In this week’s episode of the Energy Realities Podcast, the Energy Gang of 4 - Stu Turley, Irina Slav, Tammy Nemeth and David Blackmon - talk about the global mania to ban plastics and the inevitable horrible consequences it will create.
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Stu,
Stop moving away from your mic! Stay within 5" of your mic!
We don’t need all this plastic. Aside from its immense environmental load and the innate incentive for manufacturers to MASS produce, whether anyone needs these things or not… Low raw material costs and absurdly huge profits discourage recycling initiatives. The only visible outcome of plastics in use are the rising heaps of garbage, even in western countries.
Horrible consequences? Yes, I’d like to buy milk in glass bottles. To be returned to the shop, which will return them to the distributor, and so on. The old school. A side advantage: you won’t buy 10 boxes to stuff them somewhere only to find half of them unusable - you will care about what you buy and how much you pay for it.
Yes transportation costs will increase. No problem. Just ban package inflation. No air inside. No half-empty washing powder boxes. No air-stuffed toxic POS products. I bet honesty in packaging will balance everything.
Plastic is nice and moldable and useful in many items. “Many” like 10% of what we have now? Ban import of plastic goods from China. Things below any quality standards, rich in toxic and carcinogenic ingredients, extremely badly designed with no actual tests in use = self-breaking in a week or so.
To balance all this, enforce recycling of all plastic that has already been produced and thrown away. No need to use new raw materials. Why don’t we do this for a period of 10 years and see what happens?