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How will we ever get away from plastics when they are ubiquitous for safety (lemm.ee)

submitted 8 months ago by littlecolt@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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?

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[-] bartolomeo@suppo.fi 23 points 8 months ago

One way is to keep the plastic but make it out of something renewable instead of out of petroleum products. It can have the same short term properties but eventually disintigrate instead of turning into microplastics or releasing harmful particles when burned.

[-] datelmd5sum@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

What does the source of the monomer have to do with disintegration, microplastics and harmfulness when burned? PE is the most commonly used plastic in the world. It's made out of ethylene, which is about as simple as a molecule can be. Nothing prevents you making renewable PE, except it's cheaper to make from fossil sources.

[-] bartolomeo@suppo.fi 0 points 8 months ago

They're called bioplastics.

[-] Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 months ago

This maintains the problem of microplastics, which are now a ubiquitous chemical contaminant that we should be trying to reduce and remove.

[-] bartolomeo@suppo.fi 0 points 8 months ago

They're called bioplastics and they eliminate the threat of microplastic.

[-] Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Using renewable resources to make plastic does not by itself solve that problem; you need the resulting material to be substantially different from the original.

this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023

210 points (94.9% liked)

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