Same for me. I actually don't order much but kept the subscription going for some of the shows I enjoyed. I promptly cancelled because of this. Obviously I'm in the minority, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
What exactly makes an environmentalist "radical" in your mind? Is it reading studies about planetary boundaries and the effects on micro plastics pollution?
You mean the widely p-hacked studies? Scientific journals had already gotten political and stopped being publishers of truth long ago. The pandemic should've showed everyone that.
The fact that my comment isn't just downvoted but flagged is also very telling.
> Plastics aren't a problem if people actually put them in the bin, and they are buried / recycled / burned.
Only 9% of all plastics ever produced has been recycled. 100% is impossible due to the various composite materials that exist.
Landfills don't work in many places in the world due to lack of space and are expensive, hard to manage and come with methane emissions. Burning is obviously the same as burning fossil fuels and cannot happen if we want to keep our planet habitable. It also happens almost always in poor communities that suffer health consequences because of it.
Even if the disposal was somehow magically solved, we still have the problem with production. Plastics are a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030. Cracker plants for plastics production are also usually placed near communities of colour or in developing countries and create toxic conditions for life around them.
Plastics are a problem. Regardless of the disposal.
Burning is a lot better than dumping it in a river, as happens in many places in Asia. It reliably gets rid of the plastic, produces energy (ideally offsetting fossil fuels that would otherwise have been burned), and regulations for exhaust filtration keep the toxins at bay.
Not producing plastic would be preferable, and sequestering it in a landfill is the second best option, but burning it is a great alternative where the first two don't work
that is a misleading number.
In my country it is almost 100%.
Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants.
The real problem is the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).
Plastic can't be recycled at all, that is a complete myth. The only thing one can practically do is down cycle it, and even that costs more than virgin plastic so is uneconomical.
Of course theoretically perfectly clean and pure singly type plastic can be recycled, but that is something very different from post-consumer waste
"PET bottles on the Dutch market averaging 44% recycled PET content in 2023".
Also, many other products:
Fleece jackets are made out of bottles. That's up-cycling, afaik.
And lots of packaging materials (bags, shampoo bottles, etc).
If it is economical depends on many factors, and can be different in each country. Landfill may be cheap in the US, but extremely expensive in European countries, because there's no un-used land.
but yes, what can't be recycled is epoxy (also a plastic).
But nearly all plastic recycling companies in the Netherlands have gone bankrupt recently. Unfortunately it is usually best to just burn the plastic for energy.
For the case of PET bottles, recycling is possible if:
- products are made from a single sort of plastic with the intent of recycling
- can be collected as a dedicated waste stream
- are not contaminated in a way that is not easily cleaned
- there are rules and regulations to offset the added costs
As all these conditions have to be met, one might as well use reusable bottles instead of recycling altogether, like we do with glass beer bottles. But then why were plastics used in the first place, as there is then hardly any advantage?
> How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?
From following ocean cleanup project, for plastic ending up in the ocean it's usually own waste. The issue is countries that don't have working waste collection systems, any rainpour will often wash out the trash into river/oceans.
(littering is also an issue in countries with waste management though, but to a smaller degree, I kinda hate when people don't realize that stuff they throw in the street will often end up in rain collectors and directly flow into rivers)
Thanks for the reply! I was able to find the source you mentioned. Is there room in the conversation to talk about how much of their "own use" plastic is sold to them by Western companies who control the local markets?
No, it is not and the idea that extreme weather would somehow result in more food is laughable on its face. Higher CO2 concentrations also reduce the nutrients in food.
It accelerates plant growth, reducing nutrient concentration per cubic centimeter of food, but increasing the total nutrient yield because the overall boost in biomass outweighs the dilution effect. This is why greenhouse farms pump CO2 into their environments. Your reaction though really demonstrates a close-mindedness about your belief that CO2 is harmful that is anti-science.
But an individual human eats a fixed amount of food. So that fact seems pointless, since people will get less nutrition overall- unless we should all only eat ultra-processed snacks and reserve fresh food for the wealthy?
On what basis do you claim that an individual eats a fixed amount of food?
If you're worried about how artificially elevated CO2 levels affect agricultural products, then you should start taking issue with commercial greenhouses, which regularly pump CO2 in to increase yields. This is a common practice, and only now is it being viewed as something bad or strange because it's not convenient for the climate change narrative that presents industrial emission of CO2 as the apex threat that requires government-enforced collective action to solve.
A good move but it's still mad to me that we're banning junk food ads while fossil fuel ads are still allowed which are creating damage many orders of magnitudes greater than a muffin ever could.
It has an intrinsic value that can easily be explained. You absolutely need it for many uses (electronics, medical devices, jewelry in practice, ...).
So there is always gonna be a buyer at a non-zero price.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a few things going for it (fixed monetary policy, decentralization, permissionless, ...) but I am not sure about the intrinsic value. The only thing that I can think of is its network effect and derived amazing hash power that secures it. You can't recreate that easily in a new cryptocurrency.
I'd wager the intrinsic value of gold has little to do with its valuation, since the vast majority of it is used for banking and jewelry. Contrast that with metal from the platinum group, like palladium, which are heavily use for things like catalytic filters.
From an industrial point of view, gold is just fancy copper.
Gold is useful for less tangible purpose because it's accepted, and it's accepted because it's useful. BTC is similar in that respect.
Unlike the guy replying to you I think BTC has nothing going for it in practice when compared to gold. Gold has value because every government and market agreed on it. It's regulated and safely stored.
BTC is theoretically decentralized. In practice it goes through wallets and exchanges which get robbed all the time. It can't be used for any transaction because it's expensive so it's no replacement to currency. Even buying gold physically is cheaper than buying BTC (transaction costs). It's even less private than gold. I can walk into a shop, pay cash for gold and there will be no record of the transaction. With BTC the government just tracked crooks who moved BTC through the dark web and through private currencies. It leaves a huge, traceable digital trail.
Finally, BTC isn't regulated. That means a lot of the transactions are internal wallet to wallet transfers meant to "pump" the market. That's legal for BTC. So the idea that it's value is "objective" is BS.
The only people who would go into BTC in these conditions are crooks and useful idiots.
BTC was a smart idea that just doesn't work in reality. Right now it's running on the fumes of people who "believe" in it since it keeps bouncing back up. Faith based monetary systems run the world, but unlike BTC we have government to support them when we lose faith.
Equities are investment vehicles. If you choose to trade them, that's your decision - but you will lose, on average. 95% of day traders lose money [1]. Zero-sum financial instruments like futures and options and cryptocurrencies are trading vehicles. These are not the same.
Both are trading vehicles and are treated the same by traders [1] similar to the VIX. Hedge funds, asset management companies and institutions spend their time and their clients money trading, not investing [2]. For groups like these, trading is where the money is.
The VIX is a synthetic index whose value is derived from the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index options (computed from the premium of around-the-money options on the SPX cash index a certain amount of time ahead), without fundamentals, tradeable only via futures contracts and ETFs that own those futures.
It's a second derivative tradeable only via third derivative.
This is very very zero-sum.
The overwhelming majority of these actively managed funds fail to beat the returns of the S&P 500. [1]
In fact over 15 years 92% of actively managed large-cap funds trail the returns of the S&P 500.
A lot of semi educated traders frankly don't care. They follow crowd psychology based idioms with risk management. Cryptos are just a more volatile asset class to profit on.
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