Plastics are basically a waste byproduct from the energy industry. As we use less oil, there will be less plastic trying to find a use and flooding the supply of plastics.
When prices rise, a lot of single use plastics, like water bottles, will be uneconomical.
We're gonna get MORE plastic when we use less oil. Always follow the profits.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/shell-chevron-oil-chemicals...
What's interesting is that a large part of this was the move to "ergonomic" kitchen tools, which the kitchenware brand OXO has been a big part of.
Because you're right -- kitchen tools used to be made out of metal and wood. Metal could be bent back into place and resharpened. Pieces of wood could easily be replaced.
Then OXO decided that small metal handles like the one on the all-metal classic vegetable peeler you or I might have grown up with [1] weren't usable by people with hand grip/coordination issues, decided to use a bicycle handlebar grip as a model, and invented their now-famous OXO vegetable peeler [2] with a big rubber grip. And then slowly everything started to follow that aesthetic -- most kitchen tools are made out of plastic, rubber, silicone, and nylon, with "bulbous" handles. The rise of nonstick cookware is partly responsible for the trend as well, necessitating plastic/nylon/silicone turners, spoons, etc.
I'm not sure what I think about it. On the one hand, my kitchen almost feels like it's made for children, with all these big grippy things. I worked in a kitchen in Spain once where all the tools were probably 50 or 100 years old, and thought -- oh this is a kitchen for adults!
On the other hand, modern kitchen tools seem to be much safer, and usable by a larger proportion of the population -- especially the elderly. So I can't really see that as a bad thing.
[1] amazon.com/Linden-Sweden-Original-Vegetable-Peeler/dp/B00176JEY4
[2] https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-Swivel-Peeler/dp/B0000...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwin-Williams#/media/File...
After that the oil lobby shifted the world into that horrendous path.
All of current issues we have now could be explained pretty simply by human greed.
Ps. This year we double the amount of plastic due to the shift into electric cars. That oil has to be used for something.
Nearly all metals will dissolve slightly into food or water they come into contact with.
It really isn't clear that metals pose less health risks than plastics.
I think engineering metals have much less influence on the environment than plastics do, but I’m very in favor of more study. My point is that I think this is something we really need to be thinking about. Right now engineering as a field doesn’t spend much time thinking about environmental harms from plastic in normal goods, and we might want to spend more time on that.
And this study suggests aluminium in the brain might be cause (or effect) of autism, Alzheimer's, and various other neurological conditions:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64734-6
(Sulphates, acetates and oxides form really easily from contact with food and the environment)
The latter I’m aware of as we have Alzheimer’s in my family and I work in the machine shop with aluminum quite often. I do wear eye and respiratory protection but I also recently researched it and it seems the link between Alzheimer’s and aluminum is still quite unclear and not firmly established.
But as I’ve said in a few replies now I’m all for study of what the systemic harms of each are. If plastics cause harm and metals cause harm then the real question is what is the nature and magnitude of those harms. I think this requires more careful study. My point is that it may be time to look at plastic pollution the way we look at CO2 pollution.
Is that the issue? It seems more like plastics wearing away from use not to the point of it losing functionality but being constantly exposed to plastics in your food because all the implements are plasticd
I recently saw a video of someone restoring a 100 year old vegetable shredder, and with some rust removal and fresh paint the thing was good as new. Of course it was all metal. Then I looked at Amazon for vegetable shredders and they’re almost all plastic.
We could make our products out of more metal or all metal. Even so-called exotic metals like titanium are relatively abundant, and new manufacturing processes are lowering the cost of those parts.
But we use so many plastic films that get used once and can’t be recycled, as have so many plastic products that fall apart and get sent to landfills because recycling is kind of a lie anyway. If you go to a big box store like Target, right at the entrance you see shelves of cheap plastic junk meant as some sort of novelty to be used once or twice and then forgotten and thrown out. Companies like Shien sell the cheapes polyester clothing possible which falls apart in to pieces which quickly become microplastics. EVs are supposed to save us from climate change but in doing so they’re delivering us faster wearing tires releasing more microparticles in to our environment.
And I suspect that if we look at production, it’s accelerating.
So just like when atmospheric carbon passed 300ppm and we said “what happens at 400ppm and higher”, what happens when ambient microplastics double, triple, or quadruple current levels?
What would it look like to cut plastic production today? How could we even prepare to do that?