Things That Should Have Been Done Yesterday, #1

Well, yeah.

And no more fiberglass cigarette filters(butts). I don’t want to do away with smoking at all. I want all you smokers to get all of tobaccos benefits in a pure unfiltered form and die as fast as possible. But your right to throw those freakin butts everywhere is over. Immediate execution for anyone caught selling filtered cigarettes. There will immediately spring forth a market for non disposable aftermarket filter devices so the invisible-hand(TM) can keep jerking off the 1 %.

It is infuriating trying to find products not in plastic. I did an experimental year of no plastic. Baked my own bread, found milk in glass, made fabric bags for produce and bulk goods etc. You simply have to make your own or go without.

Many items are made with cheap plastic parts rather than metal so we go without. Then there are the multiple layers of bulk buying… save money by making more garbage. Individual plastic packs, in cardboard with a plastic shell wrapped in shrink wrap….. and why the heck are they allowed to call food organic when it’s stuck in plastic?

We survived the test year and are now in a habit of bulk foods and the milk in the bottle is excellent, your eye goes to the bulk produce and the specials that aren’t wrapped in plastic, you remember to request butcher paper when you order, etc. Making bread is natural but if you don’t stay on top of the yogurt you need new culture and yogurt only comes in plastic. I am now trying to learn to make tofu because it only comes in plastic.

We still have one small bag of garbage a week and that’s typically plastic. Stop delivering unbreakable items in plastic.

We ARE making progress on this. I’ll bet the last time something came in “packing peanuts” it was the puffed vegetable starch jobs that dissolve in water rather than the familiar Styrofoam “cloud farts”. The externalities to things like plastic packing materials are catching up with the industrial scale players, so we are beginning to see the transition away from non-biodegradable/not-easily-recyclable containers and packing materials.

@different clue – It is my understanding that glass is already bio-degraded as far as it can be. Physical degradation returns it to sand. My understanding of the problem with non-biodegradable plastics is that physical degradations yield various organic chemical results that are antithetical to life in specific and life in general, including our own in various cancers and disorders, genetic and otherwise, even in utero.

Great idea of course but the time it would take to extract the industry infrastructure embedded in government that profits from this would still be going on by the time plastics did biodegrade

Well, we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. If ubiquity can be interpreted as an indicator of efficient resource allocation (not a very good idea, I know), then maybe the all in cost of plastics is actually cheaper than alternatives? I dunno.

One of the very difficult conundrums is trying to factor in the true cost of externalities in product pricing. I think you’ve pointed out that one of the tricks of Capitalism is to maximize the transfer of costs to somewhere else in the chain, whether that be the price of dead fish and toxicified soils as a result of “higher yield crops,” or ruined aesthetics and compromised ecosystems as a result of the rampant over-consumption of non-necessary product components, such as packaging. What would a package of Dixie cups cost if we factored in how ugly National parks are after a national holiday celebration and the average number of marine animal deaths per thousand?

For my money, banning unsolicited mailers, like coupon books and credit card offers, is first, but in principle, we should have started doing with less two generations ago. Like why the hell does anyone need more than one cup, one spoon, one fork, and one knife? Take them everywhere you go if you want to eat. That’ll cut down on plastic use, metal use, manufacturing waste water, and all the other waste that goes into producing however many billions of plastic disposable widgets that end up choking dolphins or what have you.

The jobs argument no longer outweighs the total cost argument…unless we consider humanity and perhaps the entire biosphere disposable. Sadly, I think the hypnosis of easy convenience will not break under the pressure of gentle ministration. It will take nothing short of calamity…which in my view is simply inevitable at this point.

Shh;

I went to that Shipping industry website and found the use of skewed metrics that one would expect from the coal industry talking about “clean coal”…are you really so clueless?

“As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars. We’ve all noticed it. The filthy black smoke kicked out by cruise liners, container ships, oil tankers and even tugboats. It looks foul, and leaves a brown haze across ports and shipping lanes. But what hasn’t been clear until now is that it is also a major killer, probably causing thousands of deaths in Britain alone. Because of their colossal engines, each as heavy as a small ship, these super-vessels use as much fuel as small power stations. But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use.”

And to address your websites disinformation:

“There is a perception that cargo transport by ship is low in air pollutants, because for equal weight and distance it is the most efficient transport method”, but a “ship lets out around 50 times more sulfur than a lorry per metric tonne of cargo carried. The growth in tonne-kilometers of sea shipment has averaged 4 percent yearly since the 1990s.[14] And it has grown by a factor of 5 since the 1970s. There are now over 100,000 transport ships at sea, of which about 6,000 are large container ships.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shipping

Shh, I’m coming to realize that one should not post here at “Scolds R Us”; rather, one should simply lurk and be amused. 😈

Seems we need to go after the burning at sea of bunker fuel as a means of marine propulsion. Do note that the above comparison of “16 super tankers>all the cars in the world” is specific to SULFUR pollution. Cars don’t add that much in the way of sulfur as gasoline and car grade diesel need to be highly refined compared to bunker fuel. But it does seem to be approximately equivalent to burning high sulfur coal and as such, something we could be moving more quickly away from. Just switching those 16 supertankers to alcohol or natural gas(not to even speak of hydrogen or ship-sized thorium reactors) would go a long way. Perhaps the International Law of the Sea Convention could take up the question of minimum standards for emissions for marine trade, phasing out the the dirtiest fuels/technologies first.

“Britain and other European governments have been accused of underestimating the health risks from shipping pollution following research which shows that one giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50m cars.

Confidential data from maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles.

Pressure is mounting on the UN’s International Maritime Organisation and the EU to tighten laws governing ship emissions following the decision by the US government last week to impose a strict 230-mile buffer zone along the entire US coast, a move that is expected to be followed by Canada.

The setting up of a low emission shipping zone follows US academic research which showed that pollution from the world’s 90,000 cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year and costs up to $330bn per year in health costs from lung and heart diseases. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates the buffer zone, which could be in place by next year, will save more than 8,000 lives a year with new air quality standards cutting sulphur in fuel by 98%, particulate matter by 85% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%.

The new study by the Danish government’s environmental agency adds to this picture. It suggests that shipping emissions cost the Danish health service almost £5bn a year, mainly treating cancers and heart problems. A previous study estimated that 1,000 Danish people die prematurely each year because of shipping pollution. No comprehensive research has been carried out on the effects on UK coastal communities, but the number of deaths is expected to be much higher.

Europe, which has some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, has dramatically cleaned up sulphur and nitrogen emissions from land-based transport in the past 20 years but has resisted imposing tight laws on the shipping industry, even though the technology exists to remove emissions. Cars driving 15,000km a year emit approximately 101 grammes of sulphur oxide gases (or SOx) in that time. The world’s largest ships’ diesel engines which typically operate for about 280 days a year generate roughly 5,200 tonnes of SOx.”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution

“We’re shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre,” said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a recent European Union report on food imports.
More important, Mr. Watkiss said, “we are not paying the environmental cost of all that travel.”…The economics are compelling. For example, Norwegian cod costs a manufacturer $1.36 a pound to process in Europe, but only 23 cents a pound in Asia…The ability to transport food cheaply has given rise to new and booming businesses.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “we’ve educated our customers to expect cheap food, that they can go to the market to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. All year. 24/7.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26food.html?_r=0

If we got marine bunker oil sulfur emissions down to zero, the carbon skydumping itself would still be a problem. That problem could be solved by shrinking ocean-borne trade enough to retire some or most of these ships from service. That would substantially reduce the carbon skydumping right there.