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  #221  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 11:06 PM
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Bottom line: either we stop using so much plastic, or plastic becomes part of our environment and ecosystem, with unknown long term consequences. I'm not in favour of the status quo.
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  #222  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 11:12 PM
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What problem are you trying to solve? Not climate change, for sure. And not really plastic getting into the oceans either. I prefer well thought out policy - identify a problem, find the causes of that problem and then figure out the least intrusive way of mitigating that problem. Not kneejerk bans based on no evidence whatsoever.

If we do care about plastics getting into the oceans, my first kneejerk policies though would be banning imported fish, regulations on our own fishing equipment and banning the exporting of waste, for starters.
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  #223  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 11:24 PM
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https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/

86% of the plastic in oceans comes from rivers in Asia


Seems like nothing more than feel good Trudeau policies that will have zero practical environmental impact but yet increase costs and decrease convenience for Canadians.
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  #224  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 11:35 PM
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Originally Posted by flar View Post
Bottom line: either we stop using so much plastic, or plastic becomes part of our environment and ecosystem, with unknown long term consequences. I'm not in favour of the status quo.
Becomes? It already is:

...The reservoirs of microplastics go beyond waterways, notably to the soil in which farmers grow food. To fertilize their fields, some farmers use treated sewage sludge that is rich in nutrients—but also contains gobs of microfibers skimmed from wastewater. Estimates from Europe and North America suggest tens to hundreds of thousands of tons of microfibers may be added to farmland in those countries every year—and they can last for years in the soil after application. “It’s a mountain, basically,” says Luca Nizzetto, a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research.

Other sources are adding to the plastic mass in the ground, including degraded plastic sheets that farmers use to retain soil moisture and stymie weeds, compost from biowaste plants and so-called mixed waste—a ground-up amalgam of food scraps and unrecyclable material. A 2014 study in China showed up to 260 kilograms of plastic debris per hectare of cropland from flimsy sheets. A farm in Australia had applied so much mixed waste “that actually the whole topsoil was glistening,” says Mark Browne, an ecologist who specializes in microplastics at the University of New South Wales...


https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...nting-it-down/
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  #225  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 1:57 AM
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We have no control over what China and other countries are doing, we only control what we do. Until recently, our plastic was going to Asia. They have enough and won't take it anymore.

Clearly that suggests plastic waste is a serious problem right now. We have to deal with it, we can't just ship out dirty unsorted plastic to Asia.

What do you propose we do with all this plastic? Seems like reducing the amount of plastic waste created is a good start.

The best policy is to deal with problems before they become a crisis.
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  #226  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 2:18 AM
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What do you propose we do with all this plastic? Seems like reducing the amount of plastic waste created is a good start.
Burn it, bury it, recycle it here if it makes sense. Doesn't really matter, there are bigger things to worry about.
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  #227  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 3:59 PM
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Burn it, bury it, recycle it here if it makes sense. Doesn't really matter, there are bigger things to worry about.
All of which cost money, and reducing the amount of plastic we use reduces the amount of money we spend burning it, burying it, or recycling it.
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  #228  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 4:10 PM
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We don't use plastic because it makes things more expensive, we use it because it makes them cheaper, and reduces waste. If there is some unintended subsidy from municipal waste processing to manufacturers, then fix that. But otherwise, what exactly is the problem we are trying to fix?
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  #229  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 4:58 PM
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Originally Posted by milomilo View Post
We don't use plastic because it makes things more expensive, we use it because it makes them cheaper, and reduces waste. If there is some unintended subsidy from municipal waste processing to manufacturers, then fix that. But otherwise, what exactly is the problem we are trying to fix?
I guess you could liken it to burning fossil fuels where we are not accounting for all of the externalities of this plastic waste, most notably that it's ending up in the food system.
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  #230  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 5:59 PM
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Originally Posted by milomilo View Post
We don't use plastic because it makes things more expensive, we use it because it makes them cheaper, and reduces waste. If there is some unintended subsidy from municipal waste processing to manufacturers, then fix that. But otherwise, what exactly is the problem we are trying to fix?
Note that we just went through the same thing with recycling and anti-landfill sentiment, and it turned out to be a disaster of unintended consequences. Now our new simple slogan will save the environment for real this time, right?

The microplastics issue is bad, the plastic ocean gyre is bad, etc. But there is a lot of confusion. For example people seem to assume no matter what that Canada is to blame and so our policies must change. And there is little discussion of the trade-offs. People want to minimize food waste too; there's probably a trade-off there with plastic use, and the optimal level of plastic use might not be 0.

Plastics will still be needed in a lot of medical applications and we will have to deal with importing products manufactured mostly for countries that allow single-use plastic.

So this is really an issue to study carefully, and a good way forward is probably to try to push alternatives and nudge companies in the right direction. It's not a great campaign promise checklist item. Then again, most things aren't.
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  #231  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 6:02 PM
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I guess you could liken it to burning fossil fuels where we are not accounting for all of the externalities of this plastic waste, most notably that it's ending up in the food system.
But is it? The evidence says no, and it doesn't take much thinking to see why this would be the case. If I throw away plastic in Calgary it (should) either gets recycled or landfilled. It's not like we dump it in the river.

Now if fact the plastic waste is travelling across the ocean and getting dumped in the water there, then fair enough that's a problem that we can fix. But banning plastic straws does nothing to.solve that.
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  #232  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 6:04 PM
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I guess you could liken it to burning fossil fuels where we are not accounting for all of the externalities of this plastic waste, most notably that it's ending up in the food system.
But you need to try to quantify the damage, where it is coming from exactly (maybe just a subset of plastics or disposal streams), and articulate what the real alternatives are. The policy decisions should be sharply focused.

All human behaviour involves waste and externalities. There's no way to live without having an impact on the environment. Merely tying a cost of unknown magnitude to a behaviour is not interesting.
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  #233  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 7:06 PM
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But is it? The evidence says no, and it doesn't take much thinking to see why this would be the case. If I throw away plastic in Calgary it (should) either gets recycled or landfilled. It's not like we dump it in the river.

Now if fact the plastic waste is travelling across the ocean and getting dumped in the water there, then fair enough that's a problem that we can fix. But banning plastic straws does nothing to.solve that.
The fibres travel around the world. It's been estimated you consume about a credit card's worth of plastic a week!

...How plastics move around the world
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans, Earth’s last sink, flows from land. Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers, which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream. Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world.

On Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Group isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre, a circular ocean current.

Microplastics
Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than one-fifth of an inch across. These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest trough.

Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers, meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...tic-pollution/
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  #234  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 8:02 PM
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The fibres travel around the world. It's been estimated you consume about a credit card's worth of plastic a week!

...How plastics move around the world
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans, Earth’s last sink, flows from land. Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers, which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream. Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world.

On Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Group isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre, a circular ocean current.

Microplastics
Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than one-fifth of an inch across. These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest trough.

Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers, meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...tic-pollution/
Please explain how any of this has to do with the sort of single use plastics that might be banned?
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  #235  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 8:06 PM
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Originally Posted by milomilo View Post
Please explain how any of this has to do with the sort of single use plastics that might be banned?
From the same article;

...The conveniences plastics offer, however, led to a throw-away culture that reveals the material’s dark side: today, single-use plastics account for 40 percent of the plastic produced every year. Many of these products, such as plastic bags and food wrappers, have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years...
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  #236  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 8:18 PM
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From the same article;

...The conveniences plastics offer, however, led to a throw-away culture that reveals the material’s dark side: today, single-use plastics account for 40 percent of the plastic produced every year. Many of these products, such as plastic bags and food wrappers, have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years...
You're not even trying to understand. Just because lots of plastic is single use does not mean that those are the plastics that are going in the ocean, and especially those ones that might be banned. If you receive a plastic cup or a straw, do you go out of your way to throw it in the sea, or do you do the normal thing and throw it in the trash?
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  #237  
Old Posted Jun 15, 2019, 2:35 AM
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Originally Posted by milomilo View Post
You're not even trying to understand. Just because lots of plastic is single use does not mean that those are the plastics that are going in the ocean, and especially those ones that might be banned. If you receive a plastic cup or a straw, do you go out of your way to throw it in the sea, or do you do the normal thing and throw it in the trash?
You can't seem to see.past where it goes into the trash. All that plastic will exist for centuries, and we keep making more and more. So you say burn it. In a climate change thread of all places.

It's much easier to make less of it in the first place. The specifics of the policy are mostly unimportant. What matters is the direction of the policy. During the implementation, when things hit the real world, all parties involved (including the government) will have to adapt. Less plastic and forcing effort toward making better alternatives seem like very reasonable things to do.
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  #238  
Old Posted Jun 15, 2019, 5:08 AM
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The fibres travel around the world. It's been estimated you consume about a credit card's worth of plastic a week!

...How plastics move around the world
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans, Earth’s last sink, flows from land. Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers, which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream. Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world.

On Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Group isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre, a circular ocean current.

Microplastics
Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than one-fifth of an inch across. These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest trough.

Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers, meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...tic-pollution/

Blaming the entire western civilization for the Pacific garbage patch gyre is fake news.

It is well documented 95 % of all of the mass of the great garbage patch in the pacific comes from China and other SE Asian nations.



Blaming AU OZ and the USA is the height of ignorance where this pollution is coming from and it is not the heart of America that now drinks from tree depleting wooden straws.


Hell the SE Asians use the pacific ocean as a dumping pit and has for decades.


Now you want to put onus on civilized societies? At least we take care of our trash. The SJW worrying about a plastic straw even on the west coast of the USA making it into the gigantic garbage gyre is kind of funny that SE Asia pumps billions of tons of garbage daily into the ocean.



Its like SJW's flying on privet jets yelling at the world to clean up its act when even one celebrity specialist in climate science puts out more CO2 n a week than entire stone age country will in a year.


These wealthy false prophets to not want to limit the poor in the darkest jungles and deserts and limit their growth rates


Instead the middle Americans should pay the 15 Trillion dollar price tag.

Abort their own and let the 3rd world run willy nilily to any first world country at their pleasure.


It would be funny if it was not so insane.



Throwing rocks in glass houses is what billionaire SJW newfound MMGW are running on now. It is not getting warmer except for under the collars of the true believers that live in the new wave secular religion that is MMGW.


We have been exposed to doomsday for the last 40 years. If we go another 40 years and if we are even colder now that we were today would the feinds back off. I didn't think so either. Everyone in the know knows the BS meter is going off the chart now and most reasonably educated science leaning intleatuals like myslelf will not longer by into the secular Eschatology to the degree they the white race is willing to commit genocidal dna suiside but also encourage another DNA people to replace them thinking them to be the better alternative.



The PC warriors have gone off the cliff.


I see white snowflake running over white female children in the car because we was conserned about global warming.


I mean the left is giving the POTUS Trump an easy win.


How did we become so stupid and compliant so quickly?


In future generations in history, this period of global non borders and the rats race to hell will be hopefully written in stone because the PC warriors are willing to grind the memory of the founding fathers into pure dust.


You can google that one.

We are at a precipice that is 20 years before Canada but it will itself reach it in enough time.



The question is, in 50 years times I could give a rats ass if the temp went up or down one degree either way.


The fact is is that you are not needed anymore.


You are only waisting space and expelling too much CO2 and not paying the billionares enough for your byproduct of breathing that plants seem to like but others in power seem to not like you breathing as much as you do.


I have already been dealing with this fake news for the last 30 years.


The best we can get is fudged numbers of fudged data that we may have gotten a bit warmer like 0.9 C in the last 3 decades and I myself do not trust where the data is coming form.


IMO we will only get colder for the next 40 years due to the solar minimum

How will the warmingers deal with that reality?

I would assume the same procedure they are doing now, which is transferring sub Saharan Africans and pure Islamism anti EU folks to the EU to make up for the 1.23 reproductive level that is so way below the 2.23 replacement level it would even make China the one Child policy county to blush.

The EU has a reproductive problem on the level of Japan or even worse if you could even imagine that, I mean even worse than Japan. There must be a lot of nothing going on sexually there. I mean who in this day and age can even tell who a woman or a man is? We get yelled at that men can bleed and have children too in their male uteruses?

Men's rooms have tampons now. I though the USA had conflictions of nature about what a XY vs an XX chromosome was all about. The EU wimps took it to the extreme to self castration of themselves they need Africans and middle easterners to push that sperm into unwilling EU females like it nor not. It not a crime to rape a white over and over until you impregnate the woman if you are illegal according the Brussels and Germany and mother Merkel. EU males esp Berlin Males will never step up to protect their own women.


Instead you have inane posts like Berlin has a lot art and Instagram posts. I mean WTF your losing your county and you are now a personal employee of the depressed and under the thumb Berliners thinking everything is hunky dory. They lostness of it all confounds me. But I just hope that particular former is just young and unwise and never saw the Berlin wall go down himself for I figure that creepy character " Ich bin ein Berliner " was still is the balls of his almost ball less father at the time when I was already in medical school.


Perhaps most of the most masculine males died in the WWI and WWII wars and all they were left with was pacifists and transgenders.

But mother Merkel must have a way for females to reproduce.


Islam took a toll on the Spanish empire. Mother Merkel who is children less realizes that white EU females need to be inseminated by any means necessary.

If that the means to the end is slave rape and multiple wives and combines all the better because germany is in a collapsing reproductive state that will cost more lives not being born than the combination of WWI and WWII.



Its not like German wymen are not attractive enough. Its the castorated fem men that cannont reproduce ala Japan for the last few decades.


Don't worry SJW's the white race in the EU sans the eastern bloc will be minority white in about 20 years.


Than let us look at Germanys GDP output per capita by than,

In that time half of the population will be on the doles. While hopefully the UK can escape from this monstrosity of a human experiment gone widely wrong and if followed to the degree wanted could in a few generations send us back to the dark ages we my never recover form for other than ala akabar.


I hope Mohamad is a good space traveler because western civilization will be crushed into dust and only a memory of the well intelligent ones at that time scale.




Good night all you fellow gaias out there in paradise.

Last edited by bnk; Jun 15, 2019 at 5:29 AM.
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  #239  
Old Posted Jun 15, 2019, 12:34 PM
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Originally Posted by flar View Post
You can't seem to see.past where it goes into the trash. All that plastic will exist for centuries, and we keep making more and more. So you say burn it. In a climate change thread of all places.

It's much easier to make less of it in the first place. The specifics of the policy are mostly unimportant. What matters is the direction of the policy. During the implementation, when things hit the real world, all parties involved (including the government) will have to adapt. Less plastic and forcing effort toward making better alternatives seem like very reasonable things to do.
I agree that’s making less plastic is the better idea.

But your outright rejection of incinerators I think exemplifies how far from science the environmental movement has gone.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/en...-to-energy.htm
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  #240  
Old Posted Jun 15, 2019, 12:38 PM
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Originally Posted by whatnext View Post
The fibres travel around the world. It's been estimated you consume about a credit card's worth of plastic a week!

...How plastics move around the world
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans, Earth’s last sink, flows from land. Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers, which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream. Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world.

On Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Group isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre, a circular ocean current.

Microplastics
Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than one-fifth of an inch across. These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest trough.

Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers, meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...tic-pollution/
Canadian plastic does end up in the ocean, but mostly in the form of residue from washing synthetic clothes and microplastics. These would both be uneffected by the ban being proposed. As others have said, the Pacific garbage pile mostly comes from Asia (there is no Atlantic garbage pile)
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