askchapo

An all out ban? Catastrophic without a lot of time to prepare, years at least, probably a decade or more. So many people rely on medical devices at least partially made of plastic. Polyester and nylon are in all kinds of things, pretty much all cheaper fabrics. Most shoes have plastic. Lots of plumbing and construction in general uses PVC, even electric wiring is often coated in plastic. All cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes. Nearly all electronics. Weapons of all types, from pistols to missiles.

I think the only way to do it without killing people would be a phased approach that starts with the most common and least essential plastic goods, but even then it would take a lot of time to implement alternatives.

Surely it can be done, but not any time soon and definitely not in the imperial core. I could see China doing it long-term, like a decades-long plan to slowly reduce plastic use in manufacturing, shipping, etc.

It'd be catastrophic.

It sounds like you're mostly thinking of plastic containers though, which... well it'd still have to be carefully phased, because food comes in those, and it'd be better to still allow a little plastic film for safety seals, but yeah, it'd be entirely possible to switch back to bottles and cans. It'd probably cost like $0.10 more to produce per item or something trivial though, so corporations would never allow it.

A policy I like to daydream about is, after ending CO2 emissions, massively subsidizing lumber production until it makes sense to make disposable containers out of wood. All the wooden garbage in landfills would sequester carbon, so we could slowly get back to pre-industrial CO2 levels.

There would be a fuckton more broken glass everywhere for one thing

I was just thinking today about the logistics of banning disposable takeout/delivery containers entirely and replacing them with durable, reusable ones. The customer would drop them off at collection points scattered about your town/city where they would be collected, sanitized, and redistributed.

I actually looked it up, and apparently Seoul has a pilot program like this that they launched this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBxDczFulA

plastic means a substance that can be moulded to shape, and does not mean 'made of oil' as many people likely assume.

Oil is portrayed as a miracle substance, it can be turned into plastics, into medications, into whatever. But it's all missing the point, humans have poured squillions into chemistry labs to make oil do these things, and from this we could easily make a lot of these things from hydrocarbons that dont involve fracking, drilling and couping democratic states

plastic is in the position it is in because it is cheaper for industry, not because it is convenient, though it may feel that way.

when coke came in glass bottles, coke demanded the bottles back, they cost coke money.

we could transition to a largely plastic free world, there are things that would likely still need to be made from so-called bioplastics, a lot of things contain 'plastics', i'm thinking seals for plumbing, glues, and etc.

Anyway, plastic is cheap and convenient (ie disposable), recycling often uses more resources than extracting raw materials. Dont hold your breath.

they may take our plastic, but they will never take the microplastics in our blood, because it would not provide an 18% profit for the company who "win" the government tender

The world existed before plastic it can exist without it.

Plastic is a lightweight byproduct of petroleum refinement.

You’d need to stop using petroleum, because what are you gonna do, let the waste just pile up? Burn it?

You’d need local handling of cleaning and recycling of alternatives because the alternatives are all heavier.

Good luck transporting the alternatives without petroleum, an energy dense fuel that is stable and easily transported.

You don’t get to keep electronics either, because those are widely made of plastic.

Your manufacturing has to go back to lubricated metal, wood or animal byproducts for everything because now you can’t just have two nylon contact surfaces good for ten billion cycles.

Everyone else has covered the important stuff, so I'll cover something less important that is an area of interest of mine.

The toy industry would be devastated - plastics are an incredibly useful material for toys, pretty much all of the technical innovations in the world of toys that don't have to do with electronic components are drawn specifically from the increasing capabilities of plastics over time. Something as simple as the modern action figure would be far more difficult to produce to the same level of quality if they were forced to use wood or metal exclusively again - the articulation would suffer, the durability would suffer, the ability for that articulation to hold tension over time would suffer, the ability for paint to stay on the figures would suffer, and there'd be a lot more difficulties with avoiding sharp edges and breakage from the forces you can expect children to put their toys through.

Problems like this would exist for basically every single toy on the market - they've all benefited massively from plastics, and if there is ever restrictions on the use of plastic (as there probably ought to be) then we'd see a massive devolution in what toy manufacturers are capable of.

Obviously this doesn't actually matter - the world was fine before action figures and would be fine after them, much as some people like them, and physical toys are arguably on the way out anyway in favor of screen-based entertainment for children (I consider this a bad thing, but, it's pretty clearly happening.) so a plastic ban may not change much in the end.

life would be GLORIOUS.

of course it's not actually that simple, but on a broad consumer level a shitton of plastic is totally replacable. rubber replacement plastics will not be easily replaced with genuine rubber because that's already scarcer than demands, and plastic is simply the best material for a few things.

i also think carbon capture should be tooled into plastic production, trees are cool but plastic's ridiculous longevity is actually good in the context of retaining carbon

It would not be fantastic

be like germany during the nazi era