Plastic seals food, sterile medical implements, medicine, beverages, etc… it’s seems like plastic is used as a way to seal things safely. Post pandemic rising, I see even more. My work used to be have plastic utensils in the cafeteria, for example, an already wasteful thing. Now, post-2020, every fork, knife, and spoon is individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper. I feel like the more my desire to escape plastic intensifies, the more plastic I see all around me everywhere.
How can we get away from plastic as a safety layer?
We don’t have to get rid of plastics.
Get rid of cars (which emit the most micro-plastics), fishing nets (which cause the most plastic pollution in the ocean), plastics in clothing and packaging where it isn’t needed.
Then use bio-degradable plastics for whatever’s left. And single use plastics only for the tiny reminder of use cases where it’s needed, like medicine.
Getting rid of cars is generations away in the US, at minimum.
Guess we’d better get started right away, then.
The best way to get people out of cars is to give them good alternatives, so I think you need to start by improving infrastructure and public transport.
Yep. The big issue is that the US landscape was designed for cars from the get go va Europe where cars were an afterthought. You don’t get rid of cars by making them forbidden or too expensive you get rid of them by making useless or less useful than alternative options a.
Some US cities came after the car, but anything on the eastern side existed well before cars. Those cities had walkable neighbourhoods, dense downtowns and public transit. A lot of that was bulldozed to make the roads wider and provide parking for the car. North American cities were not built for the car, they were bulldozed for it.
That’s my point.
American cities were designed before cars as well. The difference is that the car and fossil fuel industries lobbied for cities to be completely redesigned around cars in the 50s and 60s. And governments all across the US bulldozed their own cities to do it.
Suburban areas were designed after.
Yes but the highways that connected them to urban and productive areas were made by destroying the old downtowns
Getting rid of Internal combustion engined cars more reasonable. EVs aren’t perfect, but they are much better than ICE cars as far as pollution goes.
In the context of micro plastics, it’s the same. It comes from the rubber tires wearing out.
Then instead of roads let use tires made of metal and put them on some kind of road that also has metal. Let’s make it electric too…
Maybe we could connect many cars together on this system, and make it so the front or the back car is a special one thats more powerful and pulls the other cars behind or pushes the ones in front of it that carries all the passengers. For convenience, we could make nice loading and unloading areas.
That’s outdated tech tho, these days distributed motors are all the rage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit
Right, but we’re talking about microplastics here. Those mainly come from tires and braking systems, so the switch won’t help this specific problem.
Serious question, do brakes emit any plastic particles? I was under the impression they were mostly ceramic these days (or asbestos way back when)
From this article.
Wait till energy costs 10x in the next decade. Car use will go to nothing real quick.
Nope
If energy costs 10x more everything else will be at least 8x more. It’s just inflation on everything at that point.
I don’t trust biodegradable plastics anymore. The in between stage of biodegration is micro plaltics. This may be an issue even if it’s from organic sources.
You don’t have to get rid of cars, my dude, just tires.
It’s called a train; just use a train.
Ready to go to the grocery store kids? All aboard the grocery store express!
You sound sarcastic but … https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram
Lmao. Just use biodegradable plastics! So easy! You know jack shit about plastics my guy.