How will we ever get away from plastics when they are ubiquitous for safety
How will we ever get away from plastics when they are ubiquitous for safety
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?
You're viewing a single thread.
Bioplastic - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
The solution is not perfect though...
Life cycle analysis studies show that some bioplastics can be made with a lower carbon footprint than their fossil counterparts, for example when biomass is used as raw material and also for energy production. However, other bioplastics' processes are less efficient and result in a higher carbon footprint than fossil plastics.
the plastic problem is separate from the carbon problem though… we don’t ban plastics because we’re concerned about climate change; we ban them because we are worried that microplastics are causing significant health effects to both humans and most other animals
Still, there is that other thing to worry about as well. The eco system is a system, doesn't depend on one thing only.
Likewise, we will always have products and processes which have some carbon footprint. The hope is that we have enough others that don’t or are carbon negative that the net effect is one of balance.
of course, but they are complex problems and you shouldn’t poo poo a potential mitigation to 1 because it negatively impacts another
the solutions to complex problems shouldn’t require being solutions to every complex problem
Obviously. I doubt bioplastic had even 1/100 of the money and research of their fossil counterparts.
That might also be true.