• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Plastic does deteriorat or disintegrat, but it only does so into smaller and smaller pieces of its self.

    Things like a plastic bottle will break into smaller parts of the bottle and linger around for hundreds or thousands of years but the bottle “shape” will not be recognised in this sense.

    Unfortunately plastics like organic materials don’t breakdown and get absorbed the same way back into nature. Our streets would look a lot cleaner IMO if all our litter broke down quicker. Ie less plastic rappers flying around and chip bags.

    Fun fact, when we freeze a bottle of water it too slowly deteriorates and disintegrates. That plastic is then transferred into the water contained in the bottle. Doing this multiple times can show the wear and tear overtime.

    Even at microscopic levels things like toothbrushes brissle do show signs of wear and tear, as all products do.

    My example of toothbrushes is more on how interwoven our plastic dependency is in our day to day lives. We may be ingesting plastics without even realistically knowing where from.

    For example in our foods. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/22/health/plastics-food-wellness-scn/index.html#:~:text=Apples and carrots were the,also the least contaminated vegetable.

    “People don’t think of plastics as shedding but they do,”

    “In almost the same way we’re constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off, such as when you open that plastic container for your store-bought salad or a cheese that’s wrapped in plastic.”



















  • Unfortunately this could be the case and the cynic in me feels this could be a green washing scheme like you said.

    But hopefully with what some cities are doing now with charging the full economic and social cost of blue & black bin programs to companies and manufactures this could start having a real good impact.

    Specially since most manufactures shift the cost of recycling and trash to communities and tax payers. Instead this cost should be internalised by the manufacturer and retailer.

    Hopefully this kind of shift promotes better sustainable packaging, and prevents things like planed obsolescence and fast fashion.