Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating back to 4,200 BC

Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by OfSanguineFire on Monday October 16, 2023 @11:32AM (#37901263)

You’re way off. A generation is roughly thirty years, and industrial plastic production has been around longer than that. Bakelite was invented in 1907 and widely used in consumer goods already in the first half of the 20th century. Then, styrene was widely produced by the 1950s. You can watch Alain Resnais’s 1958 documentary film Le chant du Styrène[0] to see the vast industrial apparatus that had already been built in France to produce it.

What is true is that plastic wasn’t such an everyday feature of the developing world until the last few decades, and it was the combination of increasing plastic use and lack of organized rubbish collection that led to plastic-strewn streets and polluted waterways there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_chant_du_Styr%C3%A8ne

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by _ph_ on Monday October 16, 2023 @12:02PM (#37901812)

The plastic which is the problem is at max. 2 generations old so the previous poster was off by 1. Considering this sites affinity with software development, an off-by-one error should be acceptable :)

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by ta1243 on Monday October 16, 2023 @12:47PM (#37902580)

The first microplastics, from tyres for example, date back over 100 years, or about half the time of industrialisation as a whole (say from Ironbridge onwards)

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by callalex on Monday October 16, 2023 @05:00PM (#37906573)

Tires used to be made from natural rubber, not the modern synthetic stuff we call plastic. Similarly, cellophane wrap (Saran wrap) and cellophane tape (scotch tape) used to be made out of plant fibers.

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by _a_a_a_ on Monday October 16, 2023 @01:36PM (#37903349)

I'd say a generation is the time for a newborn to grow up and have their own first kid born. Typically that's been under 20 years. May be changing now, getting later, but I usse ~20 years as rule of thumb for one generation.

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by DougMerritt on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:35PM (#37905145)

I strongly agree, but then again "generation" has always been a highly imprecise unit, enough so that I wouldn't outright call "30 years" wrong.

We have lots of examples like that, for instance lots of people complain when "a couple" refers to any number other than two, and yet common usage is for it to be pretty synonymous with the more obviously vague term "a few".

Another reason to be strict with output and flexible with input.

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by lhpz on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:09PM (#37904668)

This 1958 short film (in French) about Plastics is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1hZyQUF6Y

Was commissioned by an industrialist selling plastics, but is rather high-end for and ad ! Worth watching. I love HN for this kind of unexpected discoveries.

Plastics were regarded as a miraculous material in the 1950s.

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Re:Dig near Paris unearths beginnings of urbanization dating... by YetAnotherNick on Monday October 16, 2023 @10:01PM (#37909512)

I thought of life expectancy and took that as a generation. Thinking back, yes generation obviously means 20 years not 80.

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