Political Memes

What about the shareholders! Think of the shareholders!!! Won't someone think of the shareholders!!!!

Eh. Single use plastics are REALLY useful in certain areas of healthcare where sterility is important. Especially for vascular access devices. Nothing is going to beat the ability of plastic to:

1. stay sterile on a shelf for months to years at a time, so that it can safely be used to bypass 90% of a person's immune system to give lifesaving medication and reliably produce quality samples for testing

2. do it while being flexible enough to not damage the vasculature permanently or in a way that causes enough damage / inflammation to render the access point unusable

3. Yet be resistant enough to breakdown that it's unlikely to break off in a large enough chunk that could migrate and damage the brain heart or lungs.

And I suspect someone who works OR has a way longer and more interesting list than I do.

Now there are other areas in healthcare that plastics could be significantly reduced. The big one that occurs to me is hygiene supplies. We use a lot of single use wet wipes and bed pads with plastic backings. If we were willing to give direct care workers more time to spend with each patient they could make better use of washcloths, washable bed pads, etc.

But there are a select few use cases where I expect plastic to outperform all alternatives for the foreseeable future.

I make things for a living. Every time I order screws, brackets, or any other small component, it dawns on me how many more single use plastic bags we use than most people realize. I've been making this big thing at work that uses a ton of aluminum extrusion (aka 8020) and we've been using a ton of these little corner brackets. Every. Single. Bracket. Comes in this plastic bag. Inside the plastic bag there is another plastic bag that contains 4 screws and 4 T-nuts, and a 3rd plastic bag that contains the bracket itself. I started making a bag full of little bags like a year ago with the intention of reusing them, but the bag is now full of several hundred crumpled up little bags and I've used maybe a dozen. I've stopped saving them. On this project alone we're probably going to use over 150 of those little brackets. We have a small operation, I can't even imagine how many little bags an actual factory goes through in a single day.

I've been reselling my condom for years!

Too many definitional loopholes.

We should restrict plastic severely and go back to paper, metal, glass, wood, and natural fiber cloth for all product packaging. It can be done, because that's how we did it before plastic.

Prime example here is refrigerators. If you get a leak in the refrigerant line, your refrigerator is pretty much toast. I found this out the hard way when I wanted to repair one. They don't even have taps that you could refill it with. I had assumed there would be something like with a car's air conditioner where you could add refrigerant and recharge it. Instead, it's a closed system and because of the way that they are designed, to recharge a refrigerator well over $3,000, because the technician has to tap into the line and reseal it after they top it off which requires specialized tools, so basically if anything happens with that system, you're better off buying a whole new refrigerator. Super wasteful design imo. I guess one could argue that by making it not sealed it could be more prone to leaks over time, but it's still wild that you don't have the option of filling it with maybe 10 bucks worth of refrigerant and instead have to scrap the whole machine.

I think most people agree with this idea. There are two basic problems preventing it.

1. There is a giant gap between what people believe they should be doing and what they'll actually do voluntarily when faced with the slightest inconvenience.

Basically you have to make people do inconvenience things. You can't ask.

For example single-use shopping bags. Everyone understands why they are a problem. Every store sells a reusable alternative. Recyclable paper bags have always been an option. But unless it's regulated, people continue using disposable single use plastic shopping bags.

2. The problem isn't just what can be recycled it's what WILL be recycled.

Imagine going through construction debris trying to separate plaster, wood-lathing wire-lathing, screws, and insulation into separate piles for disposal.

Picture the average grandma disassembling a sump pump to make sure plastic rubber Teflon and metal materials all end up in separate recyclable piles.

The problem is we are only paying for half the lifecycle of the product. Start charging disposal fees to companies for every plastic/non-recycleable bit, and your head will spin at how fast they can get us 90-100% repairable, recyclable, and re-useable products.

On the one hand maximizing design for material conservation also tends to increase costs, creating shortages.

On the other hand ignoring the externalities of production leads to environmental costs causing collapse.

In the gripping hand is our ability to create and manage an economic and political system capable of deciding where that balance is.

I guess light bulbs are going to become expensive.

Oh and can be recycled is kinda meaningless if the system to recycle the items doesn't exist.

Total lifetime cost and emissions are more important. Recycling something doesn't mean its total pollution is free.

As someone in the repair industry, I can tell you this meme is nonsense.

Refurbished, reused, repaired, or otherwise remanufactured parts are almost always inferior to new ones. That’s not opinion, that’s reality. They’ve always been worse and always will be, at least until corporations stop playing the profit maximization game.

The truth is, these companies don’t care about quality. Their only goal is to spend the absolute minimum making old parts “usable” again, which leads to a massive percentage of defective components flooding the market.

I bought an air purifier last winter. Now I can't find a replacement filter anywhere. Fuck that forced obsolescence crap.

'Reduced' implies manufacturing changes. What if, once the product is reduced, it still can't be reused/recycled?

What if the intended life of a product is 50 years maintenance-free after which it's landfill? Can't be reused, can't be refurbed, can't be recycled - but it's still generally a good use of resources.

In many products, there's a repair-reliability tradeoff. If you pot it, you can't repair failures, but you'll reduce the failure rate by >90%. Repair shops hate it because the ones they see can't be fixed, but they' don't see all the 'easy repairs' that never needed doing in the first place.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/266269-if-it-can-t-be-reduced-reused-repaired-rebuilt-refurbished-refinished

Well I mean if it can be reduced then it should be removed, lol, that one doesn't belong in the list.

Give me the enthropy reversal machine LadyButterfly! Divulge your secrets!

Yeah, but modern economy wants you to buy a new one ideally every year, so it doesn't work for that.

I'll give you an idea....my wife keeps all the thin plastic food containers from when we bring food from a restaurant. Now we have hundreds of reusable containers. We don't need to buy new plastic containers or plates!

So instead of selling the food in thin containers that eventually become planters or paint buckets, why not let people bring their own Tupperware or plates from home?

Literally everything can be resold.

Which includes fossil fuels & other things we burn & release as gases.