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It's very easy to say "why don't we just stop using toxic petrochemicals," but very hard to do in practice. For a sustainability advancement to be considered a success, it has to actually replace something. To replace something, it:

- has to be affordable, or people will refuse to buy it. The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.

- has to be at least as performant as what it's replacing, or people won't want to change. The general public is not going to buy an inferior product in the name of sustainability.

- has to be more environmentally friendly than what preceeded it, or it has no benefit.

If you can find a more environmentally friendly material that is able to replace plastic, achieve its physical properties, at the same cost, then patent it and you will be very wealthy. And will have outplayed the billions (probably a lowball) being dumped into this by governments, universities, and private companies around the world.

Also, the reason most of these articles hype their own work up is because the name of the game in academia is grant money. If a funding agency doesn't think your work is impactful, they'll give it to someone who is. That's why articles rarely describe their incremental work as just being incremental.

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mathgradthrow 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't have to be cheap, It just has to be made cheaper artificially with globally enforced taxes.

The number one economic role of government is mitigating externalities that arise from free trade, often through the restraint of that trade.

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anigbrowl 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

globally enforced taxes

Why not just pass a law requiring everyone to be good?

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Spivak 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Congrats you just made everyone subject to those taxes artificially worse off. People aren't stupid and can see what you did. You will be voted out of office next term. If you're going to artificially adjust prices it's got to go the other way where you subsidize the behavior you want. It worked with lightbulbs.

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ant6n 4 days ago | parent [-]

Or perhaps everyone is actually better of if negative externalities are taxed.

	▲	Spivak 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You made a change which caused consumer prices to go up, folks are already struggling financially it doesn't matter if it's for a good reason. This is the "I know you're struggling but the economy is actually doing great" but applied to environmentalism.
	▲	WillPostForFood 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or perhaps everyone is worse off because some well connected lobbyist got the government to mandate their more expensive, less effective product.

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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chiffre01 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would be interested to know the cost of more sustainable packaging at economies of scale. Almost all plastic-based packaging emerged after 1950, yet even before then, there was a need to package mass consumer goods on a large scale.

I also believe plastic and PFAS coatings are used in packaging largely because they are assumed to be the only suitable materials. However, in earlier times, there were many clever and cost-effective solutions.

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georgyo 4 days ago | parent [-]

Population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion. The population of the world has over tripled. This world put a lot of scaling pressure on everything.

I didn't think plastics are used because they are considered the only submittable suitable material, but they are definitely the cheapest and easiest to use. You cannot injection mold wood to be the exact shape and size with a snug fit for something you are packaging.

	▲	dredmorbius 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The fraction of the world's population regularly consuming manufactured and packaged goods is also increasing. That increases discarded plastics and other materials. About a decade ago I tracked down the somewhat provocative claim that contemporary New Yorkers (city, not state) produced less refuse, by mass, than those of the 1930s. My first thoughts were that total packaging weight and waste food might account for this, older packaging materials being more ecologically-friendly, but generally more massive: wood, glass, metal, etc., and refrigeration and food preservation less developed. Good guesses, but wrong as it happens. The culprit was coal ash, on the order of 40% of all rubbish by weight. It had been > 80% in 1900. Building heat was supplied by boilers running on coal. That left a large quantity of fly ash as residue. As heating switched to natural gas and cogeneration steam from the 1950s through the 1960s, coal use was largely eliminated. Former generations of New Yorkers would often refer to receptacles as ash cans, and they were traditionally made of galvanized steel, both useful when contents might contain glowing coals. As trash evolved to colder refuse, plastic bins or bags could be substituted. "[T]he New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969." (<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/...>) Net non-coal refuse has increased, but the total, at least as of a decade ago, was still below the early-20th-century high point. Much of the current total however is plastics, and in particular disposable diapers. I'd had additional sources on this at one point though I can't locate them presently. This paper discusses composition and confirms the 40% & 80% figures above: "How New York City Residents Diminished Trash", Paul E Waggoner and Jesse H. Ausubel, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven andRockefeller University, New York. October 2003. <https://phe.rockefeller.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NYTra...> The NYT article above also confirms "ash cans".

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kazinator 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.

More or less, yes, but I think it deserves more nuance. Most of the general public is stuck trying to make ends meet, and regard the environment as a problem to be solved by their government and rich corporations.

If you take away their plastic bags and straws, they will make do.

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hcarvalhoalves 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You seem to believe plastic containers are used due to being a more affordable and technically superior solution. That’s a common mistake.

The true reason it’s so cheap and available, is subsidies. $7 trillion as of 2023, to be exact.

Without subsidies, using a non-renewable, expensive to harvest resource, to produce single-use plastic would be an absolutely irrational decision.

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

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incrudible 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

This bogus number comes from putting a value on the supposed environmental cost, but that is not what subsidy means in the economic sense. We already established that if we somehow could globally settle on a price for externalities, alternatives would be competitive, but they would still be intrinsically more expensive.

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leptons 4 days ago | parent [-]

Except it isn't a "bogus number". Fossil fuel subsidies are real.

>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/sen-wh...

I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.

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incrudible 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you say "$7 trillion to be exact" and then reduce that to $1 trillion in a followup, the number you initially gave is bogus.

I don't care to figure out exactly how much of that number is similarly misleading, but the article you quoted gives $20 billion for the US in 2022, or 0.3% of the federal budget that year. I don't support these (actual) subsidies, but clearly such numbers are not game changers when the average American spends 10% of their income on energy.

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leptons 3 days ago | parent [-]

I never said "$7 trillion to be exact", that was someone else.

The fact is that any subsidies to fossil fuel companies is wrong. They don't need it, and petroleum use in almost all industries is ruining the planet.

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incrudible 2 days ago | parent [-]

The people lamenting “the ruination of the planet” would be the first to be eaten by the people starving due to cessation of petroleum use.

	▲	leptons 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody is advocating for a sudden "cessation of petroleum use". Taking away subsidies from petroleum companies that already make record profits year after year isn't going to cause mass cannibalism, and I'm not sure why you would think that. Replacing petroleum use with sustainable green alternatives also won't cause mass cannibalism - because the energy sources will be replaced with better alternatives. I'm not sure how you jump from "replace petroleum" to "mass cannibalism", it's really quite absurd.

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dredmorbius 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You'd want to factor in externalities as well, both on the extraction side (fossil fuels are phenomenally under-priced, likely by a factor of millions), and disposal (environmental impacts of discarded plastics and pollution during manufacture).