FTFY.
It's all about survival. Humans are animals not much different than a deer, lion or whatever. A deer will run away from something it doesn't know where a lion will attack/kill anything it doesn't know. Just like the stereotypical "git off my land" character of a country bumpkin. I mean, how do you feel when you see a stranger walking on your property? Same thing.
I always laugh when people say they feel close with nature. Um, hello! You ARE nature. The human brain just overlaid a thick layer of self awareness/logic/reasoning/emotion to the lower level animal bits. So instead of pissing on trees we instead draw lines on paper called borders and property lines. And we still live in trees, just dead ones turned into boxes called homes.
For thousands of years we struggled like any other animal to survive. If you had food you made sure no one takes it. If you found a safe place to sleep you dint want to share it. If a stranger wanders into your territory, chase or kill them, they are a threat. If you were a male you had to prove your worthiness to a female by fighting or peacocking (some things never change...) etc. Oh and we smell just as bad. The stink of a locker room or unkempt home is no different then the stink of a farm or zoo. You're a smelly hairless great ape. Deal with it.
edit: More simply, what upper-middle class people usually refer to as "everybody."
Perhaps the law should require proper labelling of packaging material that is in contact with food just like it requires food ingredients to be listed. If manufacturers were to lobby hard against such a rule, what might we conclude from that?
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Edit: the original stated purpose, according to the linked wikipedia page, was: facilitate recycling...
And if it actually will be recycled depends not only on the facility but also on the cost of doing what needs to be done (for separation and transport), and the possibility of what can be done (laminates). However these constraints are not communicated clearly.
I'm 52 years old, I live in Germany, where we "recycle" for ages, about 30 years now, and we tell our kids and grannies and everybody in between to separate the trash because "recycling", and we see benches and other sturdy plastics items "made from trash" and still, only 17% of the collected packaging trash is reliably recycled, while the recycling of other plastics (toys, vehicle parts, any plastics that are not packaging) is also intransparent.
https://bmbf-plastik.de/en/publication/plastic-atlas-2019-fa...
https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/kurzerklaert/kurzerkl...
Unlikely. It's more likely that they don't know, because they didn't look too hard.
The reason it's not recyclable has nothing to do with that, though. It's not recyclable because plastic recycling is very difficult, many plastics can't be recycled, and of those that can, any contaminants will ruin an entire batch. Food is an example of such a contaminant.
This is a myth.
Unheated food-grade plastic is generally okay, but when exposed to heat or UV light, you have a big problem. This paper is worth reading [0], according to their experiment, almost all commercially available plastic products—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals after being exposed to UV lights or heat.
There are several pre-made food products on the market with plastic containers that instructs you to cook them in microwave with the plastic packaging still on. One product I tried recently even had a little tab on the plastic wrapper that would start whistling when the food was done. I think I tried it that one time. I don't usually buy things like that.
Even most cotton shirts and jeans tend to be a blend with synthetic plastic fibers because it stretches and breaths better.
That said, phthalates are used in tons of stuff, and it's not fully clear to me which sources are the most important. I've replaced my soap/shampoo/shaving creams with phthalate free versions. It's also present though in basically all plastic tubing, which is known to leach phthalates and is used very extensively in food production machinery.
How do you identify these? You mean there are products that advertise themselves to be phtalate free? Or that you are actively looking for phtalate composition in the products you buy?
In general, the problem will be worse with smaller diameter pipes/tubes due to surface area/volume ratio, worse if the water has been standing in the pipe/tube, and worse if the water is hot.
These chemicals are extremely difficult to get away from. I saw a study where they tried to get volunteers to take a reasonably large set of actions to reduce their levels of BPA and Phthalates, and they were able to get them down to about half the original levels, but not lower.
The first is that I recall the shower curtain problem was related to the heat / steam floating around in the shower which facilitated shedding of particles and also ingestion. Having the "plastic" clothing just on the body may be less bad.
Also, and more importantly, I think people who are conscious about those things tend to wear less plastic fibers but won't necessarily think about the shower curtain.
For example, except for full on technical sportswear (think biking shorts), I never wear polyester or other synthetic fibers in clothing that goes directly on my skin. I used to avoid it because, for the most part, I've found that polyester is less breathable, tends to stick a lot, etc. I try as much as possible (I check the labels) to stick to cotton / linen (for the summer) / wool (for the winter). Now, the whole "plastics are bad" thing doesn't really push me to reevaluate my choice.
Just look at the labels...
I stopped buying these a while ago. Buy fresh veggies, classic pasta/rice/lentils or whatever you fancy, meat from the butcher if you eat meat, I skip anything I can't identify or anything that I couldn't make myself at home with regular ingredients.
It's super restrictive but you get rid of literally 99% of junk food. You are what you eat, quite literally
You nonetheless minimize exposure that way to be clear.
Also, remember "cleaning" products besides a select few like Bronner's have the same type of crap in them. "Eco-friendly" ones like Seventh Gen and Meyer's are bullshit if you look at the ingredients list.
Let's all take a moment to consider how blessed we are to have those ingredients list, by the way.
Even if some things are impossible to do, it's imo best to not pile on top of those problems issues that aren't impossible to solve.
I know at least a couple places where you can buy it (Huis Maria in Harelbeke, Vanuxeem in Ploegsteert, so both Flanders and Wallonia) so I would assume those to be widespread enough throughout the country.
To me coming from France it was Belgium that was the easier place to find glass-bottled water :)
The bottles are reused, and the water tastes a lot better than at least my tap water (in Antwerp - the tap water comes from a stagnant canal used for merchandise shipping, and last year for example it turned green and smelled of algae for a while after a ship carrying fertilizer capsized).
And yeah, you usually give the bottles back. However, it's much more common in Germany than in Belgium, it seems. I have never seen a line to give the bottles back in Gent, unlike Berlin.
(a) I used to live in Malaysia where tap water wasn't drinkable as-is, but filtering and boiling made it drinkable and tasted just fine. Hot water dispensers are pretty standard to have in most Asian homes; just put the water through a filtering pitcher before pouring into the hot water dispenser.
(b) Subscribe to those 5-gallon big blue bottles and a dispenser. They get actually reused instead of downcycled.
Why is your water quality bad?
You can get distilled water delivered in very large glass jugs (4 gallons i think?)
https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientscha...
This is mostly about dissolved minerals, carbonates etc, and you should be able to control trivially.
I know I would prefer to know exactly what's in my water.
Hacker News: colonizing to Mars is straightforward and natural. Buying vegetables fresh or organizing a farmers market is impossibly hard and goes against human nature.
How could someone consent to be born?
I really want to do this, but it seems impossibly hard. For example, almost all the food I buy is in plastic containers.