News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A Startup Making Paper Out of Stone, Not Trees. Parent comment

Re:A Startup Making Paper Out of Stone, Not Trees by pbhjpbhj on Friday June 16, 2017 @04:11AM (#14567371)
> If you look at the entire lifecycle of a product, plastic bags (to take an example) have a better footprint across the board than paper ones. //

Importantly we don't factor in destruction of the planet: use of non-renewable oil and pollution (and is impact on food supplies, etc.). This is where the cost seems higher with disposable plastic, a cost we are yet to pay.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Startup Making Paper Out of Stone, Not Trees by Baeocystin on Friday June 16, 2017 @07:13AM (#14567976)
The footprint calculation is our best effort to factor everything in, and that includes environmental degradation.

I don't want to minimize the difficulty of this- it's really, really hard to get right. But we do learn things, and (perhaps most importantly) we learn counter-intuitive things. And one of them is that plastics, even taking the tremendous problems with garbage patches in the ocean and the like, and not the clear-cut negative that our emotional side tends to think.

[ Parent | on HN ]