This reporter for the BBC is trying to go an entire month without “buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic.” The idea here is that plastic is somehow bad for the environment in some vague way that is never really explained beyond a brief reference to landfills, so we should all see what it is like to do without. In fact, in the video interview, the fellow who shows up to inventory her trash actually points out that plastic is far better for the environment than the alternatives.
In any case, what strikes me here is that her goal is to avoid “buying or accepting” anything with plastic. If she made the rule that she couldn’t use any presently owned goods made with plastic, it would prove impossible to even blog about her adventure.
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Would this extend to any plastic IV tubes or other medical equipment in case she got into a car accident?
Would this extend to any plastic IV tubes or other medical equipment in case she got into a car accident?
This reminds me of an article I saw about some Manhattan family determined to make the smallest environmental footprint they could. There’s a picture of dad with his bike and a tow thingy for his kid. They’re both wearing bicycle helmets. Now, the only reason this schlep can even afford a bicycle and all the gizmos–in fact, the only way such products can even come into being for anybody who’s not a zillionaire–is mass production. So right away this guy’s responsible with all the other consumers for triggering an entire factory, refined materials, mining, transportation, etc. What a fool’s errand.
And, of course, she didn’t use plastic to make purchases, did she?
It’s an interesting experiment if only to remind us that oil=plastic. What would our lives be like if oil reached $200, $300, or even $500/barrel and many of life’s conveniences were priced out of existence.
On the other hand, I am sure we are industrious enough to find oil alternatives to make truly necessary plastic items such as medical equipment.
william,
at a particular petroleum price point, “nautural” carbohydrate based plastics become competitive and will gain a foot hold. As Rothbard states, almost every product has a substitute and if the original factors for a particular product become prohibitively expensive due to unforeseen loss of supply or state interference, the closest substitutes not dependent on the factor in question will gain in demand. Furthermore, baring particularly heavy handed government intervention, capitalists will take note of the decreasing supply of petroleum and raise prices, resulting the most efficient application of the remain stock to the consumer demand. As petroleum supply ramps down, carbohydrate based plastics will ramp up. There will be no shock to the consumer, unless the government meddles with price restrictions.
In fact we already know how to make oil from things that grow (trees for example). Germans turned coal into oil in WWII, and it is trivial to turn thing that grow into coal. The costs were too high – though with current oil prices I suspect you could turn a profit if you had a large enough factory to do this. (none exist now, and it is a very large investment to make one – the risk the oil goes down in price makes it not worth it)
The lesson to be learned is that we will never, ever, “run out” of oil. As petroleum costs rise, alternatives become cost effective.
There might very well be a few applications that cannot be substituted, where petroleum is the one and only source. But when those are also the only use to which petroleum is put because of price, it may in fact last forever.
Thermal depolymerization is an excellent application for waste carbohydrates into general use “oil”, and even pure synthetic motor oil is not all that much more expensive than its “fossil” counterpart.
Now if you want to talk about waste, how about packaging? I look at my “recycling” every week, and most everything in it is “packaging”. Let’s take a look at reducing _that_, regardless of what it’s made from.
I am curious. It mentions an entire month without “buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic.” It doesn’t mention that the good (let’s say a stalk of celery) may have been packaged in plastic until a few hours before the sale or that he may well ask a mate to buy something wrapped in plastic, put in a paper bag and deliver it to his door. Oh and let’s not forget all the plastic which is used in manufacturing process. Oh, and exactly what do they mean with “plastic”? The most widely accepted textbook definition is the following: any of various organic compounds produced by polymerization, capable of being molded, extruded, cast into various shapes and films, or drawn into filaments used as textile fibers. This could prove more than a challenge.
Typical eco-nutter behaviour: let them play and let’s pray they do not force any more of this non-sense on us.
“In any case, what strikes me here is that her goal is to avoid “buying or accepting” anything with plastic. If she made the rule that she couldn’t use any presently owned goods made with plastic, it would prove impossible to even blog about her adventure.”
Jeffrey,
This well illuminates the importance of framing
The fellow who wrote this article is clearly not a yachtsman. By that I mean a blue water yachtsman, the type of yachtsman that sails across large oceans.
If he were he may have come across the “gyre” – a large area in the middle of most of the great oceans that sits right underneath the high pressure cell associated with that ocean, the greatest of which is probably in the North Pacific.
If one were to sail from Hawaii to Seattle, one would almost certainly encounter the N. Pacific gyre. This is an area roughly the size of Texas. It is frequently marked by no wind. It is also notorious for the extensive floating rubbish and junk that is found there, most of it plastic of some sort. It probably contains a number of billions of tons of plastic.
This plastic and allot of the other plastic that ends up in the worlds oceans, along with all the other plastic that has been made never breaks down. The orignal items may have broken down and “dissappeared”, but at a molecular level all of the plastic that has ever been made still exists. Except for a very small proportion that has been burnt, deploymerized back into a fuel or otherwise chemically disposed of.
At this molecular level plastic enters the food chain. Degremont SA, the large French water services firm may have the most advanced water reesearch facilities in the world. They are researching ways of treating water for molecular plastics and other substances that are not broken down by the normal biological processes for treating water.
This is a truly alarming experiment. All of us who live in the Western world (and quite a few who don’t) have a cocktail of around 100 chemicals in our bodies that should not be there. Next time someone you know has cancer stop and consider that.
On its own this bad enough. But added to the delights of global warming, peak oil, destruction of the rain forests, loss of arable land and the human induced fifth great extinction event (happening now, all around you) it is merely another warning light that is flashing ominously.
So, let me get this straight. Plastic is the cause of rubbish in the oceans, cancer, high oil prices, rainforest disappearance, and the “fifth great extinction event” that is happening all around me. Clearly it takes a yachtsman to deduce all that!
the libertarian approach is private ownership of the oceans. there would be no pollution problem if the proper incentives were in place, and no more tragedy of the commons.
to rod campbell-ross:
global warming or global cooling? andrew bolt (herald sun) sums it up:
“…the world hasn’t warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years.
Sea ice now isn’t melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall.
Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes and hurricanes, aren’t increasing and the rain in Australia hasn’t stopped falling.
What’s more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago.
even the moral-crusader rudd has shifted to “climate change”, the warming language doesn’t get mentioned anymore by the labor ministry.
Jeffrey, since you express an interest in getting things straight, let me help.
Our yachtsman friend makes a perfectly straight-forward point – not that “plastic causes ocean rubbish”, but that our oceans are full of plastic rubbish. His point is rather easily validated, if one desires to confirm: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4RNWN_enJP213JP214&pwst=1&q=plastic+pacific+gyre&start=10&sa=N
Mr. Campbell-Ross has NOT alleged that plastic is responsible for cancer, high oil prices, rainforest disappearance, or the “fifth great extinction event”. He has simply expressed concern about these other actual/alleged phenomena (you left out “loss of arable land”), while noting his concern that plastic enters the food chain.
His listing of these other “problems” may seem gratitutous, but to the trained Austrian eye (such as that of Joseph Huang), they are rather quickly identified as sharing the defining attributes of being connected to human activities with respect to open-access or incompletely-owned resources. But you didn’t need anyone, much less a busybody yachtman/radical enviro, to tell you that, right?
Tom
Tokyo Tom and Joseph Huang are both right. I offered no economic consequence of these issues. The central issue is indeed Gerrit Hardins “Tragedy of the Commons”.
The Austrian solution, private ownership, is not available, either for the oceans, or for the air. How then do we deal with plastic entering the food chain and climate change?
That list of so called “proofs” contrarian to climate change is very light-weight, the issue is not provable either way; and anyway is no longer a science based discussion. The science of climate change and the counter arguments are both settled. The subject is all about risk management. If anybody on this blog bothered to study climate science (I have – at a Masters level) you would know that the worlds climate is composed of a large number of major sub-systems. All of them are showing changes that are highly consistent with higher temperatures and increasing levels of CO2.
Tokyo Tom and Joseph Huang are both right. I offered no economic consequence of these issues. The central issue is indeed Gerrit Hardins “Tragedy of the Commons”.
The Austrian solution, private ownership, is not available, either for the oceans, or for the air. How then do we deal with plastic entering the food chain and climate change?
That list of so called “proofs” contrarian to climate change is very light-weight, the issue is not provable either way; and anyway is no longer a science based discussion. The science of climate change and the counter arguments are both settled. The subject is all about risk management. If anybody on this blog bothered to study climate science (I have – at a Masters level) you would know that the worlds climate is composed of a large number of major sub-systems. All of them are showing changes that are highly consistent with higher temperatures and increasing levels of CO2.
Tokyo Tom and Joseph Huang are both right. I offered no economic consequence of these issues. The central issue is indeed Gerrit Hardins “Tragedy of the Commons”.
The Austrian solution, private ownership, is not available, either for the oceans, or for the air. How then do we deal with plastic entering the food chain and climate change?
That list of so called “proofs” contrarian to climate change is very light-weight, the issue is not provable either way; and anyway is no longer a science based discussion. The science of climate change and the counter arguments are both settled. The subject is all about risk management. If anybody on this blog bothered to study climate science (I have – at a Masters level) you would know that the worlds climate is composed of a large number of major sub-systems. All of them are showing changes that are highly consistent with higher temperatures and increasing levels of CO2.
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