Who agrees?
Who agrees?
98 comments
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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:
- 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
- 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
- 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.
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Some years ago I read an article that more and more hospitals (in Germany) are getting rid of their sterilisation facilities, because single use tools can be ordered in bulk and the facilities + personnel are costly. Profit-driven healthcare is such a nightmare for the environment.
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Can confirm, I worked as a vendor for both OR facilities and various laboratories. It's something I've been thinking of for a while, actually. Single use plastics are so important to both areas of healthcare I don't see how we can reduce their usage. It's one of the few cases I know where not using plastic has a risk of actually killing a number of people due to inferior quality or cross contamination.
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Plastic that can break down and compost with high heat and moisture and time is basically the goal for pollution concerns. But it's naturally resistant so making it being able to break down when you want but still be durable and waterproof isn't easy and will probably never be as cheap.
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You can say all that, and still it is true that PFAS has absolutely no reason to be in every needle and no patient asked for that.
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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.
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The bag of bags that is in every houses
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I've been reselling my condom for years!
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I'm sure there actually are people who would buy used condoms.
I don't want to meet them. But I'm sure they exist.
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Certainly not as a novelty either.
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what, the same one? do you sell it to the same guy every time and then buy it back?
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🎵 it's the ciiiiiircle of cuuum! 🎵
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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.
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I mean, I fix my own fridges and appliances and do small appliance work for my friends and neighbors, but I already own the required tools so I’m really just charging for some time and the refrigerant.
134a is still cheap, and no company worth their salt should be charging a fee to customers so that specialized tools can be purchased. If you don’t own the tools of the trade, that’s a company problem, not a customer problem.
3000 dollars was a “I don’t want to do it price”
For people I don’t know, I do charge about 300 bucks to just show up, because that covers operating costs and an hour of my time. But unless the system was pulling into a vacuum, it shouldn’t take longer than an hour or so to recover the refrigerant, patch the leak, pull a vacuum, and recharge. So yeah, if your fridge is only worth 500 bucks, it’s not worth it. But if it’s an expensive fridge it might be worth it to find an appliance technician that will charge you a fair rate to repair the damage.
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I might have misremembered the price. I just remember it being prohibitively expensive vs just getting another fridge. I ended up just getting a free one off nextdoor n tossing the old one. It was a garage fridge. Having said that, I can see what you're saying about if someone had a higher end fridge.
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They have piercing valves that cost a few bucks, shredder valves are also less than five dollars. These are typical and easy repairs for for household refrigeration. I do it daily.
Depending on what the job requires it's 125 to 500 to refill a system.
Most fridge manufacturers don't put access valves on their sealed systems because they cost more money and are significantly more prone to leaking.
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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.
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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.
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I think most people agree with this idea. There are two basic problems preventing it.
- 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.
- 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.
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And this is why bags are no longer free where i live and cost up to 40c a piece. People quickly stopped using them haha
The inconvenience of the price became larger than always having a reusable bag in the car or bike hehe-
We banned them here too. I always forget my reusable bags and toss a loose assortment of goods in my trunk to tumble around.
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I wish we could pay for them. nope, gotta buy more expensive actual garbage bags that use far far more material
I just need, like, four or five plastic shopping bags a month. that would cover my needs.
instead I'm shovelling dog shit into bread bags that don't quite have a big enough opening
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No where does it say that consumers should be required to do these things. Just that if the only end of life possibility for a product is the land fill, then we should restrict it's manufacturing. Obviously there would need to be exceptions for things like medical needs or accessibility accomodations.
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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.
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Total lifetime cost and emissions are more important. Recycling something doesn't mean its total pollution is free.
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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.
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lightbulbs that never die already exist, but big bulb mafia says no one can sell em.
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I bought an air purifier last winter. Now I can't find a replacement filter anywhere. Fuck that forced obsolescence crap.
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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.
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This is the exact point of the meme, see the second frame.
I guess if you need more explicit speech you could add "to as good as or better than new condition" to the first frame.
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Repaired parts, yes.
But you can use new parts to repair an existing device to as good or even better condition.
Old parts can then be recycled. If the part can't be recycled, see the OP meme.
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Companies largely respond to what their consumers expect.
Snap on makes high quality buy it for life products with an excellent warranty because they have a consumer base that values these things and will pay for it.
Red Wing makes decent boots you can buy for cheap or buy it for Life boots if you're willing to spend the money. Because they have both of those consumers.
TCL makes disposable televisions with a 2-year life for consumers who are singularly concerned with the display size to dollar ratio.
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Well I mean if it can be reduced then it should be removed, lol, that one doesn't belong in the list.
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'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.
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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?
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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?
Food safety reasons. The restaurant then has to clean any random container people bring in, because it represents a contamination risk to the kitchen.
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Which includes fossil fuels & other things we burn & release as gases.
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OK, no more fossil fuels. Now what?
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Yeah, but modern economy wants you to buy a new one ideally every year, so it doesn't work for that.
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Literally everything can be resold.
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Digital items.
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Ah, yes. :3
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They can be resold. We're just living in a world where WE don't allow that.
But it's possible to do.
You have software. Tim wants software. Well fuck Tim. Sell it to Steve instead. Now Steve pays you money. Now Steve has the software. You don't anymore.
See? Done.
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If you choose to pay for a digital something, that's on you.
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Give me the enthropy reversal machine LadyButterfly! Divulge your secrets!
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But my disposable economy?!?!?
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Surely there is a word starting with re- for compost...
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Recomposted 👍
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I agree but money and profit trump all of this so it is more like a fantasy.
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Add practically to the first statement
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You underestimate how far the slightest ambiguities can be stretched and distorted.
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I didn't think they're underestimating anything, I think they're pointing out that an absolute like this would be pretty devastating. Like if we applied this to medical equipment, it would be pretty terrible. And even if you made an exception for something like medical equipment, that's a regulated category of goods, and would still massively reduce the amount of waste produced, even if people used loopholes created by that exception.
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Jokes on you. Everything can be reduced. *Except profits
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Add Roasted in there somewhere
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Boom!
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Surprised nobody linked the song yet:
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Unless it is popular. Nothing counts in capitalism unless it sells. Doesn't matter what is being sold if it's selling!
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Oxygen
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Yeah, I'll agree. But damn, I'm sick to death of that crappy meme!
98 comments
What about the shareholders! Think of the shareholders!!! Won't someone think of the shareholders!!!!
One of the beautiful things from the Simpsons that will forever be lodged in my brain.
Those poor, brave shareholders
are shareholders truly that evil or is the company using them as scapegoats? like are shareholders seriously angry about not making massive growth? and if so, fuck em. they're just gambling anyway.
Have you ever heard of shareholders suing a CEO or Company for not being aggressive enough on profit making ? It does happen, shareholders are pure scum !
Well, the shareholders are going to put their money where it makes the most money. Shareholder profits are everything now. Capitalism is so fucking stupid, and it's going to kill us all.
Shareholders (collectively) are the company, the CEO is actually the scapegoat, you remove one, the board (who are chosen by the shareholders who have shares with voting rights) would just appoint another CEO that does the same thing, putting profit first, that's literally their job, they wouldn't get appointed CEO if they won't do the dirtywork.
They say Brian Thompson murdered people, yes, but who gave those orders? The board who appointed him, and the voting shareholders that appointed the board.
Shareholders are humans on earth too and have to deal with pollution and microplastics in their brain as well, little-known fact!