Hey! I work in an Antarctic lab, and want to also add another reason to take this seriously: microplastics have been found in every. Single. Lake that our team has sampled in Antarctica. It's...really dire.
@Eng1neer_panda That's something still in contention, and I'm not the best person to ask as I'm only an assistant and working a couple of different projects, but iirc the leading theory is that it was atmospheric transfer. Which is...colossally worrisome if true.
I always hated how, instead of blaming the industry and big corporations, it's the individual's responsibility to make a change. Like asking an ant to clean up after itself while omitting the literal elephant in the room shitting all over the place.
yeah and with plastics it's honestly even more infuriating. Like go to any grocery store, everything is wrapped in plastics. Where could I even go to make a personal impact by buying food that isn't wrapped in plastic?
@@basvriese1934 There is a store in my city that specializes on environmentally conscious grocery goods. Reusable containers are encouraged. I noticed that Bulk Barn also allows reusable containers: all they ask is that you clean them before bringing them in. Obviously you also need to tare them to avoid buying your container every time.
Well, yes and no. We the ants are also buying up all that elephant shit that's being produced. Some of it we have almost no choice in, some of it we do. Industry is much more culpable but we are still massively overconsuming the things they produce.
Private businesses repeatedly resisted fire regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Private businesses repeatedly resisted mercury regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Private businesses repeatedly resisted lead regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Private businesses repeatedly resisted tobacco regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Etc.
Private businesses sell illegal tobacco and govt new about lead for ages, same as environmental causes, you are looking at the forcing happening the wrong way, they removed lead because of the violence that was happening and the lead poisoning, govt has and is dragging their feet, not private businesses as they know all about the illegal tobacco sales and if in USA if 80% of the homeless spend fifty dollars a day that is 26 million a day, somebody is getting paid and they are with the govt, as the business of govt is business.
Businesses need the regs to change but not necessarily for reasons people think. It’s hard to be the first to change if your competitors don’t have to. You take all the risk, while they can wait to see how you do. If you are unsuccessful, they win. If you are successful, they can copy you - you took the risks not them. Regulation makes change happen for all. It’s a pain, but it also means everyone has to make a change and share the risk. Businesses do not like to change what they do without some sort of outside stimulus. I work in the chemicals industry, so have seen this story play out many times over the last 30 years. Many staff in this industry want to do better (we live in this world too), but we need public pressure, public acceptance of the alternatives (there is often resistance to change from the consumer) and regulation to help us do it.
I hate that it's not even a choice anymore. I'm only 36 and I remember so many things coming from the grocery store in biodegradable containers as a child, and now I sometimes struggle to find even eggs in recycled paper packaging... How the hell can "the market" fix the problem when it doesn't even provide an alternative in the first place?
If you drove to the market the diesel/[etrol or plastic in your ev comes from the same barrel, it only exists because of oil that we haven't reduced consumption of. Driving to the store using any fossil fuel and complaining about a secondary product that only exists because of those fossil fuels is backwards looking at the problem
@@narrgamedesigner2747 An alternative to oil, that we did not produce, then produce something to replace the 6000 products we get? When there were no production emissions for oil?
Apparently you have not heard of Pact, Eileen fisher or eBay if you can’t afford them at full price. I only wear organic natural fabrics it’s quite easy to find.
That doesn't concern me so much if the clothing is hard wearing enough. I have clothes I bought 20 years ago that are still going with every day wear. Over the past 10 years any clothing I buy barely lasts 2 years and material they're made from is getting lighter and lighter. If I can get 20+ years of wear out of it then a blend of synthetics isn't as much of a concern for me
Another part of this topic (that could be its own video) is clothes made from plastic - like polyester, rayon, nylon, acrylic - they shed microplastics every time you wash them (and they enter our water systems this way) but also shed microplastics when you wear them. And unfortunately these types of fabrics are cheaper to make so more and more brands use them instead of natural fibers (like cotton and linen). This links to fast fashion crisis we have which links to overconsumption and capitalism trap.
you are very correct in that fast fashion and synthetic clothing is a huge culprit, however - rayon is not made from plastic. It's still made with plenty of chemicals that probably aren't great for the environment (or us), but no plastics at least.
I remember even back in the 80's hearing concerns about plastic in the environment. Nothing was done about it instead, plastic use exploded in the decades afterward.
The reality is the consumers don't really care. We just want cheaper products which inevitably means plastic right now, since it's incredibly cheap and relatively durable
Ive been to countries that sell you glass bottled drinks at slightly more money, then pay you that money back when you return the bottles which are then stripped of label, cleaned, sterilized and directly reused. Ive always thought, if you standardised a bunch of packaging I dont see why you couldnt do this with so much more. All your liquids, probably a whole bunch of other things as well.
The problem is partly building that infrastructure back up and partly the varying storage requirements of liquids. Not everything can be stored in the same standard bottle, and there is a good reason to have things in a variety of bottles. I don't want people to confuse hydrogen peroxide and beer for example, both would need to be stored in colored glass container. Not to mention that buying the amount of sand required to produce that much glass would cause construction costs to skyrocket even higher than they are already. It's just not viable economically right now.
That’s how it was in the 1960’s, then we were lied to about recycling and the labeling. I don’t live in the US anymore. I live in BC and we recycle almost all plastics unless combined with paper.I have purchased some products that are made from the recycled plastic including mattresses and fencing materials. I think the plastic like material made from wood or agricultural materials where it works and can decompose easily is part of the answer. Use less plastic for disposable things period.
There is a beer brewery about an hour from me called Franconia, the gent is from Germany and talks at some length on the tours about the cost breakdown of a bottle of beer, a huge chunk of which is the packaging. He's a great speaker, and very much flummoxed that we do single-use glass bottles as his only option.
@@lumenox8541plastics are infecting every single aspect of our lives and were worried about economic feasibility? It's not about cost anymore, it's about "at any cost" at this point.
That intro packed a huge punch. I knew about the plastics at the bottom of the marina trench but I had never seen it before. It hits hard. Thank you for the video!
@@markwis5285 I've bought grocery bag made of fabric somewhat 5 years ago, and I use it every day, it's durable and doesn't show any signs of wear, the only caveat is it's made of PET 😬
Growth must continue at all costs because the economy. Externalities are a problem but progress must continue. The next quarter profits depend on that.
I've discussed with friends and family, and have expressed I REALLY want a Single-Use Plastic Tax. Bring back Glass Bottles, and give Credit to collect and recycle them. Even if we have to use Plastic Bottle Caps on Glass to properly seal it, that reduces the waste by SO much.
The netherlands has a sup tax. I don't think it's doing a hell lot though. 15 cents on bottles which we always had, and newly drink cans does work. Sure not everyone takes it back. But the public trash cans are searched by the poor for them of people throwing it away. (Though this sometimes means they throw trash everywhere....). Single clean stream pet does help in getting that recycled.
We don't need either plastic or glass for bottling drinks. A metal can will suffice, is recyclable, could also have a deposit value to encourage returns rather than littering, and is light to transport.
Though we in the Netherlands and more of the "Germanic" world ( Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia ) does collect pfand, in the case of bottles and cans it is simply to combat litter, they don't go to recycling. It is nearly impossible to reuse plastic bottles in a food safe level. That's where glass makes a different, it can be more properly sterilised. Glass and metal containers being reusable is one of the few ways to cut single use containers. And even though we have increased a tax on single use containers, using one's own is still extremely rare. But maybe like bags it will just take a while for a portion of society to join in, even for bags single use is still very common.
@@Debbie-henri You can re use any container, you should be able to fill it up in the store and buy only what you want by volume or weight... of course, the market will also then demand less centrally manufactured fancy things that can only really be done sealed at the source because they will have to be expensive but that's the way it is (so in balance that market would mostly need to be supplied by companies that run mostly local and re use glass bottles or breweries that re use smaller kegs you take home, hence why the large companies are against it). All that said, food packaging is barely even a footnote in the problem.
The unfortunate reality is that being environmentally friendly is expensive as an consumer. There have been times where I wanted to buy something that is a bit more environmentally friendly but just could not because I did not have the money for it. And for most people, whether they can afford it or not, money is the number one factor on what they decide to buy.
That's why this can never be solved by consumer will alone, and why the oil and plastics industry push the "environmental footprint" narrative to try to make it the consumer's responsibility. It's why the producers want the solution to be down at the end of the lifecycle, which will never work but sounds a lot like "personal responsibility." Producers need to pay for the damages they've caused.
Expensive in the short run but cheaper in the long run if everyone switches over. A huge problem is that the corporation lie about the the their products so consumers aren't making an informed decision. Regulators are toothless.
This is why we need to make the people who profit from our self-destructive system pay their fair share. Most of those cost savings go into their pocket. Meanwhile, the medical and environmental costs that make everything progressively more expensive, well, *we* pay those costs.
All money that exists in the world is bank debt, either central or commercial bank debt, having to hold bank debt to eat has social problems that should be looked more than just "more money"
Using plastic in more permanent things feels fine, but in impermanent uses it feels bad Ie my plastic wii remote has been in use for over a decade compared to the constantly disposed of water bottles
The focus should definitely be on short life plastics, however all plastics should eventually be phased out. long life plastics create all the same problems, just slower.
Unless oil, the input stops, then plastic production can't. 15% of each barrel is used as plastic, whether it is long life or single use the amount of plastic entering the environment as microplastics will remain the same, one study has found over 300,000 pieces per gram of food. a remote will eventually end up in landfill, as we use 100 million barrels a day 15 million are plastic that has to go somewhere, they are part of a whole, not a separate issue
Yeah I think plastic should stay in things that absolutely have to be plastic, for now like some medical devices. But even your remote control, polyester clothes, microfiber, faux fur, dials and switches, adhesives and paint, kitchen goods etc etc still sheds fine layers of plastic all the time that gets into our lungs, our water, our food. Going back to ceramics, wood, glass and metal won't only be environmentally friendly, that stuff looks and feels way better too.
@@Solstice261 The main problem is the corresponding amount of diesel, propane, petrol that got produced at the same time and is also a one-time used product.
As someone thats worked in plastic recycling, I can assure everyone, recycling is mostly bullsheet. We added virgin plastics and only really recycled plastic which were cut offs from the plastics we sent out because it was the only way we could guarentee they were the right type of plastic and wasnt going to cost a fortune if the wrong type of plastic ruined a roll or extrusion. We should just limit packaging to 6 or so different packaging sizes, ban plastics and force everyone to go back to either paper or another grown medium. Plastics arnt needed, weve become far to reliant on them due to the corruption in the subsidy system. The fact the UK is still subsidising the petroleum industry is a tragedy and if our species survives another millenia, they will judge us harshly.
81% of each barrel is stuff we burn and plastic 15%, if we keep producing 100 million barrels a day, so 15 million barrels a day of plastic, that is cheaper than recycling, be hard to see how it works unless it's like where they add a ten cent cost to each can and then give back that tens cents at a colllection, much more than the metal value, they know most people won't bring them back and therefore a money making scheme while some rubbish got picked up by the people who paid for it to be there.. edit : They could make all things lie laundry detergent in bring your own bottles and refill but then the supply of plastic at the other end builds up.
I'm a grad student at the composites lab at Purdue, I remember at some point hearing about selective depolymerization of nylon during one of many discussions about the potential for composites recycling. it would be great and would make nylon about as recyclable as aluminum, but I don't really know how much of a difference it would make overall.
@@thamiordragonheart8682good for you for going to grad school to study this subject and how it affects the environment! We need more young people like you!🎉😊❤
I was guessing 5%: because I know that most "recycled" plastic is actually land-filled. They will get a buyer for that low-grade plastic, under a layer of dirt to protect it from sunlight, any day now!
7:01 Actually, since 2020 the hole in the ozone layer is not closing anymore (it has more or less stayed the same size) and for the past couple of decades the mean concentration of ozone in the atmosphere has more or less plateaued (probably due to additional nitrous oxide pollution).
God. I remember many, many years ago as an arrogant, contrarian 15 year old declaring to my French tutor something along the lines of "oh, I'm not worried about global warming, we know it's a problem and we're/they're already working on sorting it, the real problem once that's sorted is plastics in the environment."... I guess I was half right. That feels pretty bad.
If by many many years ago you mean the 1980s, I remember hearing similar conversations in school. I have contacts who say they remember them in the 1970s. We are in so much trouble.
@@QT5656 Considering the environmental movements or the late 60 and 70's I'm not surprised. Then they all went back to work and started having holidays with the new debt based system
I think there's a very important clarification that needs to be made with this. Single-use plastics is a crisis. Long-term sturdy plastics are less of a problem, they're easily recyclable and usually at a profit. Long-term plastics are often used to cut weight in everyday products like a keyboard or mouse which reduces emissions from transport. Long-term plastics are used in stuff like car bodies and for cup-holders which reduces the weight of your car and improves fuel efficiency. Single-use plastics for stuff that can instead be cardboard or paper should be changed.
Plastics as a total are 15% of each barrel of oil and single use are 50% so 7% of the total issue of each barrel and last time I checked diesel and petrol, jet fuel, the 81% of each barrel was also single use, why isn't the 81% the crisis?
I wanted to say something similar. The problem depicted in this (and other)Videos is severe but its not the plastic itself its what we do with it. Plastic can (and does) solve alot of our todays problems but we have to Change our thinking towards waste. There is no waste.just ressources.
@@sujimaynenobody does. It's vital in the creation of life-saving medical equipment, for one. Anyone who genuinely wants to eradicate 100% plastic is not someone to take seriously.
When taking about geological scale plastic pollution, it does remind me of when plants invented cellulose, it took millions of years for bacteria to figure out how to break it down, in the mean time a massive layer of now coal formed.
Been saying this for ages: I've never produced or distributed a single piece of plastic in my entire life, so how is it suddenly my responsibility to clean it all up?
@@jamesphillips2285 Yes, you can. Plastic items get produced because consumers prefer plastic products to the drawbacks that would come from the alternatives.
I feel like it would be useful to stop using the word plastic, and start using words that describe each subtype. The global and biological impact is very, very different for different types of plastic. It's hard to explain to people why one type is so much worse than another because they don't have the language to process that information. Because of how thoroughly its all grouped into one word, it's hard to even find information on which ones are worse than others.
It’s just like how people believe there is a singular cure for cancer we need to find as if cancer isn’t just a category of thousands of different illnesses
@Matty002 7 isn't so many, it was discovered that 7 is the limit of what most people can remember easily which is why phone numbers have 7 digits. But listing them won't help until people see a need to do it. And it's probably a good idea to come up with our own ways to classify them.. maybe based on how degradable they are, or how likely they are to make micro plastics? Maybe I should make a RUclips channel, try to push the idea, explain why I think it's a good idea?
Even as just a relatively young 30 yo, I can remember as a child I used to interact with stuff made out of wood, glass and metal a lot more than I do now
Naysayers: "Everything is doomsday with you people but we never hear about the ozone home or acid rain anymore." And all it took were massive international efforts.
Recently where I live disposable cups (not just plastic but also cardboard etc.) were banned in a lot of cases and some people got very annoyed at it. The number of times I've heard them use the argument "but when I use a throwaway cup I bin it properly so it doesn't pollute, and most people do, so this ban is pointless" is surprising. How many people don't even consider the idea that these cups actually need to get *made* shocked me. I mean, even if you don't give a crap about the environment, it's still insane that tons of materials, energy, man-hours and facilities are used just to make stuff that gets thrown away immediately after use.
well we have language and writing so unless everything with language on it is somehow destroyed and everyone somehow forgets and somehow all the plastic on the planet gets buried immediately, the scientists will have some idea of why they found plsastic during a dig. unless theyre nonhuman scientists
Mmhmm, another summary about plastic that mentions the horrors of microplastics yet fails to point out that the majority are from car tires. Everybody's buying filters to keep microplastics from their laundry from entering the sewer while commuting an hour a day, not realizing the latter is several orders of magnitude worse. I also wish that reporting on the % of plastics that are recycled would follow up with suggestions about which types are very easy to recycle (HDPE, which you can even recycle at home, and PETE which is a tad harder but still comparatively easy) and which are basically always landfilled even if you try to recycle them (PVC, LDPE, PP, PS and then the long tail of nylons, acrylic, polycarbonate, etc). It's one reason I always 3d print PLA, unless I have a solid reason not to; it doesn't exactly compost, but it does break down extremely quickly compared to essentially all other plastics. In short, your HDPE yogurt container is not a massive problem. The plastic bag you carry it home in, though... We know about quite a few viable alternatives already. Plastics manufacturers will be fine, though oil producers might take a hit (which they deserve; oil production should be cut to about 1% what it is now, being used solely for feedstock for lubricants and emergency power generation during crises). I mentioned PLA, which is suitable for a few "single-use" plastics and doesn't carry the 500-year breakdown problem. Silicone-based replacements can also be a decent option, though regulating additives will matter, because the easiest way to recycle silicones is to burn them for electricity and then send the resulting silicon dioxide to refiners for semiconductor productions...
Every single thing that is plastic in your homes has had microplastics drop to the floor and into your lungs, along with tyres as you say along with brake pads and a study in France or Italy found 300,000 pieces per gram of food so they are all around us and talking about the source of oil that is 15% of the total of each barrel while ignoring the oil we spew into the sky is probably putting our attention to the wrong things.
@@markwis5285 YEp, they're all around wherever plastic is and that surrounds most of us, the small amount that might come from a plastic bottle I think is tiny compared to what we breathe every day.
I think Dr Breen said it best: "Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken, plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed? Sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eons worth of mud?"
I recently moved onto a farm and drastically reduced my waste production because I created a compost where all food waste, pap mache and paper boxes etc is broken down into fertilizer. It has really clarified to me how much plastic waste I (a single woman with a regular usage) is producing in just a week. It's staggering. I deeply want that to change and I so hope something like what you're talking about in this vid can be implemented. It's extremely frustrating that you as a consumer caring about the environment has to go through immense hoops to avoid plastic waste when doing something as simply as getting groceries.
It's been 3 weeks!! Why does this only have 150k views?? As a person living in America, this video has been absolutely constant in my brain. I cannot turn my head without seeing plastic.
I used to work in a retail store, and let me tell you, *there's sooo much plastic* that you don't see, because products come wrapped in them, and then we throw the plastic away. Seriously, it needs to end! Even *gardening tools* come wrapped in plastic. Why are *gardening tools* wrapped in plastic?
i currently work in a hardware store. it is insane the amount of products made out of stainless steel, galvanized metal, treated/coated metal, rubber, hard plastics that are then loosely wrapped in single use plastic wrap that we immediately throw away. it disgusts me. the company i work for say "looking after our environment is one of our top priorities". yeah, my ass it is.
@@arobbo28 greenwashing made me quit associating with sustainability movements years ago, realizing how many cynical people use it as a corporate marketing ploy and nothing more.
I remeber being told and taught in preschool and grade school how horrible it is to be using paper bags and products, and how AMAZING plastics are for the environment….This was 2000. 2 freaking thousand, and they made us believe SOMEHOW that plastics are some be all end all to the world’s problems. I’d have zero qualms buying a 2 gallon jug with a good reusable seal to get my soda’s tonic water lemonades etc and cleaning it. Ooooorrr like we did before just recycling glass bottles after drinking them. Really I don’t understand how we’ve gotten here outside big business has too far a reach to milk as many profits as possible due to plastic being far cheaper than alternatives.
I feel you. Even though I'm from EU, it's going downhill here too. I have a tip: try to find local clubs that do tiny things to better the area. Joining a small public gardening club cured my feeling of being powerless. We plant and manage a public garden in my village, which was first just an empty and ugly field. These clubs are usually very hard to find, because they mostly exist of "retired boomers" that forget about actively recruiting more members, so you can only find them by word of mouth or asking around in community centres :P But they are there, and it's often very satisfying to actively change things for the better in the local area and have a say in the matter. Good luck! Stay strong!
The 50 kilos of plastic per person per year is even worse than it sounds because most people don't interact with that much plastic that ends up as trash... most of the "disposables" that we interact with(takeout, grocery containers, etc) are paper. Most of the plastics we interact with are wrapings, grocery bags, or Ziploc bags... the vast majority of plastics aren't even seen by the common person. It's almost all in factories or transport.
The quote " *There's a great future in plastics* !" - from the 1967 movie *The Graduate* resonates deeply. In the movie, Mr. McGuire says this to Benjamin, Dustin Hoffman's character, in a side conversation. And now we’re living in that plastic world …
I'm glad in the Netherlands we take recycling more serious. Since January 1st all plastic bottles and aluminium cans fall under a money deposit system. Meaning that way more bottles and cans are being recycled (or at least collected).
Bloody hell, Simon. Watching this video made me so depressed. I don't know how people like you continue being climate or environmental scientists without losing your mental health. Keep up the good fight, and take care of yourself.
Replacing fossile fuels is childsplay compared to replacing plastics. I just really hope that microplastics don't turn out to be dangerous because the sheer volume of plastic and plastic adjacent products breaks my brain.
Plastic does not exist without the fossil fuels so no. No plastic exists without oil or fossil fuels., saying replacing fossil fuels is childspaly has to be one the most ignorant things I have seen in this chat so far..
It may happen on it's own if we actually phase out fossil fuels. As @antonyjh1234 has been copy and pasting in the comments: plastics are currently subsidized by fossil fuel production. That is why "virgin" plastic is cheaper to process than recycled plastic.
Can you make a video summarizing the Busan Plastic treaty mentioned in the video? Explaining why it didn't result in enough new regulation, summarizing the Chair's Text and giving some ideas on what can be done to increase the changes of more strict legislation from future summits?
It's tough to avoid plastic as a consumer. I ordered some socks and made sure to choose a fabric with no plastic... but each individual pair came packaged in plastic. So dumb. On the plus side, the local Panda Express switched to paper containers and bags. Our latest batch of Celestial Seasonings tea came without the plastic overwrap. I definitely notice these things and it leaves a strong favorable impression.
My Canadian city is running a pilot program offering to collect Styrofoam recycling to attempt to use a similar enzyme process to break it down. Seems to be going alright so far. Even heard a couple teens' science fair projects were on it a few years back here, so maybe they've hit it big lol
It's just an enzyme right? Not a bacteria? I'm a little concerned with bio-engineered plastic destruction because one of the benefits of plastics is durability in situations that metal or natural materials can't stand.
If it’s something people work on, than it’s too late. The plastic problem is way to extreme. And there are to many plastic bottles and microplastic in the air, ocean, in us in our brains. That enzymes can help now after it’s all in us and around us. Don’t you think?
Thank you for talking about plastics! More sustainable, minimal, and reusable packaging are one of the most obvious ways to reduce out raw material consumption and especially plastics
"next" in the same sense that lead was the next crisis while our grandfathers and great grandfathers were already long into having elevated lead levels.
I honestly think treaties should be made by countries willing, the most recent cop has proven what happens when you include those that are only there to ensure a deal is watered downz we can all see what the Paris agreement did, probably helped things not be worse but it didn't do what was promised
@@DonHavjuan it seems my previous comments are not being published for some reason... however there is consistent evidence that microplastics contribute to all kind of medical issues, google for "toxicity of microplastics"
@@DonHavjuanA lot of plastic compounds can be carcinogenic. In vitro experiments with human cells and in vivo data generated with mice showed that microplastics elicit adverse health effects mainly by causing inflammation, oxidative stress [increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production], lipid metabolism disturbances, gut microbiota dysbiosis, and neurotoxicity
Here in Norway you pay an extra 2 or 3 NOK per plastic bottle bought. You get this back if you put your bottle in one of the recycling stations we got all over the country (basically every shop). We also have our own lottery system where you can donate your bottles to a lottery drawing. Part of the profits are donated to the Red Cross as well, so lots of incentives to hand in your bottles. Now if only we could get similar systems all over the world.
I am a MAJOR nerd on all this so pre-watching notes: 1.) I need to write about it, but i want standardized categories for “prompt biodegradable” (think paper, turns to mush and is gone fast), slow/long term biodegradable, and non-biodegradable. 2.) I want a FULL LIST of all plasticizers/dyes used etc 3.) Bio-Petrochemistry (Pyrolysis Oil, Hydrothermal Liquefaction Biocrude, and Syngas) and “Power-to-X” are the way 4.) Some things cannot easily be done away with and thus i think there are categories that need a “drop in replacement”. If we can make these prompt/short term biodegradable as soon as possible this would help the most. I’m thinking things like “Pallet Wrap”, Packaging, and Wire Insulation etc 5.) Waste Management needs an overhaul. Nationwide, if not worldwide, Deposit and Return systems, MAJOR fines (and enforcement) for littering/dumping, and also landfill bans+mining. Also labeling to allow for easier waste sorting for this (re my writings on W2E/RDF compatibility labels etc) I am rushing through this, but I can link to some writings of mine on all this, and would LOVE to hear what you all think. Also I’ll update post-properly watching the video too.
I would love for thermal depolymerization to be a thing, but right now it is an unfeasible idea being peddled by the plastics industry as a magical solution to the problem they've created. Maybe it will be viable, someday, especially for the eventual recycling of non-single-use plastics that are, on balance, not that bad, but unless we make the plastics industry responsible for making it happen (sans oil to power the process work!) we're not going to get there any time soon.
All plastic coming from oil and the 15% that will still exist is where plastic comes from, if all the other things are still being used at the same rate, 100 million barrels a day, where will the 15% go, as 81% is single use burnt fuel, why bother with plastic replacement when it is always going to exist if we still use diesel? What decrease of the 15% and reproduced to replace a product that we didn't produce, oil, will mean an overall reduction in emissions?
@@antonyjh1234 If one had no sense of humour. To others, possessing more, there may be implications. Dissecting humour is rather like dissecting a frog: you're left with bits and the frog dies. (Unoriginal).
A topic that's always interested me is this: what can we do when we find out larger institutions and even cities are just dumping the recycling in with the landfill waste? What can we do when we see organizations engaging in egregious unnecessary waste (often to everyone's detriment) simply as a matter of procedural oversight? When I was student teaching, often I'd be in my office until later in the evening, and I'd be there late enough to meet one of the school custodians emptying our trash and recycling bins, both into the same large bag; every single one, every single day, even for something as small as a single candy wrapper. I had a candy jar on my desk, and felt bad about seeing an entire trash bag go to waste over a few Dove chocolate wrappers, so I repurposed a small amazon box as my designated candy wrapper bin and hid it away under my desk, planning to dispose of it at the end of the year. One morning, I arrived to find the box emptied out and fitted with its own trash bag. Obviously, this procedure was not in the best interest of anyone under the age of 60. It was of little consequence to any of the teachers, it couldn't have been that much harder for our custodial staff to have separate carts for trash/recycling and only empty bins when they're half full or have organic stuff in them, and it was definitely not in the interest of a Title 1 school with many other potential uses for that marginal bit of money, but nobody ever questioned it beyond the occasional snide comment. Obviously there's bigger fish to fry, but these oversights permeating all levels of our society clearly are not helping. What could ordinary people do to help sort out these issues in our workplaces or other institutions?
It's a bummer that 99.9% of food in supermarkets is wrapped in plastic, so even if I want to reduce my plastic consumption it's almost impossible to buy food without also buying plastic packaging :( we can't win :(
@@nilslindstrom8087 You can buy food at the market or organic food shops where they are not wrapped in plastic. Needless to say, it will be more expensive, because supermarkets aren't just wrapping things in plastic for no reason but to make their logistics more efficient.
@@theprofessionalfence-sitter I already by as little food as possible in the supermarket and as u say get stuff at the lokal market. I avoid ultraprossesed foods and other unhealthy stuff. My comment was trying to hilight that the consumer is not a part of the problem, they are stuck in a bad system that is victim blaming.
We need to work towards longevity for all types of materials and products. Take wood or paper, often not there is no reforestation. (think paper bag, or cheap furniture) Or look at fertilizers and shipping used for textiles. (Fast fashion) Or the energy to make glas or metals (canned / glass food). But, yes the easy disposable plastic is on a different dimension. Where we move away from plastics it's too easy to just shift the problem to different materials.
I work for an air quality monitoring company. We find our particulate monitoring instruments have microplastic concentrations. Including femto-size and piko-size. Even in remote areas of the Yukon, we see these show up. Y’all, it’s so over.
A complete phase out is totally insane for the foreseeable future. There are lots of necessary functions polymers have in modern life that simply cannot be replicated by any other class of material. I’m 100% for going as far as we can though.
In addition, I think it is crucial that we figure out a way to price the environmental cost of plastics into the market, since monetary incentives seem to consistently be the strongest available.
I get that it feels that way, but you haven't seen all the possibilities for alternatives. You don't know that fully replicating the functions is impossible.
This is why a lot of climate scientists are not taken seriously. They often don't have realistic solutions, but intentionally cause panic to get more funding.
@@sujimayne Just because you don't see a thing, doesn't mean it isn't possible. Coming out with "X cannot be done" when you aren't involved in X research is just another form of alarmism.
As always, thank you for this amazing job on placing the spotlight where most media don't, and for the well-documented videos. Already shared this one in my social media.
I hate plastic! You just can't get away from it where I live. I've been eagerly awaiting the result of these negotiations for a while. I hope they go with the strongest possible option.
The phasing out of CFCs and lead was easy though. Simple alternatives existed. But it's not so simple for plastic. All of the alternatives basically require land. Be that trees, hemp, metals, or what have you. I just don't see how we can replace them without causing other environmental problems. We're already destroying biodiversity due to human land use. The last thing we need is more demand for land. Not really sure how we fix this problem.
@soyoltoi Both still require space for growing no? I'm skeptical there is enough malt waste currently to offset even a significant amount of plastic production. The issue is scale.
@s0cks1985 A lot of people have been working on different ways to make PHAs from various kinds of sources, including plastic itself. The more sources we have, the more plastic we could potentially make. Although it doesn't use that much land, as you mentioned, the techniques used to make either PHAs or microalgae don't scale now, but that's true for any emerging technology.
Ugh finally some good news on this front and only from three weeks ago. Really hope Busan goes well too, if it isn’t already concluded. Would be great to, you know, not have a trashworld like you see in dystopian sci-fi at some point in the future.
Watching this video a month later and I wanna ask what's the latest news on the Busan plastic pollution treaty? Was it a success was some agreement made?
@@WoodHead0815just know that most Americans wish we could be a part of the treaty, if not one of the leading participants. The problem is some individual people have so much wealth hoarded that they’re able to cancel out the voices of millions
I do not agree with the 'plastic is propping up fossile fuel' narrative. Companies generally do not use one product to subsidise the production of another (with some rare exceptions). Instead, they will choose to produce more of the more profitable and less of the less profitable product. That means that if plastic production shrinks, you would not expect fossile fuel production to decrease but to increase. Generally, crude oil is cheap enough to extract that we will expect the vast majority of reserves to be taken out of the ground no matter what. Thus, the best way to reduce CO2 emissions from oil is not to try to reduce the production of anything using oil, but instead to promote the usage of oil for anything other than burning it.
I'm glad to see that glass, earthenware, and wood is making a comeback in shops here. But still a lot of silicone and plastic because it's cheaper. I have 38 year old wooden items that are still perfectly useable. I don't have plastic that's 38, because it broke or frayed and fit replaced. Please, let's give paper, earthenware, glass, and wood more use. 😢 Yes metal is not included, but for cooking iron and steel are great! This is more a call to replace things that are often plastic these days. Rice husk containers are also great!
Thank you, Simon and Luke. This was a very sobering watch. Not sure whether I am looking forward to or dreading hearing the outcome of the talks in Busan...
'Develop Alternatives' needs to move to the top of the list. Humans are lazy, wasteful and habitual. In being so, simple alternatives are required. My ever so small bit has been to take glass 'Mason' i.e. canning jars (sterilized of course), where I can, to take-out (take-away, in the U.K.) and insisting on liquids I purchase (salsa from my favorite Mexican restaurant was my first) be sold to me in my container, not theirs. Fabric shopping bags and avoiding those damn (sorry) plastic bags for produce by putting these products directly in my cart and shopping bag or insist on paper bags for produce. For now, plastic soda bottles are reused (somewhat) and the state of Oregon has put a substantial deposit on them as well as aluminum, tin and glass containers. They impressively expanded the program a few years ago to $0.10 per container as well as things like water bottles. Our ditches look a heck of a lot better for it! I'm going to the effort that few will and am sure governments need to legislate the design and manufacture certified recyclable and/or quickly biodegradable (non-polluting) packaging as well as the use of the same by banning the plastics that aren't. 😒 Perhaps an advert a couple times a day showing a montage of the garbage collected the day before from their area... with tonnage to be shown in prime-time interrupting programs at a climatic or punch-line funny bit... You know, just 15 seconds all by itself so that it's too short for us lazy humans to FF past it... 😏
As a regular consumer just trying to live, I find it hard to avoid plastic. Hygine products come in plastic. Vegetables come wrapped in plastic. Whatever you do, plastic is always involved. The plastic free options are usually more expensive. Add that do the increasing cost of living, and we're less able to consider environmentally friendly options because just affording basics is already too expensive. It's going to take legislation and changes at the start of production to get things moving to reduce plastic use. It's all good saying "reduce, reuse, recycle" but, as I said, a lot of products come in plastic. Good luck trying to reuse all the plastic you buy, like the bread bags and bits of film on things. And then, when you do recycle, a lot just goes to incineration or landfill anyway. The regular person is fighting a losing battle if it's just the end of the line consumer doing all the actions to held the environment.
A phase *out* seems really quite an extreme solution to me, plastics are such a broad spectrum of materials used in such a broad spectrum of ways. It's as herculean a task as a phase-out of metal would be, or perhaps moreso. Can I ask why you feel it's fully necessary? How are we going to have wind turbines without GFRP? How do we have sanitary hospitals without latex gloves? How do we have bicycles without synthetic rubber? Obviously plastic production needs to be reduced, and what plastics are produced should be designed in a way that limits toxicitiy, but it's complete abolition would put us back into the Edwardian era, without a doubt.
We could simply burn more used plastics so it doesn't end up in the environment, which is the concern here That's one option. There'd be rise in Carbon emissions but that could be reduced by moving to nuclear energy and phasing out coal and gas fired powerplants Just takes political will
it really makes me hopeful that something is being done. I know it probably won't go anywhere but even the fraction of a chance is making me feel.happy
15% of each barrel of oil is where plastic comes from, we use 100 million barrels a day so 15 million barrels a day get produced in the refining process. If this rubbish pick up program doesn't stop the inputs then it will always build up. If we use diesel/petrol/propane then platic will always be there, recycling when the inputs don't stop and are cheaper??? Yeah I see change happening Edit people complain about single use plastic but does the petrol/diesel etc get used twice and I didn't know about it?
It isn't that plastics are one part of the oil and the diesel/petrol are another part of the oil. It's the same feedstock and quite a few overlapping fractions of the refined oil go into each. If we banned the burning of all oil-based fuels, the costs of plastics would drop like a rock even while oil production went way down, because there wouldn't be as many uses for the same oil.
@@oasntet What do you mean if we banned the use of oil based fuels, it is that plastic is one part and asphalt another and bunker oil another, these are all reached at different temperatures right, like gas comes off before naphtha does, how would the cost of plastic drop if asphalt isn't sold off as part of the barrel?
It’s really scary because of how convincing some of the messaging has been, to the extent that some companies don’t even understand that they’re a part of the problem. I see brands absolutely convinced that soft plastics are recyclable, they will promote using it as packaging for their products is fine because you can just drop it off at the supermarket and it’s then taken away and recycled…which is a lie. The supermarket made themselves the go-to drop off location for all soft plastics because they are the main source of them being used so widely, and greenwashing to pretend to everyone that it’s not a problem because somehow they’re taking care of it.
I think, on a larger scale humanity will go through one environmental crisis after an other, but each of these crises will span over half a century up to more than a century until we solved it. That is maybe just the logical result of there being more than 8 billion people on this planet. And each of these crises will be more long term.
Oil and all fossil fuels are supposed to be removed from your life, in your lifetime, all nylon, plastic, petrol, diesel, asphalt etc and gas and coal, the whole economic model depends on it and if we don't it pushes the earth into hothouse earth and thinking it is solvable in a century, by what we do, in agreement, and calling plastic a crisis to be solved is probably a definition of climate denialism and not an admittance of the real problems at hand.
It's not the number of humans. That's the Malthusian fallacy. It's the political structures that have developed, where most people have almost no power to do anything about the crises while those with power are actively encouraging them to continue, in order to maintain their power through the profits they get from whatever causes each crisis.
Hey! I work in an Antarctic lab, and want to also add another reason to take this seriously: microplastics have been found in every. Single. Lake that our team has sampled in Antarctica. It's...really dire.
How did the plastic get there?
@Eng1neer_panda That's something still in contention, and I'm not the best person to ask as I'm only an assistant and working a couple of different projects, but iirc the leading theory is that it was atmospheric transfer. Which is...colossally worrisome if true.
Could it be the sort of plastic from e.g. car tyres?
@@microwave-radiation micro plastic can be wind-borne as well as water-borne .
@@PootisHasBeenEngaged rubber is in tyres and acts differently to plastics in the environment.
I always hated how, instead of blaming the industry and big corporations, it's the individual's responsibility to make a change. Like asking an ant to clean up after itself while omitting the literal elephant in the room shitting all over the place.
yeah, its basically just those businesses paying a fuckton to blame consumers, like how BP coined the term "Personal Carbon Footprint"
Especially when the 'elephant' is _persistantly_ a paranoid and cowardly moron. With you.
yeah and with plastics it's honestly even more infuriating. Like go to any grocery store, everything is wrapped in plastics. Where could I even go to make a personal impact by buying food that isn't wrapped in plastic?
@@basvriese1934 There is a store in my city that specializes on environmentally conscious grocery goods.
Reusable containers are encouraged.
I noticed that Bulk Barn also allows reusable containers: all they ask is that you clean them before bringing them in. Obviously you also need to tare them to avoid buying your container every time.
Well, yes and no. We the ants are also buying up all that elephant shit that's being produced. Some of it we have almost no choice in, some of it we do. Industry is much more culpable but we are still massively overconsuming the things they produce.
Private businesses repeatedly resisted fire regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Private businesses repeatedly resisted mercury regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Private businesses repeatedly resisted lead regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Private businesses repeatedly resisted tobacco regulations until people died and regulations were forced onto them. Etc.
Private businesses sell illegal tobacco and govt new about lead for ages, same as environmental causes, you are looking at the forcing happening the wrong way, they removed lead because of the violence that was happening and the lead poisoning, govt has and is dragging their feet, not private businesses as they know all about the illegal tobacco sales and if in USA if 80% of the homeless spend fifty dollars a day that is 26 million a day, somebody is getting paid and they are with the govt, as the business of govt is business.
What a load of tosh, govt doesn't change and they are complicit in business not changing
"Mmmmm yes, that sweet sweet tax dolla dolla."
@@cgarzs Tax pays for no current govt spending. tax literally makes money disappear as we are a debt based system.
Businesses need the regs to change but not necessarily for reasons people think. It’s hard to be the first to change if your competitors don’t have to. You take all the risk, while they can wait to see how you do. If you are unsuccessful, they win. If you are successful, they can copy you - you took the risks not them.
Regulation makes change happen for all. It’s a pain, but it also means everyone has to make a change and share the risk. Businesses do not like to change what they do without some sort of outside stimulus.
I work in the chemicals industry, so have seen this story play out many times over the last 30 years. Many staff in this industry want to do better (we live in this world too), but we need public pressure, public acceptance of the alternatives (there is often resistance to change from the consumer) and regulation to help us do it.
I hate that it's not even a choice anymore. I'm only 36 and I remember so many things coming from the grocery store in biodegradable containers as a child, and now I sometimes struggle to find even eggs in recycled paper packaging...
How the hell can "the market" fix the problem when it doesn't even provide an alternative in the first place?
If you drove to the market the diesel/[etrol or plastic in your ev comes from the same barrel, it only exists because of oil that we haven't reduced consumption of.
Driving to the store using any fossil fuel and complaining about a secondary product that only exists because of those fossil fuels is backwards looking at the problem
@@Sythemn well especially single use packaging is rampant.
I am pretty sure there are alternatives that are just more expensive to deploy. And also long enough for people to take home.
@@narrgamedesigner2747 An alternative to oil, that we did not produce, then produce something to replace the 6000 products we get? When there were no production emissions for oil?
@@markwis5285 single use diesel is used more of, same as petrol, propane, single use plastic is 7% of each barrel and fules are 81%, all single use.
We need laws because it’s been so hard for me to find 100% natural fiber clothes for the last 10 years.
agreed. trying to buy actual 100% linen clothes is impossible and i hate that we live in this timeline.
Apparently you have not heard of Pact, Eileen fisher or eBay if you can’t afford them at full price. I only wear organic natural fabrics it’s quite easy to find.
Sounds like a skill issue
That doesn't concern me so much if the clothing is hard wearing enough. I have clothes I bought 20 years ago that are still going with every day wear. Over the past 10 years any clothing I buy barely lasts 2 years and material they're made from is getting lighter and lighter. If I can get 20+ years of wear out of it then a blend of synthetics isn't as much of a concern for me
You think something is made of purely wool or cotton and then read the tag and it's only 75% of that, the rest is polyester. It's insane.
Another part of this topic (that could be its own video) is clothes made from plastic - like polyester, rayon, nylon, acrylic - they shed microplastics every time you wash them (and they enter our water systems this way) but also shed microplastics when you wear them. And unfortunately these types of fabrics are cheaper to make so more and more brands use them instead of natural fibers (like cotton and linen). This links to fast fashion crisis we have which links to overconsumption and capitalism trap.
This was argued in the sixties. Hippies. Whole Earth Catalog. Permaculture. < My experience.
The hippies were right and maybe someday they will be the ones left.
you are very correct in that fast fashion and synthetic clothing is a huge culprit, however - rayon is not made from plastic. It's still made with plenty of chemicals that probably aren't great for the environment (or us), but no plastics at least.
@@EmilyKinny Rayon IS a plastic. It was one of the first. WIKI it.
@@tonyduncan9852rayon is a cellulose fiber, like lyocell, and linen...
I remember even back in the 80's hearing concerns about plastic in the environment. Nothing was done about it instead, plastic use exploded in the decades afterward.
The reality is the consumers don't really care. We just want cheaper products which inevitably means plastic right now, since it's incredibly cheap and relatively durable
Yes because it's money over health and environment
We stopped using plastic straws and that's it
Ive been to countries that sell you glass bottled drinks at slightly more money, then pay you that money back when you return the bottles which are then stripped of label, cleaned, sterilized and directly reused. Ive always thought, if you standardised a bunch of packaging I dont see why you couldnt do this with so much more. All your liquids, probably a whole bunch of other things as well.
The problem is partly building that infrastructure back up and partly the varying storage requirements of liquids. Not everything can be stored in the same standard bottle, and there is a good reason to have things in a variety of bottles. I don't want people to confuse hydrogen peroxide and beer for example, both would need to be stored in colored glass container. Not to mention that buying the amount of sand required to produce that much glass would cause construction costs to skyrocket even higher than they are already. It's just not viable economically right now.
That’s how it was in the 1960’s, then we were lied to about recycling and the labeling. I don’t live in the US anymore. I live in BC and we recycle almost all plastics unless combined with paper.I have purchased some products that are made from the recycled plastic including mattresses and fencing materials. I think the plastic like material made from wood or agricultural materials where it works and can decompose easily is part of the answer. Use less plastic for disposable things period.
There is a beer brewery about an hour from me called Franconia, the gent is from Germany and talks at some length on the tours about the cost breakdown of a bottle of beer, a huge chunk of which is the packaging. He's a great speaker, and very much flummoxed that we do single-use glass bottles as his only option.
@@lumenox8541plastics are infecting every single aspect of our lives and were worried about economic feasibility? It's not about cost anymore, it's about "at any cost" at this point.
This used to be a common practice e everywhere. Sadly someone decided to get rid of it
That intro packed a huge punch. I knew about the plastics at the bottom of the marina trench but I had never seen it before. It hits hard. Thank you for the video!
It's gotten to be no matter where you go on planet earth there is disgusting plastic garbage everywhere everywhere everywhere there's no escape
Disney at the bottom of the deepest point on Earth. That’s harrowing.
@s.lmaaltajik7572 so u support regulating plastic?
Some seem to forget the step before reuse and recycle... REDUCE
@OldShatterham good start is to invest in cloth grocery bags....Even old pillowcases with drawstrings . I use the former for 10 years now.
@@markwis5285 I've bought grocery bag made of fabric somewhat 5 years ago, and I use it every day, it's durable and doesn't show any signs of wear, the only caveat is it's made of PET 😬
@@markwis5285haven't the cloth grocery bags been pretty much demonstrated to have worse environmental impacts than plastic bags
Growth must continue at all costs because the economy. Externalities are a problem but progress must continue. The next quarter profits depend on that.
Maga. Reduce Maga.
I've discussed with friends and family, and have expressed I REALLY want a Single-Use Plastic Tax. Bring back Glass Bottles, and give Credit to collect and recycle them. Even if we have to use Plastic Bottle Caps on Glass to properly seal it, that reduces the waste by SO much.
The netherlands has a sup tax.
I don't think it's doing a hell lot though.
15 cents on bottles which we always had, and newly drink cans does work.
Sure not everyone takes it back. But the public trash cans are searched by the poor for them of people throwing it away. (Though this sometimes means they throw trash everywhere....).
Single clean stream pet does help in getting that recycled.
We don't need either plastic or glass for bottling drinks. A metal can will suffice, is recyclable, could also have a deposit value to encourage returns rather than littering, and is light to transport.
Though we in the Netherlands and more of the "Germanic" world ( Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia ) does collect pfand, in the case of bottles and cans it is simply to combat litter, they don't go to recycling. It is nearly impossible to reuse plastic bottles in a food safe level.
That's where glass makes a different, it can be more properly sterilised. Glass and metal containers being reusable is one of the few ways to cut single use containers. And even though we have increased a tax on single use containers, using one's own is still extremely rare. But maybe like bags it will just take a while for a portion of society to join in, even for bags single use is still very common.
@@Debbie-henri You can re use any container, you should be able to fill it up in the store and buy only what you want by volume or weight... of course, the market will also then demand less centrally manufactured fancy things that can only really be done sealed at the source because they will have to be expensive but that's the way it is (so in balance that market would mostly need to be supplied by companies that run mostly local and re use glass bottles or breweries that re use smaller kegs you take home, hence why the large companies are against it).
All that said, food packaging is barely even a footnote in the problem.
@@Debbie-henrimetal cans have plastic coatings & still contribute to the microplastic issue.
The unfortunate reality is that being environmentally friendly is expensive as an consumer. There have been times where I wanted to buy something that is a bit more environmentally friendly but just could not because I did not have the money for it. And for most people, whether they can afford it or not, money is the number one factor on what they decide to buy.
That's why this can never be solved by consumer will alone, and why the oil and plastics industry push the "environmental footprint" narrative to try to make it the consumer's responsibility. It's why the producers want the solution to be down at the end of the lifecycle, which will never work but sounds a lot like "personal responsibility." Producers need to pay for the damages they've caused.
Expensive in the short run but cheaper in the long run if everyone switches over. A huge problem is that the corporation lie about the the their products so consumers aren't making an informed decision. Regulators are toothless.
This is why we need to make the people who profit from our self-destructive system pay their fair share. Most of those cost savings go into their pocket. Meanwhile, the medical and environmental costs that make everything progressively more expensive, well, *we* pay those costs.
We also receive contradictory and confusing advice on what can be recycled, and it varies from place to place.
All money that exists in the world is bank debt, either central or commercial bank debt, having to hold bank debt to eat has social problems that should be looked more than just "more money"
Using plastic in more permanent things feels fine, but in impermanent uses it feels bad
Ie my plastic wii remote has been in use for over a decade compared to the constantly disposed of water bottles
The focus should definitely be on short life plastics, however all plastics should eventually be phased out. long life plastics create all the same problems, just slower.
Unless oil, the input stops, then plastic production can't. 15% of each barrel is used as plastic, whether it is long life or single use the amount of plastic entering the environment as microplastics will remain the same, one study has found over 300,000 pieces per gram of food. a remote will eventually end up in landfill, as we use 100 million barrels a day 15 million are plastic that has to go somewhere, they are part of a whole, not a separate issue
Yeah I think plastic should stay in things that absolutely have to be plastic, for now like some medical devices.
But even your remote control, polyester clothes, microfiber, faux fur, dials and switches, adhesives and paint, kitchen goods etc etc still sheds fine layers of plastic all the time that gets into our lungs, our water, our food.
Going back to ceramics, wood, glass and metal won't only be environmentally friendly, that stuff looks and feels way better too.
The main problem comes from disposable plastic which is sadly their main use
@@Solstice261 The main problem is the corresponding amount of diesel, propane, petrol that got produced at the same time and is also a one-time used product.
As someone thats worked in plastic recycling, I can assure everyone, recycling is mostly bullsheet. We added virgin plastics and only really recycled plastic which were cut offs from the plastics we sent out because it was the only way we could guarentee they were the right type of plastic and wasnt going to cost a fortune if the wrong type of plastic ruined a roll or extrusion.
We should just limit packaging to 6 or so different packaging sizes, ban plastics and force everyone to go back to either paper or another grown medium. Plastics arnt needed, weve become far to reliant on them due to the corruption in the subsidy system. The fact the UK is still subsidising the petroleum industry is a tragedy and if our species survives another millenia, they will judge us harshly.
81% of each barrel is stuff we burn and plastic 15%, if we keep producing 100 million barrels a day, so 15 million barrels a day of plastic, that is cheaper than recycling, be hard to see how it works unless it's like where they add a ten cent cost to each can and then give back that tens cents at a colllection, much more than the metal value, they know most people won't bring them back and therefore a money making scheme while some rubbish got picked up by the people who paid for it to be there..
edit : They could make all things lie laundry detergent in bring your own bottles and refill but then the supply of plastic at the other end builds up.
I'm a grad student at the composites lab at Purdue, I remember at some point hearing about selective depolymerization of nylon during one of many discussions about the potential for composites recycling.
it would be great and would make nylon about as recyclable as aluminum, but I don't really know how much of a difference it would make overall.
@@thamiordragonheart8682good for you for going to grad school to study this subject and how it affects the environment! We need more young people like you!🎉😊❤
that was more recycled plastic globally than i thought, i was thinking roughly 2%
9% probably is an over-estimate, though it's really hard to be precise. The US, for instance, is down around 5% and even that might be optimistic.
If you're interested in where that 9% figure came from start with Geyer et al. 2017
There are certain plastics that get recycled one single time, if I remember correctly.
Maybe 9% is a, er, _lie._ Who knows?
I was guessing 5%: because I know that most "recycled" plastic is actually land-filled.
They will get a buyer for that low-grade plastic, under a layer of dirt to protect it from sunlight, any day now!
7:01 Actually, since 2020 the hole in the ozone layer is not closing anymore (it has more or less stayed the same size) and for the past couple of decades the mean concentration of ozone in the atmosphere has more or less plateaued (probably due to additional nitrous oxide pollution).
Very sad
Source?
they should just give me all that nitrous
@@watashiwaelhuesodemiespada2717 Just google it. Nasa makes yearly report on it.
@@watashiwaelhuesodemiespada2717 nasa publishes the numbers, and you can see it visualized on the website 'our world in data'.
God. I remember many, many years ago as an arrogant, contrarian 15 year old declaring to my French tutor something along the lines of "oh, I'm not worried about global warming, we know it's a problem and we're/they're already working on sorting it, the real problem once that's sorted is plastics in the environment."... I guess I was half right. That feels pretty bad.
The fact you said that to a French teacher makes me happy, because I bate everything to do with France.
If you have been convinced this plastic agreement is as important as the Paris agreement then you are nowhere to being half right.
If by many many years ago you mean the 1980s, I remember hearing similar conversations in school. I have contacts who say they remember them in the 1970s. We are in so much trouble.
@@QT5656 Considering the environmental movements or the late 60 and 70's I'm not surprised. Then they all went back to work and started having holidays with the new debt based system
@@موسى_7 ..okay
I think there's a very important clarification that needs to be made with this. Single-use plastics is a crisis. Long-term sturdy plastics are less of a problem, they're easily recyclable and usually at a profit. Long-term plastics are often used to cut weight in everyday products like a keyboard or mouse which reduces emissions from transport. Long-term plastics are used in stuff like car bodies and for cup-holders which reduces the weight of your car and improves fuel efficiency. Single-use plastics for stuff that can instead be cardboard or paper should be changed.
Plastics as a total are 15% of each barrel of oil and single use are 50% so 7% of the total issue of each barrel and last time I checked diesel and petrol, jet fuel, the 81% of each barrel was also single use, why isn't the 81% the crisis?
I wanted to say something similar. The problem depicted in this (and other)Videos is severe but its not the plastic itself its what we do with it. Plastic can (and does) solve alot of our todays problems but we have to Change our thinking towards waste. There is no waste.just ressources.
Don't kid yourself, Simon wants to completely phase out plastic production.
@@antonyjh1234we're talking about micro plastics in this video.
@@sujimaynenobody does. It's vital in the creation of life-saving medical equipment, for one. Anyone who genuinely wants to eradicate 100% plastic is not someone to take seriously.
When taking about geological scale plastic pollution, it does remind me of when plants invented cellulose, it took millions of years for bacteria to figure out how to break it down, in the mean time a massive layer of now coal formed.
Was that cellulose or lignin?
Bacteria still haven't figured it out. Fungi degrade cellulose and lignin.
lol our plastic pollution will just turn back into hydrocarbons in millions of years from now
Been saying this for ages: I've never produced or distributed a single piece of plastic in my entire life, so how is it suddenly my responsibility to clean it all up?
You live alone on a desert island?
@@tonyduncan9852 He is pointing out it is a systemic problem.
You can't "personal responsibility" your way out of a systemic problem.
@@jamesphillips2285 Unless one makes oneself personally responsible for systemic change. Obviously. Maybe a subtle implication?
This issue is just going to be used to reduce your freedom and raise your taxes. Like everything else. Welcome to the party.
@@jamesphillips2285 Yes, you can. Plastic items get produced because consumers prefer plastic products to the drawbacks that would come from the alternatives.
I feel like it would be useful to stop using the word plastic, and start using words that describe each subtype. The global and biological impact is very, very different for different types of plastic. It's hard to explain to people why one type is so much worse than another because they don't have the language to process that information. Because of how thoroughly its all grouped into one word, it's hard to even find information on which ones are worse than others.
excellent comment +1
It’s just like how people believe there is a singular cure for cancer we need to find as if cancer isn’t just a category of thousands of different illnesses
its so ironic that you dont list the subtypes. although if its more than a handful id probably not list them either. google says 7 kinds
@Matty002 7 isn't so many, it was discovered that 7 is the limit of what most people can remember easily which is why phone numbers have 7 digits. But listing them won't help until people see a need to do it. And it's probably a good idea to come up with our own ways to classify them.. maybe based on how degradable they are, or how likely they are to make micro plastics? Maybe I should make a RUclips channel, try to push the idea, explain why I think it's a good idea?
Even as just a relatively young 30 yo, I can remember as a child I used to interact with stuff made out of wood, glass and metal a lot more than I do now
Naysayers: "Everything is doomsday with you people but we never hear about the ozone home or acid rain anymore." And all it took were massive international efforts.
Recently where I live disposable cups (not just plastic but also cardboard etc.) were banned in a lot of cases and some people got very annoyed at it. The number of times I've heard them use the argument "but when I use a throwaway cup I bin it properly so it doesn't pollute, and most people do, so this ban is pointless" is surprising. How many people don't even consider the idea that these cups actually need to get *made* shocked me. I mean, even if you don't give a crap about the environment, it's still insane that tons of materials, energy, man-hours and facilities are used just to make stuff that gets thrown away immediately after use.
imagine how will scientists from the distant future explain the layer on plastic on earths geological history once its rediscovered
well we have language and writing so unless everything with language on it is somehow destroyed and everyone somehow forgets and somehow all the plastic on the planet gets buried immediately, the scientists will have some idea of why they found plsastic during a dig. unless theyre nonhuman scientists
Microplastic is stored in the balls
common misconception. its actually stored in your bones
Mmhmm, another summary about plastic that mentions the horrors of microplastics yet fails to point out that the majority are from car tires. Everybody's buying filters to keep microplastics from their laundry from entering the sewer while commuting an hour a day, not realizing the latter is several orders of magnitude worse.
I also wish that reporting on the % of plastics that are recycled would follow up with suggestions about which types are very easy to recycle (HDPE, which you can even recycle at home, and PETE which is a tad harder but still comparatively easy) and which are basically always landfilled even if you try to recycle them (PVC, LDPE, PP, PS and then the long tail of nylons, acrylic, polycarbonate, etc). It's one reason I always 3d print PLA, unless I have a solid reason not to; it doesn't exactly compost, but it does break down extremely quickly compared to essentially all other plastics.
In short, your HDPE yogurt container is not a massive problem. The plastic bag you carry it home in, though...
We know about quite a few viable alternatives already. Plastics manufacturers will be fine, though oil producers might take a hit (which they deserve; oil production should be cut to about 1% what it is now, being used solely for feedstock for lubricants and emergency power generation during crises). I mentioned PLA, which is suitable for a few "single-use" plastics and doesn't carry the 500-year breakdown problem. Silicone-based replacements can also be a decent option, though regulating additives will matter, because the easiest way to recycle silicones is to burn them for electricity and then send the resulting silicon dioxide to refiners for semiconductor productions...
Filtering a washing machine is a stupid idea; there's an easier solution.
Use cotton and woolen clothing.
Every single thing that is plastic in your homes has had microplastics drop to the floor and into your lungs, along with tyres as you say along with brake pads and a study in France or Italy found 300,000 pieces per gram of food so they are all around us and talking about the source of oil that is 15% of the total of each barrel while ignoring the oil we spew into the sky is probably putting our attention to the wrong things.
Please do a short video on what you know. 👍
@antonyjh1234 synthetic carpet is a prime source of household microplastics eg. Nylon... as their worn down over time.
@@markwis5285 YEp, they're all around wherever plastic is and that surrounds most of us, the small amount that might come from a plastic bottle I think is tiny compared to what we breathe every day.
I think Dr Breen said it best:
"Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken, plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed? Sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eons worth of mud?"
Plastic waste in the Marianas Trench = doing carbon sequestration very badly.
oil comes from organisms sinking to the bottom of the ocean= recycling
I recently moved onto a farm and drastically reduced my waste production because I created a compost where all food waste, pap mache and paper boxes etc is broken down into fertilizer. It has really clarified to me how much plastic waste I (a single woman with a regular usage) is producing in just a week. It's staggering. I deeply want that to change and I so hope something like what you're talking about in this vid can be implemented. It's extremely frustrating that you as a consumer caring about the environment has to go through immense hoops to avoid plastic waste when doing something as simply as getting groceries.
It’s been a problem though. I still remember Nickelodeon talking about plastic pollution to my tike self in the 90s
It's been 3 weeks!! Why does this only have 150k views??
As a person living in America, this video has been absolutely constant in my brain. I cannot turn my head without seeing plastic.
this is the definition of a bi partisan issue that everyone can agree on and nothing has been done. Really shows the state of things
Also the thing with plastic waste "degrading" is basically that the plastic item only grinds down to microscopic particles.
I used to work in a retail store, and let me tell you, *there's sooo much plastic* that you don't see, because products come wrapped in them, and then we throw the plastic away. Seriously, it needs to end! Even *gardening tools* come wrapped in plastic. Why are *gardening tools* wrapped in plastic?
i currently work in a hardware store. it is insane the amount of products made out of stainless steel, galvanized metal, treated/coated metal, rubber, hard plastics that are then loosely wrapped in single use plastic wrap that we immediately throw away. it disgusts me. the company i work for say "looking after our environment is one of our top priorities". yeah, my ass it is.
@@arobbo28 greenwashing made me quit associating with sustainability movements years ago, realizing how many cynical people use it as a corporate marketing ploy and nothing more.
I remeber being told and taught in preschool and grade school how horrible it is to be using paper bags and products, and how AMAZING plastics are for the environment….This was 2000. 2 freaking thousand, and they made us believe SOMEHOW that plastics are some be all end all to the world’s problems.
I’d have zero qualms buying a 2 gallon jug with a good reusable seal to get my soda’s tonic water lemonades etc and cleaning it. Ooooorrr like we did before just recycling glass bottles after drinking them. Really I don’t understand how we’ve gotten here outside big business has too far a reach to milk as many profits as possible due to plastic being far cheaper than alternatives.
I am so embarrassed and humiliated by just being an American. I can't express how powerless I feel.
Same here 😭😭😭
Huh. Try being a Brit.
Not just America, unfortunately...
Guns
I feel you. Even though I'm from EU, it's going downhill here too. I have a tip: try to find local clubs that do tiny things to better the area. Joining a small public gardening club cured my feeling of being powerless. We plant and manage a public garden in my village, which was first just an empty and ugly field. These clubs are usually very hard to find, because they mostly exist of "retired boomers" that forget about actively recruiting more members, so you can only find them by word of mouth or asking around in community centres :P But they are there, and it's often very satisfying to actively change things for the better in the local area and have a say in the matter. Good luck! Stay strong!
The 50 kilos of plastic per person per year is even worse than it sounds because most people don't interact with that much plastic that ends up as trash... most of the "disposables" that we interact with(takeout, grocery containers, etc) are paper. Most of the plastics we interact with are wrapings, grocery bags, or Ziploc bags... the vast majority of plastics aren't even seen by the common person. It's almost all in factories or transport.
3:33 the second I saw that graph I new it was going to be all of them but I wasnt ready for the truth anyway
The quote " *There's a great future in plastics* !" - from the 1967 movie *The Graduate* resonates deeply. In the movie, Mr. McGuire says this to Benjamin, Dustin Hoffman's character, in a side conversation. And now we’re living in that plastic world …
Heck! That's what Sam Wainwright said in *It's a Wonderful Life. 1946*
Linus Larrabee had a similar idea in *Sabrina, 1954*
I'm glad in the Netherlands we take recycling more serious. Since January 1st all plastic bottles and aluminium cans fall under a money deposit system. Meaning that way more bottles and cans are being recycled (or at least collected).
They are also recycled, this why the bottles have a slight yellow or blue tint.
And we have the only research center for circulair plastics
Sold of to poor nations that then makes it end up at the buttem of the world
Still find it wild that CFCs and leaded petrol were created by the same guy. Hard to imagine a single person having a bigger impact on the climate
Not expecting maga-America to sign on to that treaty. Mango Mussolini is very pro pollution
Biff back to the future in real life lol
Incredible nickname. I wish I had enough hope left to laugh.
It might be quite pleasant to watch him eat his words, though.
@@Sadkoi It's really tough to stay hopeful isn't it? We've got to keep resisting though. Take a break and come back swinging!
@@tonyduncan9852 I sincerely hope so too
Horrible. In the fish, the beef, vegetables, all sorts of food. It's a disaster. It makes me worried, very very worried.
Bloody hell, Simon. Watching this video made me so depressed. I don't know how people like you continue being climate or environmental scientists without losing your mental health. Keep up the good fight, and take care of yourself.
To follow up with this, if anyone is curious, the discussion referenced here was not concluded so we will have to wait another year for the answer. :(
Replacing fossile fuels is childsplay compared to replacing plastics. I just really hope that microplastics don't turn out to be dangerous because the sheer volume of plastic and plastic adjacent products breaks my brain.
I have bad news.....
Plastic does not exist without the fossil fuels so no. No plastic exists without oil or fossil fuels., saying replacing fossil fuels is childspaly has to be one the most ignorant things I have seen in this chat so far..
@@antonyjh1234trust me, replacing the power generation and transportation uses without petroleum is easier than replacing plastic polymers.
It may happen on it's own if we actually phase out fossil fuels.
As @antonyjh1234 has been copy and pasting in the comments: plastics are currently subsidized by fossil fuel production. That is why "virgin" plastic is cheaper to process than recycled plastic.
@@antonyjh1234Replacing power & transport is a big task but the solutions are already proven and commercialized. Most plastic alternatives less so
Can you make a video summarizing the Busan Plastic treaty mentioned in the video? Explaining why it didn't result in enough new regulation, summarizing the Chair's Text and giving some ideas on what can be done to increase the changes of more strict legislation from future summits?
Plastic is WAY WORSE than carbon dioxide. The companies have us all focused on carbon, while they dump 10x as much Plastic into the environment
It's its own problem, but exacerbated by the problem that underlies so many issues of the modern Earth: too many people, too little responsibility.
It's tough to avoid plastic as a consumer. I ordered some socks and made sure to choose a fabric with no plastic... but each individual pair came packaged in plastic. So dumb. On the plus side, the local Panda Express switched to paper containers and bags. Our latest batch of Celestial Seasonings tea came without the plastic overwrap. I definitely notice these things and it leaves a strong favorable impression.
A Quebec, Canada, startup is working on a plastic eating enzyme. Looks promising.
A decade hence, feral plastic eating fungii or bacteria will be causing havoc...
My Canadian city is running a pilot program offering to collect Styrofoam recycling to attempt to use a similar enzyme process to break it down. Seems to be going alright so far. Even heard a couple teens' science fair projects were on it a few years back here, so maybe they've hit it big lol
It's just an enzyme right? Not a bacteria? I'm a little concerned with bio-engineered plastic destruction because one of the benefits of plastics is durability in situations that metal or natural materials can't stand.
If it’s something people work on, than it’s too late. The plastic problem is way to extreme. And there are to many plastic bottles and microplastic in the air, ocean, in us in our brains. That enzymes can help now after it’s all in us and around us. Don’t you think?
@@12pentaboraneit’s an Enzym not a bacteria but there is a bacteria too, you’re right.
Thank you for talking about plastics! More sustainable, minimal, and reusable packaging are one of the most obvious ways to reduce out raw material consumption and especially plastics
"next" in the same sense that lead was the next crisis while our grandfathers and great grandfathers were already long into having elevated lead levels.
I honestly think treaties should be made by countries willing, the most recent cop has proven what happens when you include those that are only there to ensure a deal is watered downz we can all see what the Paris agreement did, probably helped things not be worse but it didn't do what was promised
Could you make a follow up video analysing the results of the treaty - would be cool to get your take
yeah we're fucked. There's a reason I was so depressed as a kid - I didn't want to go this way. But here we are.
more people need to watch this
Very well done. Everyone on the planet should see this.
Microplastics have also been found in the human body: lungs, liver, skin but also heart and brain... this is a serious medical issue.
Eat a high bacteria diet, strains of gut microbes can digest microplastics and prevent it passing the barrier
Prove it. They're only there because they're inert.
@@DonHavjuan it seems my previous comments are not being published for some reason... however there is consistent evidence that microplastics contribute to all kind of medical issues, google for "toxicity of microplastics"
@@DonHavjuanA lot of plastic compounds can be carcinogenic. In vitro experiments with human cells and in vivo data generated with mice showed that microplastics elicit adverse health effects mainly by causing inflammation, oxidative stress [increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production], lipid metabolism disturbances, gut microbiota dysbiosis, and neurotoxicity
Here in Norway you pay an extra 2 or 3 NOK per plastic bottle bought. You get this back if you put your bottle in one of the recycling stations we got all over the country (basically every shop). We also have our own lottery system where you can donate your bottles to a lottery drawing. Part of the profits are donated to the Red Cross as well, so lots of incentives to hand in your bottles.
Now if only we could get similar systems all over the world.
Source on studies that show this would make a meaningful impact?
I am a MAJOR nerd on all this so pre-watching notes:
1.) I need to write about it, but i want standardized categories for “prompt biodegradable” (think paper, turns to mush and is gone fast), slow/long term biodegradable, and non-biodegradable.
2.) I want a FULL LIST of all plasticizers/dyes used etc
3.) Bio-Petrochemistry (Pyrolysis Oil, Hydrothermal Liquefaction Biocrude, and Syngas) and “Power-to-X” are the way
4.) Some things cannot easily be done away with and thus i think there are categories that need a “drop in replacement”. If we can make these prompt/short term biodegradable as soon as possible this would help the most. I’m thinking things like “Pallet Wrap”, Packaging, and Wire Insulation etc
5.) Waste Management needs an overhaul. Nationwide, if not worldwide, Deposit and Return systems, MAJOR fines (and enforcement) for littering/dumping, and also landfill bans+mining.
Also labeling to allow for easier waste sorting for this (re my writings on W2E/RDF compatibility labels etc)
I am rushing through this, but I can link to some writings of mine on all this, and would LOVE to hear what you all think.
Also I’ll update post-properly watching the video too.
I would love for thermal depolymerization to be a thing, but right now it is an unfeasible idea being peddled by the plastics industry as a magical solution to the problem they've created. Maybe it will be viable, someday, especially for the eventual recycling of non-single-use plastics that are, on balance, not that bad, but unless we make the plastics industry responsible for making it happen (sans oil to power the process work!) we're not going to get there any time soon.
All plastic coming from oil and the 15% that will still exist is where plastic comes from, if all the other things are still being used at the same rate, 100 million barrels a day, where will the 15% go, as 81% is single use burnt fuel, why bother with plastic replacement when it is always going to exist if we still use diesel? What decrease of the 15% and reproduced to replace a product that we didn't produce, oil, will mean an overall reduction in emissions?
Correct. Try not to be too anal about it. Take a break.
@@tonyduncan9852 What a strange thing to say..
@@antonyjh1234 If one had no sense of humour. To others, possessing more, there may be implications. Dissecting humour is rather like dissecting a frog: you're left with bits and the frog dies. (Unoriginal).
Nothing single-use should be made of plastic. Full stop.
A topic that's always interested me is this: what can we do when we find out larger institutions and even cities are just dumping the recycling in with the landfill waste? What can we do when we see organizations engaging in egregious unnecessary waste (often to everyone's detriment) simply as a matter of procedural oversight?
When I was student teaching, often I'd be in my office until later in the evening, and I'd be there late enough to meet one of the school custodians emptying our trash and recycling bins, both into the same large bag; every single one, every single day, even for something as small as a single candy wrapper. I had a candy jar on my desk, and felt bad about seeing an entire trash bag go to waste over a few Dove chocolate wrappers, so I repurposed a small amazon box as my designated candy wrapper bin and hid it away under my desk, planning to dispose of it at the end of the year. One morning, I arrived to find the box emptied out and fitted with its own trash bag.
Obviously, this procedure was not in the best interest of anyone under the age of 60. It was of little consequence to any of the teachers, it couldn't have been that much harder for our custodial staff to have separate carts for trash/recycling and only empty bins when they're half full or have organic stuff in them, and it was definitely not in the interest of a Title 1 school with many other potential uses for that marginal bit of money, but nobody ever questioned it beyond the occasional snide comment. Obviously there's bigger fish to fry, but these oversights permeating all levels of our society clearly are not helping. What could ordinary people do to help sort out these issues in our workplaces or other institutions?
It's a bummer that 99.9% of food in supermarkets is wrapped in plastic, so even if I want to reduce my plastic consumption it's almost impossible to buy food without also buying plastic packaging :( we can't win :(
stop making up excuses, otherwise we can not fix anything.
be the solution not a part of the problem.
@@sudd3660 yeah! We all need to stop buying food. It's the consumers fault that almost everything needs a plastic wrap!
@@nilslindstrom8087 You can buy food at the market or organic food shops where they are not wrapped in plastic. Needless to say, it will be more expensive, because supermarkets aren't just wrapping things in plastic for no reason but to make their logistics more efficient.
@@theprofessionalfence-sitter I already by as little food as possible in the supermarket and as u say get stuff at the lokal market. I avoid ultraprossesed foods and other unhealthy stuff. My comment was trying to hilight that the consumer is not a part of the problem, they are stuck in a bad system that is victim blaming.
@@nilslindstrom8087 So if you can choose an alternative, how are you stuck in a bad system?
One of your best yet Simon. Thank you. Pity about the outcome.
We need to work towards longevity for all types of materials and products. Take wood or paper, often not there is no reforestation. (think paper bag, or cheap furniture) Or look at fertilizers and shipping used for textiles. (Fast fashion) Or the energy to make glas or metals (canned / glass food). But, yes the easy disposable plastic is on a different dimension. Where we move away from plastics it's too easy to just shift the problem to different materials.
I work for an air quality monitoring company. We find our particulate monitoring instruments have microplastic concentrations. Including femto-size and piko-size. Even in remote areas of the Yukon, we see these show up. Y’all, it’s so over.
Thank you for presenting this information. I wish more people cared
I'm so glad the consumer is being told to control this crisis
A complete phase out is totally insane for the foreseeable future. There are lots of necessary functions polymers have in modern life that simply cannot be replicated by any other class of material. I’m 100% for going as far as we can though.
In addition, I think it is crucial that we figure out a way to price the environmental cost of plastics into the market, since monetary incentives seem to consistently be the strongest available.
I get that it feels that way, but you haven't seen all the possibilities for alternatives. You don't know that fully replicating the functions is impossible.
This is why a lot of climate scientists are not taken seriously.
They often don't have realistic solutions, but intentionally cause panic to get more funding.
@@davidjennings2179Okay, then do it. I'm not seeing it. Where is it?
@@sujimayne Just because you don't see a thing, doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Coming out with "X cannot be done" when you aren't involved in X research is just another form of alarmism.
As always, thank you for this amazing job on placing the spotlight where most media don't, and for the well-documented videos. Already shared this one in my social media.
I hate plastic! You just can't get away from it where I live. I've been eagerly awaiting the result of these negotiations for a while. I hope they go with the strongest possible option.
I really do wonder how anyone thought this was acceptable to continue after the immediate discovery of plastic's near indestructibility
because in general people don't give a s#$
The phasing out of CFCs and lead was easy though. Simple alternatives existed. But it's not so simple for plastic. All of the alternatives basically require land. Be that trees, hemp, metals, or what have you. I just don't see how we can replace them without causing other environmental problems. We're already destroying biodiversity due to human land use. The last thing we need is more demand for land. Not really sure how we fix this problem.
What about PHAs made by fermenting malt waste? Or microalgae?
@soyoltoi Both still require space for growing no? I'm skeptical there is enough malt waste currently to offset even a significant amount of plastic production. The issue is scale.
@s0cks1985 A lot of people have been working on different ways to make PHAs from various kinds of sources, including plastic itself. The more sources we have, the more plastic we could potentially make. Although it doesn't use that much land, as you mentioned, the techniques used to make either PHAs or microalgae don't scale now, but that's true for any emerging technology.
Ugh finally some good news on this front and only from three weeks ago. Really hope Busan goes well too, if it isn’t already concluded. Would be great to, you know, not have a trashworld like you see in dystopian sci-fi at some point in the future.
I hope this video goes viral
Watching this video a month later and I wanna ask what's the latest news on the Busan plastic pollution treaty? Was it a success was some agreement made?
It was a failure, check out Nate Hagens interview with toxicologist Jane Muncke, who I believe was there.
nothing was signed or agreed, theyll reconvene sometime in spring or summer for more negotiations
American here, please for fucks sake write us off. This place is so cooked.
Your a part of the reason it looks like
@xijin_pooh5158 do expand your reasoning? I'm sure it's enthralling.
LOL. Whatever you do, DON'T emigrate to Britain. Honolulu, perhaps.
@@tonyduncan9852 sounds like the UK needs some freedom.
@@jakethefakejake69 "Freedom" has multiple interpretations. Define it.
dumping another load of plastic in my local canal in honor of you sir
💂♂
12:26 I’m sorry
Unfortunately the sorry helps no one
@@WoodHead0815just know that most Americans wish we could be a part of the treaty, if not one of the leading participants. The problem is some individual people have so much wealth hoarded that they’re able to cancel out the voices of millions
"One of the electoral decisions of all time" is one of the most aggressively neutral statements I have ever heard 😂
Plastic is a great material! Lets not use it to make stuff we are going to throw away!
No no no, lets not use it at all. Plastic is an horrible material, makes everything feel so cheap and crappy.
@@iirosiren5120 There are some objects we use every day that can't be made out of anything else.
14:59, oh, I guarantee you we have already left several of these.
I do not agree with the 'plastic is propping up fossile fuel' narrative. Companies generally do not use one product to subsidise the production of another (with some rare exceptions). Instead, they will choose to produce more of the more profitable and less of the less profitable product. That means that if plastic production shrinks, you would not expect fossile fuel production to decrease but to increase. Generally, crude oil is cheap enough to extract that we will expect the vast majority of reserves to be taken out of the ground no matter what. Thus, the best way to reduce CO2 emissions from oil is not to try to reduce the production of anything using oil, but instead to promote the usage of oil for anything other than burning it.
I'm glad to see that glass, earthenware, and wood is making a comeback in shops here. But still a lot of silicone and plastic because it's cheaper. I have 38 year old wooden items that are still perfectly useable. I don't have plastic that's 38, because it broke or frayed and fit replaced.
Please, let's give paper, earthenware, glass, and wood more use. 😢 Yes metal is not included, but for cooking iron and steel are great! This is more a call to replace things that are often plastic these days. Rice husk containers are also great!
The lesson is that every time we have a miracle material, its actuality bad for long term. Like asbestos
It's weird that some little girl lost her balloon not knowing it would end up and then Mariana's trench.
2:33 You have to tell us, animals, babies, children, disabled, uneducated, immigrants, and the people born in 30 years. Plastic will outlive you.
Gee, that was a long list. Didn’t know that immigrants like me were considered a different group of people.
Why did you list out those demographics?
Thank you, Simon and Luke. This was a very sobering watch. Not sure whether I am looking forward to or dreading hearing the outcome of the talks in Busan...
'Develop Alternatives' needs to move to the top of the list. Humans are lazy, wasteful and habitual. In being so, simple alternatives are required. My ever so small bit has been to take glass 'Mason' i.e. canning jars (sterilized of course), where I can, to take-out (take-away, in the U.K.) and insisting on liquids I purchase (salsa from my favorite Mexican restaurant was my first) be sold to me in my container, not theirs. Fabric shopping bags and avoiding those damn (sorry) plastic bags for produce by putting these products directly in my cart and shopping bag or insist on paper bags for produce. For now, plastic soda bottles are reused (somewhat) and the state of Oregon has put a substantial deposit on them as well as aluminum, tin and glass containers. They impressively expanded the program a few years ago to $0.10 per container as well as things like water bottles. Our ditches look a heck of a lot better for it! I'm going to the effort that few will and am sure governments need to legislate the design and manufacture certified recyclable and/or quickly biodegradable (non-polluting) packaging as well as the use of the same by banning the plastics that aren't. 😒 Perhaps an advert a couple times a day showing a montage of the garbage collected the day before from their area... with tonnage to be shown in prime-time interrupting programs at a climatic or punch-line funny bit... You know, just 15 seconds all by itself so that it's too short for us lazy humans to FF past it... 😏
As a regular consumer just trying to live, I find it hard to avoid plastic. Hygine products come in plastic. Vegetables come wrapped in plastic. Whatever you do, plastic is always involved.
The plastic free options are usually more expensive. Add that do the increasing cost of living, and we're less able to consider environmentally friendly options because just affording basics is already too expensive.
It's going to take legislation and changes at the start of production to get things moving to reduce plastic use. It's all good saying "reduce, reuse, recycle" but, as I said, a lot of products come in plastic. Good luck trying to reuse all the plastic you buy, like the bread bags and bits of film on things. And then, when you do recycle, a lot just goes to incineration or landfill anyway. The regular person is fighting a losing battle if it's just the end of the line consumer doing all the actions to held the environment.
A phase *out* seems really quite an extreme solution to me, plastics are such a broad spectrum of materials used in such a broad spectrum of ways. It's as herculean a task as a phase-out of metal would be, or perhaps moreso. Can I ask why you feel it's fully necessary?
How are we going to have wind turbines without GFRP? How do we have sanitary hospitals without latex gloves? How do we have bicycles without synthetic rubber? Obviously plastic production needs to be reduced, and what plastics are produced should be designed in a way that limits toxicitiy, but it's complete abolition would put us back into the Edwardian era, without a doubt.
We could simply burn more used plastics so it doesn't end up in the environment, which is the concern here
That's one option. There'd be rise in Carbon emissions but that could be reduced by moving to nuclear energy and phasing out coal and gas fired powerplants
Just takes political will
it really makes me hopeful that something is being done. I know it probably won't go anywhere but even the fraction of a chance is making me feel.happy
15% of each barrel of oil is where plastic comes from, we use 100 million barrels a day so 15 million barrels a day get produced in the refining process. If this rubbish pick up program doesn't stop the inputs then it will always build up.
If we use diesel/petrol/propane then platic will always be there, recycling when the inputs don't stop and are cheaper??? Yeah I see change happening
Edit people complain about single use plastic but does the petrol/diesel etc get used twice and I didn't know about it?
It isn't that plastics are one part of the oil and the diesel/petrol are another part of the oil. It's the same feedstock and quite a few overlapping fractions of the refined oil go into each. If we banned the burning of all oil-based fuels, the costs of plastics would drop like a rock even while oil production went way down, because there wouldn't be as many uses for the same oil.
@@oasntet
You're talking about cracking, right? That's when fractions of oil are made to react to turn into other fractions
@@موسى_7 Yeah, cracking is just the industry's term for distillation.
(Also, I was not expecting RTL text to work as well as it did.)
@@oasntet What do you mean if we banned the use of oil based fuels, it is that plastic is one part and asphalt another and bunker oil another, these are all reached at different temperatures right, like gas comes off before naphtha does, how would the cost of plastic drop if asphalt isn't sold off as part of the barrel?
It’s really scary because of how convincing some of the messaging has been, to the extent that some companies don’t even understand that they’re a part of the problem. I see brands absolutely convinced that soft plastics are recyclable, they will promote using it as packaging for their products is fine because you can just drop it off at the supermarket and it’s then taken away and recycled…which is a lie. The supermarket made themselves the go-to drop off location for all soft plastics because they are the main source of them being used so widely, and greenwashing to pretend to everyone that it’s not a problem because somehow they’re taking care of it.
I think, on a larger scale humanity will go through one environmental crisis after an other, but each of these crises will span over half a century up to more than a century until we solved it. That is maybe just the logical result of there being more than 8 billion people on this planet. And each of these crises will be more long term.
Oil and all fossil fuels are supposed to be removed from your life, in your lifetime, all nylon, plastic, petrol, diesel, asphalt etc and gas and coal, the whole economic model depends on it and if we don't it pushes the earth into hothouse earth and thinking it is solvable in a century, by what we do, in agreement, and calling plastic a crisis to be solved is probably a definition of climate denialism and not an admittance of the real problems at hand.
It's not the number of humans. That's the Malthusian fallacy. It's the political structures that have developed, where most people have almost no power to do anything about the crises while those with power are actively encouraging them to continue, in order to maintain their power through the profits they get from whatever causes each crisis.
Everything that is made, is eventually going to end up in 1 place in one way or another. And that is the environment. Well done!
So.. virtually all our food is now poisoned for generations to come. Well done humanity.. 🤦
we used to use heavy metals for pesticides, so this isn't all that new.
The thing about plastic is that it is largely inert. So far, studies have not shown otherwise, but we will need to wait for more long-term studies.
@@sujimayne Asbestos is pretty inert as well. That is the problem.
Biological processes can't break it down to get rid of it.
Poisoned is a huge overstatement. We currently have no solid evidence of negative health effects.
Thank you Simon for this outstanding article.