idea why I haven't done this yet.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I expect future generations to harbor a unique and refined fire
| of hatred for our current plastics obsession. In no particular
| order:
|
| - We extract oil from the ground, transport it thousands of miles
| to a factory, build precursors, transport _those_ thousands of
| miles to other factories, build plastic containers, transport
| _those_ to yet other places for use, fill them, use them for 10
| minutes, discard them, and then transport them tens or hundreds
| of miles to a landfill (can 't recycle them, they've got food
| waste... or you use a bunch of water to clean them for recycling,
| but see below). This is insane in any reasonable world.
|
| - Plastic recycling is... a polite lie, at best, and more
| realistically oil company {marketing, propaganda} at work. Some
| plastics, some of the time, are recyclable a few times to build a
| high cost, crap material (and relatively few people want to pay
| more for worse material to work with). Most plastics, most of the
| time, are junk and somewhere between "not worth the cost" and
| "technically not possible" to recycle. We used to (as western
| nations) stuff plastics in a container, ship it to China, and
| count it as recycled as soon as it left the port regardless of
| the result. Now, with China having decided that this was stupid,
| we ship it to whoever will take it, count it as recycled, and
| then wonder why we find a ton of plastics in the atmosphere and
| oceans.
|
| - As we learn more about plastics, most of the stuff that makes
| them work turns out to be some level of "somewhat toxic to some
| life" and "really violently toxic to all life." Most of the
| really nasty stuff simply doesn't degrade in a useful span, so
| will be with everyone else on the planet, for somewhere between
| "an awfully long time" and "the remaining span of humans on the
| planet."
|
| But, hey, super convenient for a couple decades! Can't blame us
| for making it, right? I mean, there was _profit_ involved - and,
| more than just profit, _convenience._ Such profit! Much
| convenience. All plastics!
|
| I don't mind, quite as much, "durable plastics" that are intended
| to last for a long while. But the entire disposable, super soft
| plastic ecosystem? This is going to be very, very hated in
| centuries to come. If it's not sterilized all humans by then. :/
| jchw wrote:
| "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in
| time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
| ping_pong wrote:
| Non-recyclable plastic should be banned immediately. The fact
| that we let it persist is ridiculous. I don't care how much
| costs go up.
|
| We should also limit the types of plastic to a handful, and
| they should all be recyclable in-country. If we can't recycle
| it, ban it. Let it get replaced by glass or metal. Again, I
| don't care how expensive it is. Just like climate change
| prevention, it's something that needs to happen otherwise we
| are killing humanity.
| genericone wrote:
| Plastics that consumers end up being responsible for the end-
| of-life, those need to go. And if consumers need to have it, at
| least that plastic-like-material must be fully biodegradable,
| without nano or toxic byproducts or leftovers.
|
| Plastics that are used for health/industry/logistics, I think
| those are fine.
|
| At the very least, lets stop doing insane stuff like putting
| BPA on receipts...
| Syonyk wrote:
| "Biodegradable plastics" aren't much better than "recyclable
| plastics," in terms of actual impact.
|
| They live in one of two categories, with almost nothing in
| the "actually useful" region:
|
| - "Super, super happy to biodegrade." In fact, they're doing
| it before you even get it! The plastics aren't really ever
| nice to use, because they're chemically coming apart in the
| store. They're UV sensitive, time sensitive, oxygen
| sensitive, and are generally about as useful as a DivX DVD.
| By the time you use it, they're a weird, slightly greasy,
| weirdly weak mess. They don't _work._ But, hey, they 're
| biofriendly! Or, not, depending on what, exactly, they
| degrade into.
|
| - "Biodegradable." Given certain conditions. 10x solar UV for
| 100 years. High temperatures, sustained for periods long
| beyond what any compost pile can do. Requires certain phases
| of the moon, sustained for a year without interruption.
| They're "Biodegradable" on paper, but in reality you can't
| tell the difference between them and something that isn't. In
| a typical landfill condition, they last roughly forever.
| Remember, in a landfill, _newspaper_ is not biodegradable.
| You can layers of a landfill by the newspapers and magazines
| you dig up, fully readable. It 's a totally sealed, anaerobic
| environment. Very few "bio" things work in that space.
|
| If you require "plastics that are full biodegradable, without
| nano or toxic byproducts or leftovers," you've effectively
| banned plastics. Which I'm entirely fine with.
| steve918 wrote:
| Lets just do away with paper receipts.
| kenjackson wrote:
| What's the preferred alternative to disposable plastic?
| [deleted]
| ping_pong wrote:
| Anything food related should be compostable, including in
| supermarkets. If it means we can't store food for months, the
| good. It means we can compost them as fertilizer so the
| planet is still okay.
|
| Without getting draconian on companies who don't give a shit
| about anything except for profits, they won't lift a finger
| to do anything about it.
| grailed wrote:
| Reusable materials: Metal/wood utensils. Glass cups. Washable
| containers. Paper. The list is extensive. The only downside
| is slightly higher cost.
| nickff wrote:
| 'Slightly higher cost' is usually symptomatic of higher
| resource or energy usage in the manufacturing process.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Citation?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Possibly - or symptomatic of more subsidies going to the
| fossil fuels industry than to bamboo forestry.
| ainiriand wrote:
| OR maybe it is just that the requried industrial layout
| is not in place yet to make those containers in such a
| scale. But I think that we need a replacement, and the
| less plastic we use, more alternatives will appear.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Compostable items are probably the best bet for many common
| uses. For instance, in many Asian countries you are served
| food in a plate or bowl made of banana leaves instead of
| plastic. In cultures where eating with your hands is normal,
| you can skip needing flatware of any kind. The other
| alternative is re-use, like we do with shopping bags. Plastic
| itself perhaps can be less problematic if disposing it is
| illegal and re-use or recycling is encouraged and
| enforceable. But a lot of plastic today is not recycled at
| all (https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/whopping-91-p
| erce...).
| andrekandre wrote:
| there are lots, such as paper packaging, paper cups, bamboo
| (for disposable cutlery, packaging etc) there are lots of
| alternatives
|
| i guess the hardest is plastic food packaging in grocery
| stores... that plastic is sterile, lightweight and lasts
| forever (which is good for shelflife, fuel usage etc)... i
| wonder what airtight alternatives there for that...
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Unfortunately, many of those materials are then coated with
| PFAS:
|
| https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20170201/many-fast-food-
| cont...
| gumby wrote:
| glass
| andrekandre wrote:
| i thought about that too, but glass is 1000s of times as
| heavy, and typically recycling it means re-melting which
| is wasteful of energy and has carbon emmissions problems
|
| as i see it, the only way that would work is if
|
| 1. we reused the glass 2. some national system where
| someone comes by and pickes up the glass for
| strerilizariom 3. standardized glass containers that are
| mandated/traded across industries
|
| and that still doesnt fix the usafe of fuels to transport
| all that glass to and fro...
| Syonyk wrote:
| "Not disposable stuff"?
|
| If you've assumed that "Spend a ton of resources making
| something so you can use it once and throw it away!" is at
| all sane, there's really not much in the way of argument that
| you're going to find acceptable.
|
| But fundamentally, we have a "linear waste problem" in
| society. Things are built with non-renewable-in-human-times
| resources, used once, and then thrown away - and this model
| _has to die._ Across the board.
|
| We live on a finite planet. We do not, as of yet, have any
| sort of off-planet resource extraction, and I genuinely hope
| we never manage that (the difference between "We've put an
| asteroid into orbit to mine resources" and "We've put an
| asteroid into a country we dislike" is a remarkably small
| delta-V). We should not be using "disposable" items, and I
| include an awful lot in that - despite having used some
| myself (we use disposable diapers for overnight, because
| cloth simply doesn't absorb enough beyond a certain age, and
| work to eliminate those as rapidly as possible).
|
| Whatever it is you think you _need_ disposable plastics for,
| I 'm willing to wager that 100 years ago, before the age of
| plastic, people were doing exactly the same thing you want to
| do, without disposable things. So they're not required. They
| may be cheap, the may be convenient, but required, no.
| They're not.
|
| The mental view of reality required to consider "disposable
| anythings" as sane is quite recent, and, IMO, quite broken.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > the difference between "We've put an asteroid into orbit
| to mine resources" and "We've put an asteroid into a
| country we dislike" is a remarkably small delta-V
|
| We can already put a few _thousand_ atomic bombs, warheads
| or EMPs there, with far more predictability, more accuracy,
| lower probability of early detection and, as a bonus, lower
| costs. We have had planet destroying weapons for half a
| decade now; if a nation really wants to end another nation
| - or most of humanity altogether, for that matter - it wont
| need an asteroid.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-25 23:00 UTC)