Plastic seals food, sterile medical implements, medicine, beverages, etc… it’s seems like plastic is used as a way to seal things safely. Post pandemic rising, I see even more. My work used to be have plastic utensils in the cafeteria, for example, an already wasteful thing. Now, post-2020, every fork, knife, and spoon is individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper. I feel like the more my desire to escape plastic intensifies, the more plastic I see all around me everywhere.
How can we get away from plastic as a safety layer?
We don’t have to get rid of plastics.
Get rid of cars (which emit the most micro-plastics), fishing nets (which cause the most plastic pollution in the ocean), plastics in clothing and packaging where it isn’t needed.
Then use bio-degradable plastics for whatever’s left. And single use plastics only for the tiny reminder of use cases where it’s needed, like medicine.
Getting rid of cars is generations away in the US, at minimum.
Guess we’d better get started right away, then.
Getting rid of Internal combustion engined cars more reasonable. EVs aren’t perfect, but they are much better than ICE cars as far as pollution goes.
In the context of micro plastics, it’s the same. It comes from the rubber tires wearing out.
Then instead of roads let use tires made of metal and put them on some kind of road that also has metal. Let’s make it electric too…
Maybe we could connect many cars together on this system, and make it so the front or the back car is a special one thats more powerful and pulls the other cars behind or pushes the ones in front of it that carries all the passengers. For convenience, we could make nice loading and unloading areas.
Right, but we’re talking about microplastics here. Those mainly come from tires and braking systems, so the switch won’t help this specific problem.
Serious question, do brakes emit any plastic particles? I was under the impression they were mostly ceramic these days (or asbestos way back when)
From this article.
Wait till energy costs 10x in the next decade. Car use will go to nothing real quick.
Nope
If energy costs 10x more everything else will be at least 8x more. It’s just inflation on everything at that point.
I don’t trust biodegradable plastics anymore. The in between stage of biodegration is micro plaltics. This may be an issue even if it’s from organic sources.
You don’t have to get rid of cars, my dude, just tires.
It’s called a train; just use a train.
Ready to go to the grocery store kids? All aboard the grocery store express!
You sound sarcastic but … https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram
Lmao. Just use biodegradable plastics! So easy! You know jack shit about plastics my guy.