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

submitted 1 year 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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[-] aelwero@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

On Google. PETase if you want the nerdy stuff, or "plastic eating enzyme" if you want news articles.

[-] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

My point was that, while it exists, it doesn't exist.

It can't be released widespread into the wild to eat microplastics because it would severely damaged infrastructure. So while it's a neat toy in the lab, and might make it's way into waste disposal processes, it doesn't exist where we need it to exist. And it can't. So it's not a solution.

[-] aelwero@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

It could be used at recycling centers, and at the largest "customers" of those recycling centers, the landfills...

Do you separate your plastics? The practice is waning. You see it done in less communities these days, specifically because there's nowhere for that plastic to go, and it's gonna end up in a landfill no matter how effectively or avidly you separate it, and people are realizing that and simply not bothering.

If there was a big ass bin somewhere that ate plastic, we could actually do what we've been pretending to do for 40 years and remove it from our waste disposal systems. We could separate plastic, and the plastic could get hauled off to the big plastic eating bin to be depolymerized... Hell, you could just run all the trash through it and landfill whatever got left.

this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023

209 points (94.8% liked)

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