These stories rarely mention this for some reason but the bulk of the plastic junk in the ocean is discarded fishing nets, not consumer waste. Reducing the plastic waste you personally generate is still a good idea, of course, but if you really want to have an impact then stop eating fish.
I am not sure that is good advice. Fixing the fishing industry is important, overfishing is rampant as is plastic waste from it. But fish is probably one of the best alternatives we have to other environmentally unfriendly meats we currently raise. As populations grow it is proving to be key to keeping everyone fed. Farmed fish most importantly will soon be the majority of fish consumed.
Getting ocean based fishing to not use plastics will be very difficult but moving the majority of fishing into farms by making it more profitable could very well make that problem go away by reducing ocean fishing in general.
Make trade restrictions on non-farmed fish and the demand for ocean fish from nations fishing with plastic would hopefully go down. If fish from the ocean now contains plastic it would probably be a health boon to only accept farm fish anyway.
You might create a new problem of corporate fish farms decimating local fishermans livelihoods, which sucks. But at this rate they will overfish and pollute their own jobs away anyway.
Commercial fishing is a lot less important than commercial hunting was 200 years ago. The sea is bigger, and the industry can switch to new species when one gets depleted (eg cod, salmon and tuna were once far more abundant) but the problems are still the problems. A fishery, like a bison herd, cannot handle the might of a modern industry.
Quota systems and controls keep fisheries from immediately collapsing, but there is a real difference between "won't collapse in 3 seasons" and "sustainabe over generations." The wider ecosystem effects are not really known. Big ocean, millions of species, lots of side effects.. bycatch, pollution. There are species we don't know exist going extinct, almost certainly, because of commercial fishing.
Commercial fishing is something we need to grow out of. On land, hunting is rarely a conservation issue today. Habitat is the problem. In the ocean, there is no reason (besides fishing) why we can't have mostly undisturbed ecosystems.
Agriculture replaced market hunting. Sustainable agriculture can replace market fishing. It's the responsible choice to make as a society.
your comment is a little hard to follow, but here's a few specific responses or additions.
> The wider ecosystem effects are not really known.
that's not really true. it is pretty well known that there are major detrimental effects of fish farms. of course we are still learning more and more, but we know at least something. salmon farms tend to take out good stuff from the ocean (fish) and return bad stuff (disease, waste, genetic changes, etc.).
> There are species we don't know exist going extinct, almost certainly, because of commercial fishing.
there are species we know about going extinct due in part to commercial fishing. for example, the southern resident orcas have been struggling heavily due to commercial fishing, pollution, poisoning, capture, river damns, salmon farms, and more. there are very clear actionable things that can be done to save them, but none are even close to being acted upon. it is possible the population there has passed a point of no return such that that particular population will go extinct. they have struggled to even birth new orcas, and due to captures 30-50 years ago, they don't have the leadership they are used to. their behavior has already began to showcase how hard it is for them to even find salmon, as the normally tight knit pods have been seen breaking up to find salmon. there was a month in 2018 where almost none of the pod was seen for an entire month by whale watchers and scientists, an event that hasn't happened in decades or ever since they've started being observed.
It's true that a lot of aquaculture is not great environmentally. There's a spectrum.
Two points though.
(1) Even some of the worst practices are at least relatively localized. For a given tonage of fish, commercial fishing fleets affect far larger areas, with the most productive areas usually most affected. I think practices need to improve a lot, but even with the current below-par methods... Imagine a ranch with terrible environmental practices. They indiscriminately poison predators, overgraze, use bad fertilizers, run effluent into streams... That 1,000 acre ranch is surrounded by 100,000 acres of wilderness (or good tree farms). The ranch is bad, but enough wilderness can dilute its effects.
(2) A lot depends on the species of fish. With land agriculture, we tend to farm a handful of species that lend well to farming. Before farming, people ate different species. Still, agriculture didn't produce bear meat, otter or some other hard-to-raise species to suit the preferences of hunter-gatherers. With aquaculture, we're still often trying to farm otter and bear.
Tilapia & carp (for example) have a long history of aquaculture. It's cheap and efficient and can be done in environmentally sound ways. The problem is that salmon (raised in environmentally unsound oceanic pens) sells for 5X per kg.
To me that means regulation can be sharp. If salmon, cod or tuna are replaced by more agriculturally enclined species... that's a reasonable compromise, IMO. We can have fish, just not any fish.
Tree farms are also not a forest. There's no real ecosystem there. They're just rows of commercially viable trees planted and left until they're old enough to harvest.
This is not the case, at least in Oregon. Our tree farms are generally healthy, left undisturbed for 40 or so years between harvests, and are parceled out so that entire areas aren't harvested at once. All state run timber sales are surveyed to ensure there are no endangered species present, and, are tagged to reasonably protect against runoff issues (can't cut all the way up to a creek for example). The straight row plantations you may have been referring to are generally for wood pulp, AKA toilet paper.
Note: I am not a ecogeek, I just have a brother in law who is a wildlife biologist and works at a firm that does this stuff for the state, and, I regularly recreate (dirt bike, mountain bike, deer hunt) in a few different "working forests" here in oregon. These working forests aren't pristine old growth, but then again I wouldn't dirt bike etc in a virgin forest either.
It's a shit sandwich, not a fish sandwich. I have begun to feel pretty guilty about the occasional fish fry knowing that we're screwing up the oceans so badly. But what makes me supremely annoyed is that the Far East isn't doing anything to rein in pollution, they just dump shit into rivers and the ocean and go about their merry way.
We don't need to eat meat or fish at all to be healthy, and meat & fish are very resource intensive. We're better off redirecting all the resources we currently waste trying to feed 8 billion people this way into sustainable, plant-based diets anyway.
I was vegetarian for 20 years, vegan for 7, yet I started eating meat and fish about a year ago. Here are my thoughts:
- I started eating animal products again for health reason; I believe many people can thrive on a vegetarian or vegan diet, but I couldn't. It makes me unhappy, but there I am.
- Similarly vegetarian and vegan for a long time, my wife started craving animal products the minute she got pregnant. And after birth she became very ill, and survived on chicken broth. In short, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
- There is no reason for anyone to eat meat twice a day; and above all there is no reason for heavy subsidies so that everyone can eat meat cheaply twice a day.
So my preferred solution: animals raised humanely and sustainably to allow for healthy, limited consumption of animal products, with products priced at actual cost in order to eliminate over-consumption.
It would be more impactful get three people to reduce meat by 50% than to get one to reduce by 100%. Unfortunately, "meals that don't have a chunk of meat as their centerpiece but that are still far from vegetarian" does not have the same ideological zeal as veganism (speaking in the context of a western industrial background).
When eating out (again: western cuisine), the meat-free choices are getting better and better and I applaud that, but it seems to just get more polarized. In aggregate, either vegan or an ever bigger focus on a meat centerpiece is hardly an improvement. Low meat dishes seem to have a serious branding problem.
I have a number of friends who eat meat only 2 times per week. I used to be vegetarian for about 15 years until I met my wife and we agreed to eat meat, but only organic/otherwise sustainable and only a limited number of times per week.
When eating out, I still eat vegetarian unless I know where the restaurant got its meat from. Increasing numbers of restaurants in Amsterdam do care where their meat comes from, fortunately.
That's why I mention them both. I'm generally fine with anything that has animals outside rather than locked up in a tiny cage, but I prefer meat grown locally in a field that's not certified over meat that's technically certified but shipped from the other side of the world.
As much as I'd love to brain the next deer that's eating under my apple tree I'm also aware that that deer might have been stuffing its face at god knows what dumpster or drinking from the river downstream of town (which has a several hundred year manufacturing history so I wouldn't drink the river water).
Farming animals for meat has its problems but it does impose much stricter controls on the inputs. No farmer raising livestock for human consumption is feeding their animals contaminated food and water if there are other options available. If DuPont is upstream of your farm you're probably SOL but that's the exception not the rule.
As a rule of thumb I would say there is good overlap. In support of my claim, I suggest the report from Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food [0].
Organic according the USDA means that you use manure to fertilize instead of biosolids and you use something like copper-based pesticides instead of glyphosate.
I don't know enough about agriculture to understand what that means, but I have heard that the US uses a different, presumably lower, standard for organic crops than the EU does.
> I don't know enough about agriculture to understand what that means, but I have heard that the US uses a different, presumably lower, standard for organic crops than the EU does.
It means exactly what you heard. The USDA Organic label doesn't mean that organic crops are sustainable. The organic label doesn't address problems associated with commercial agriculture: monocultures, wide-spread use of pesticides, fertilizer run-off into streams/rivers/ponds/lakes causing them to become hypoxic, destruction of wetlands to create arable land etc.
Exactly, the whole "diaspora Asian" thing has this figured out just fine. But every food tradition has a great variety of low-meat options, with the possible exception of pure hunter/herder communities. But in the west they are traditionally mostly restricted to home cooking and what little still made it to professional kitchens is now increasingly getting squeezed out by fully meatless choices (the choice in status meat somehow never gets less).
(I say "diaspora Asian" because I can only talk about what we get under the Asian brand in Europe, which for all I know might be completely unrelated to what actually happens in the namesake regions. But that's completely unrelated to the point we are making here: meat for flavor instead of for status, kudos to them)
> It would be more impactful get three people to reduce meat by 50% than to get one to reduce by 100%. Unfortunately, "meals that don't have a chunk of meat as their centerpiece but that are still far from vegetarian" does not have the same ideological zeal as veganism
So, work to get people to try a different appreciate meatless options; as you note, they are getting better. You can reduce meat consumption by eating meat-centered meals less frequently as well as eating some-but-less meat in each meal.
The thing is, I really don't like those dishes that bend over sideways to eradicate even the last bit of meat. I'd be fine making that steak-sized chunk an extremely rare occasion, but don't take away my little flavor bits. Polarized "we cater for vegans and for big-steak aficionados" and then controlling your dosage via some foodie variety of pulse width modulation might be fine for some, but it's not for me. When low meat options disappear from the menu to make room for vegan options while the high meat dishes stay, then people like me are likely to end up eating more meat, not less, without really wanting to.
> I really don't like those dishes that bend over sideways to eradicate even the last bit of meat.
It's not like meat is a natural part of every dish that must be eradicated at some kind of effort to produce a meatless dish, though I'd agree that dishes they start with a meat dish and take that approach are often among the worst of meatless dishes.
I agree! This has been bothering me ever since I stopped eating vegetarian. My ideal dish would have lots of tasty vegetables with a side of meat. Unfortunately I suspect that most customers would consider they're not getting their money's worth.
Absolutely agree. I think the calls for vegetarianism and veganism can really backfire. It's not realistic to expect everyone to give up meat completely.
We should be calling for people _limiting_ their meat consumption in a way that works for them. It's far more effective to have 50% of the population limit their meat consumption than 5% eschew meat all together.
I personally eat meat about once a week, and that's something that's worked for me. I also try to source my meat and dairy from humane sources. And it's been a minimal effort. I don't feel that I've been denied meat. I can still have it once in a while, and it does not affect me in my daily life whatsoever.
I don't mind vegetarian. I rarely eat meat and never crave for it. However vegan just sounds horrible. Eggs and cheeses are incredible, milk, fish, prawns. Cutting them out feels like cutting half of the nutrients out of my diet. I wouldn't risk it unless I had very extensive knowledge and dedication to human dietary requirements and what which plants can provide, which I don't have and won't have.
> Cutting them out feels like cutting half of the nutrients out of my diet. I wouldn't risk it unless I had very extensive knowledge and dedication to human dietary requirements and what which plants can provide, which I don't have and won't have.
Yea, this is pretty common (as many comments above yours will also attest to). “Vegetarian” and “vegan” are awful diet plans, in that they only tell you what not to eat. People coming from a standard diets based around meat/cheese/eggs undoubtedly have a hard time, and often become sick.
Fortunately, you don’t need that much knowledge. This stuff has been figured out by dietitians. If you’re interested in what a plant-based diet could look like, check out nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger has a “daily dozen” checklist that will pretty easily get you to a very healthy diet. It includes: cruciferous vegetables, other vegetables, whole grains, flax, berries, other fruits, spices (turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, etc), greens, nuts/seeds, beans/legumes, water, and exercise. If you consistently knock all 12 of those out, you’ll be healthy as a horse.
Some people consider that vegetarian, but I never understood that myself. When I was vegetarian, I didn't eat fish. I did eat eggs, though. Since they were unfertilized I didn't have a problem with them, and it helped me stick with the diet for as long as I did.
With a vegan diet, you need vitamin B12 supplements.
Take a multi-vitamin supplement, some linseed oil for the essential fatty acids and maybe some mineral supplement if appropriate according to the blood test.
You should do that anyway no matter your diet.
Dr Garth Davis: Americans have become obsessed with Protein
With a vegan diet, you need vitamin B12 supplements.
From the linked article:
> Overall, multivitamins are not recommended for the generally healthy. There’s just no clear evidence to prove that they have any benefit. A 2013 analysis of 27 trials involving more than 400,000 people concluded that there was no clear evidence that they reduce cardiovascular disease, cancer risks, or reduce all-cause mortality.
This makes no sense.
You have a vegan diet to reduce cardiovascular disease, cancer risks, or reduce all-cause mortality.
You take vitamin supplements to prevent potential deficiencies.
> Vitamin B12 deficiency in the US and the UK is estimated to occur in about 6 percent of those under the age of 60, and 20 percent of those over the age of 60.[1] In Latin America rates are estimated at 40 percent and they may be as high as 80 per cent in parts of Africa and Asia.[1]
Your solutions sounds pretty good to me (I'm vegetarian), because you are already aware of all the bad things about that industry, but you probably also know that most of the people don't know that and aren't capable of eating meat or fish from sustainably and healthy sources. In my personal experience, there's a lack of culture that makes easier for everybody to become vegetarian or vegan rather than learning how to find that kind of products that you mentioned...
I think there's a role for consumption of meat and animal products. There's also a lot of land which cannot be used to directly generate human food in any sensible way, e.g. in the uplands. Furthermore, animals have an important role in maintaining soil quality, which is vital to ensure good crop yields.
It's mostly down to only buying what you need / use really. Frozen vegetables are another option, they are often easily portionable and are a better choice than "fresh" vegetables (source: I used to work in a vegetable packing plant for a summer vacation job; the vegetables we packaged to be sold in shops the day after came from a big freezer / fridge, oftentimes we had to discard whole pallets because the brocolli had gone moldy. I have no idea how long that stuff had been in there, but given the amount of mold it must've been a while)
I was surprised how much meat people smilingly throw away in NewZealand - when I was asked to "just throw it in the trashcan" around 30dkgs of perfectly delicious and cooked meal I simply refused and walked away.
My muscles were literally blocked to make that movement of my arms, swiping a plate of meal to the bin. Around ~25 other people did not have any problems with it, so I guess the problem is in me.
Not just in New Zealand. It hurts me when I see people not finishing their plate. I will eat myself sick before I will throw away food. Sadly, this has developed into a bit of a weight problem. And then there's restaurants and supermarkets which throw away enormous amounts of unsold food.
We should buy and cook less food, or maybe have a quick way of sharing left-over food with people who are hungry.
As much as it would be great to get everyone on plant-based diets, it's not going to happen anytime soon. So I guess, for the environment at least, fish is the best we can do until then?
It doesn't have to be all or nothing! My wife has been vegetarian since I've known her, and vegan for a year and a half or so, and I never fully stopped eating meat until about the same time she went vegan. Before that, what happened to my diet was a reduction in the amount of meat consumed, and (for unrelated health-reasons), the cutting out of most red meat (I started with pork, and then barely ate red meat for a couple years) and shortly before starting to eat a vegetarian diet, I started only eating meat when we ate out (which is maybe 2-4 times a month for us). A few close friends of ours actively try to cut out red meat on most weeknights, for example. Some other friends simply try to incorporate vegetarian/vegan substitutes once a week, or other similar amounts.
Whether your concerns are environmental, for health reasons, or about the ethical treatment of animals, you can adjust your diet as much or as little as you want and still have some sort of impact. Just like you don't have to sell your car and bike to work every day in order to cut down on your footprint by, say, biking to the nearby stores instead of driving.
I think it will happen sooner than you think, with companies like Beyond Meat working hard to ultimately make plant protein "meat" both highly palatable and less expensive.
There are a lot of people (myself included) who actually enjoy real meat and would never switch, so no it won't be happening any time soon or at all really.
My meat eating wife, whose favorite food is steak, prefers the impossible burger and gets it over the real thing when we go out. I've heard other similar accounts as well. Unless everyone like yourself refuses to even try it then it's likely to catch on at least to some extent.
And honestly it seems a bit selfish to not at least try the less environmentally damaging option.
Ground beef seems like low hanging fruit, making convincing sushi seems more difficult.
> And honestly it seems a bit selfish to not at least try the less environmentally damaging option.
I can think of several reasons people may not want artificial meat. Maybe they think it's gross (test tube meat) or it goes against tradition and culture. I don't think the "shaming" angle works well to get people to change their diet. I know I immediately tune out or get defensive when people tell me what I should do with my personal life. Especially since almost everything is "bad" for the environment. So unless someone lives in a dirt hut, eating veggies they grow themselves, wearing clothes made from their own hemp and never traveling, I really don't take what they have to say about the environment into consideration.
Between the cancer risk posed by red and processed meat as well as the environmental damage, I expect meat consumption to go the way of smoking within a generation.
Given the sad state of nutritional "science" and the extremely low odds of it getting better anytime soon, I think it's just as likely we'll shortly find out that red meat reduces your cancer risk.
The science is solid. We know that red meat, especially processed red meat, definitely causes cancer. The evidence so good that the evidence is now in the same trust-worthy class as the evidence that tells us smoking causes cancer.
But red meat doesn't cause very much cancer. There's a low risk of colorectal cancer, and red meat (even processed red meat) increases that risk by a small amount.
To prevent one case of cancer from red meat a large number of people have to give it up.
I disagree with parent poster. If people can assess risk they'll see a small increase of a low risk, and decide there are other things to worry about. If people can't assess risk (the vast majority of people) they'll decide if they like bacon enough to keep eating it, just as they do with alcohol or anything else.
The vast majority of people in the US eat meat regularly and feed it to their children. There is no way this is going to stop in one generation. There are also plenty of cultures that have meat as their staple. Can you imagine telling Mexicans to eat vegetarian tacos for instance? That simply will never happen, it's too ingrained into culture (and too delicious!).
Smoking cigarettes and cigars was also once considered a delicious and ingrained part of many cultures. It is now clear that processed and red meats cause bowel cancer, and the environmental impacts they pose are also becoming more and more clear. Just like smoking ended in a generation I can definitely see people rejecting these products in the near future. Cultures change all the time.
I don’t agree. Diet is an integral part of one’s culture. Smoking cigarettes is a needless vice mostly pushed by marketing. I think you’re greatly underestimating how important food is to some cultures. I suggest you have a conversation about this with someone from a meat eating culture. It will give you more perspective on the staying power of meat.
I know it was very popular, but 1940 was not that long ago. We're comparing it to eating meat which humans have been doing for at least tens of thousands of years. You also need to eat something, while some cultures smoke more than others, no one needs to smoke to survive.
Not necessarily cigars/cigarettes, but tobacco has also played an important role in some cultures. I doubt Native Americans were using tobacco, sometimes for ceremonial and religious purposes, due to marketing
Here in America, which has much lower smoking rates than many other developed nations and has indeed lowered the smoking rate a lot since ~50 years ago, there's tons of young people taking up smoking and "vaping". A bunch of my tech coworkers do.
I’m Mexican and can confirm meat isn’t going anywhere. I can’t even imagine Mexico City without it. Not only does everyone eat meat but most people make a living selling it. There are taco carts on every corner.
It’s also a huge part of family life. These dishes have been passed down through the generations and it’s actually moderately offensive to suggest that it’s not socially acceptable to eat what my family has been eating for as far back as anyone can remember. I know my children are growing up learning to love all of the dishes their family cooks and enjoys together.
Have you missed the incredible amount of pushback in the recent past against identity politics? You may get half the population to decide it is socially untenable, but the other half will double down in response.
Do you refuse to stop anything enjoyable? I think there are often other factors worth considering. Maybe you enjoy meat, but if you also enjoy many non-meat foods, you can eat those and still fulfill the need to eat and the need to enjoy food.
You might stop eating fish to not support the finishing industry, but then you might start supporting the fish oil industry which is even worse. It's better to buy from small time local fishermen or fish yourself. Fresh fish also taste better.
There's currently quite a bit of debate over whether or not plant-based diets are better than other diets, but not over whether or not they are healthy.
The 2009 statement linked above was not removed; a 2015 update of the position statement was retracted and re-published in 2016 [1][2]. The position has been formally endorsed until December 31, 2021.
The 2015 version of the paper was removed for revision. It was revised and the current revision (Dec 2016) still has the same position on vegetarian diets.
>POSITION STATEMENT
It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics that appropriately planned
vegetarian, including vegan, diets are
healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may
provide health benefits in the prevention
and treatment of certain diseases. These
diets are appropriate for all stages of the life
cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy,
childhood, adolescence, older adulthood,
and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more
environmentally sustainable than diets rich
in animal products because they use fewer
natural resources and are associated with
much less environmental damage.
And it was never actually a big deal in the first place, because they have maintained more-or-less the same position for several decades, and the removal didn't actually change their position in a significant way.
>Following the release of the “Vegetarian Diets” position paper, the Academy Positions Committee received correspondence from respected experts in the area of vegetarian nutrition, including Academy members, expressing concern about what they cited as inaccuracies in the paper. Upon receipt of the memoranda, the APC sent the paper out for a secondary external blind, unbiased review. Based on the result of these reviews, as well as the received correspondence from experts in the field, the APC voted to remove the paper from the Journal with the goal to revise and publish at a future date. Until then, individuals should refer to the “Vegetarian Diets” position paper published in the July 2009 Journal (Volume 109, Issue 7, pages 1266-1282).
>It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
Furthermore, most similar organizations take similar positions
>[Vegetarian and vegan] diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
Though I normally encourage vegetarianism and admire vegans, I wouldn't stick to strictly a vegan diet during pregnancy.
From an economic/environmental perspective, severely limiting your intake of animal products is nearly as good as avoiding them completely, and nutritionally you're on much more solid ground.
My son has been vegan for his entire life. He’s 4 now and very healthy.
I was vegan for 5 years and about 6 months ago started eating meat and dairy again for reasons unrelated to food. I was raised in a household that ate meat with almost every meal. I have personally experienced pros and cons to both lifestyles, but would argue that in practice, a vegan diet is healthier for most people due to the nature of food options available to them.
To be honest I haven't put much thought into that perspective, it's a good question. Breastfeeding was never a question for us, even on a vegan diet. I wonder what other vegans think of this question.
As I continued being vegan, I realized that the spectrum which is actually important is raw vs. processed foods, and less so meat vs plants. I think a lot of people who "do vegan right" end up just eat less processed crap in general and end up being healthy, not necessarily because of eating less/no meat. However, there are vegans that get on the "oreo diet" and just eat junk food 24/7 - those are not healthy vegans.
"I think a lot of people who "do vegan right" end up just eat less processed crap in general and end up being healthy, not necessarily because of eating less/no meat."
I agree 100%. Some of the biggest benefits of any diet are obtained by getting back to simple foods and away from highly processed foods/carbs mixed with seed oils and sugars. Ditch that stuff and you'll likely do well on just about any diet.
This does not answer the question, but the fact that even ruminant offspring rely on milk to supplement their nutrition I think should at least create skepticism
I really don’t think any nutritional scientist would claim it’s impossible to be healthy as a vegetarian. Whether it’s easier with meat or feasible for all people is something else
> I really don’t think any nutritional scientist would claim it’s impossible to be healthy as a vegetarian.
It is impossible for some people. Nutrition claims should always be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, the advice surrounding cholesterol over the past 30 years.
It's important here to realize that irrespective of your diet-- vegetarian, vegan, omnivore, carnivore and everything in between-- these are just labels and any of these can be bad for your health.
For example, the following highly processed and sugary foods are considered vegan/vegetarian-friendly: French fries from most fast-food chains, Oreo cookies, Fritos corn chips, Lays potato chips, unfrosted Pop-Tarts, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Graham Crackers.
I would not trust an endorsement of a diet from a health organization. Over the past 30-40 years most modern countries have been experiencing a surge in chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and strokes. If you look at the places around the globe where Western diets have been introduced (e.g., Hawaii and Polynesia, Aboriginal tribes of Australia, Inuit in polar regions etc.), you see wrecked health markers for those populations after abandoning their local indiginous diets. Health organizations have done a disservice in the realm of nutrition and health.
>We don't need to eat meat or fish at all to be healthy
Bollocks! Meat is one of the healthiest and nutritionally rich sources of food available! Toxic transfat is made from polyunsaturated vegetable oils, and diabetes causing sugars is from grains and high sugar plants! The easiest weight loss in the world is a meat based, 70% kcal from animal fat, minimal vegetable, zero carb diet: lost 80 lbs/yr myself on it without an extra step taken to exercise. Just sat on my @ss and lost the weight! Veganism as healthy is a big fat unhealthy meme!
I'm guessing you mean "minimal amounts" because B12 doses/levels are measured in micrograms. In fact a vegan diet provides no natural B12 (see note below). This is a serious gap that must be addressed by supplementation/fortification.
Supplements have challenges too (and in fact many studies show supplements to be of little value). In order to attain sufficient B12 via supplements, a person needs to consume many times the RDA value. For example, only 10 mcg of a 500 mcg oral supplement is absorbed by healthy people.
So while technically you may need minimal amounts of B12, it remains an essential vitamin. Getting it in a format which is both absorbable and bioavailable is not trivial and serves as a clue that human physiology evolved in an ecosystem which, to varying degrees, involved eating animals.
Note: For now I'll set aside probable/common deficiencies among vegans/vegetarians in B6, heme iron, the vitamins A, D3, K2, micronutrients and fatty acids DHA, CLA, Carnatine, Carnosine, Taurine, Creatine and others. In fairness, a western/standard american diet can also score poorly in many nutrients.
Fermented foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut can provide B12, but you have to get the old-fashioned variety, not the "pour some vinegar over boiled cabbage" version.
No one's disputing the footprint, they're disputing how feasible it is for all or even most people. Vegetarianism requires much more understanding and planning to ensure you ingest sufficient proper macro and micronutrients.
Eating a healthy diet takes work no matter what diet plan you follow. You're assuming a meat-based diet is automatically healthy when in fact the typical meat based, western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases. You're going to be a lot better off on an even non-ideal plant based diet than you are going to be eating hamburgers and pizza.
I'll admit it's currently not that easy to follow a strictly plant based diet if you mostly eat in restaurants and don't live in a first tier Western city.
If you're willing to do your own shopping and mostly eat at home it's actually not only easy but really enjoyable to take back control of your health and what you eat.
> the typical meat based, western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases
The standard American diet is composed of 70% plant-based foods, which is the same ratio found in the Mediterranean diet which is lauded as one of the most healthful.
It's not the meat that's causing the issues, it's the processed plant foods and plant-derived oils that destroy one's health on a western diet. Or in other words, the horrible food quality. Any diet that doesn't include processed plant foods and oils will be an improvement from one that does, regardless of whether it includes meat.
> You're assuming a meat-based diet is automatically healthy
I'm asserting that it's harder to be nutrient deficient given a meat/fish-based diet. The only "work" in this diet is not eating too much.
> western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases
Mostly due to overconsumption, not due to the composition of the diet. Controlling for caloric intake eliminates most differences in health outcomes between the various diets, assuming no nutrient deficiencies are present.
> We don't need to eat meat or fish at all to be healthy
I think you will have to back that statement up if you want to be taken seriously. I for one am certainly not going to stop eating fish and meat, I have been a vegetarian for over a year and I did not fancy it.
The 2009 statement linked above was not removed; a 2015 update of the position statement was retracted and re-published in 2016 [1][2]. The position has been formally endorsed until December 31, 2021.
> I think you will have to back that statement up if you want to be taken seriously.
This is such a mainstream statement that it seems to me entirely reasonable to omit a source. You can find dozens of them by looking up "vegetarianism" on wikipedia and navigating to the "health effects" section.
You are omitting the fact that genetics plays a huge role in the success and efficiency of your diet.
More than a third of East Asians have a deficiency in one of the enzymes involved in the breakdown of alcohol (aldehyde dehydrogenase). They cannot properly metabolize it.
Inuits have mutations in genes that code for enzymes that desaturate carbon-carbon bonds in fatty acids. This means they can handle diets that are very high in certain types of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.
A mutation of the melanocortin-4-receptor (MC4R) leads to a markedly increased preference for high fat, but a significantly reduced preference for high sucrose food.
So what I'm saying is that blanket statements like "well if I/those guys can do it then everybody should be able to" have no real value. Diets are strongly influenced by and relying on genetics. Since we don't have the same genes we won't handle the same diet in the same way. Linking to statements that have since been withdrawn due to omissions also doesn't help.
Edit. Huh... getting downvoted for saying diet and genetics go hand in hand, with evidence that hasn't been retracted. If anybody was wondering why some people are never taken seriously, it's because they reject reality thinking this will change it.
> You are omitting the fact that genetics plays a huge role in the success and efficiency of your diet.
Not just genetics, but a lifetime of bacterial and other environmental exposures that defines your microbiome, which is obviously essential to processing all food. An environment with a long history of vegetarians will be well suited to vegetarians. Not so much if that hasn't been the case.
I think you're being downvoted because of the "Withdrawn statements" comment. It looks like this has been posted multiple times in the same thread, but the statement was not withdrawn.
The paper liked originally was indeed withdrawn. It was corrected and subsequently republished which I didn't notice (can't edit anymore). This being said (from the paper):
> appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets
Most people's diets are not "appropriately" planned because most people never actually consult a nutritionist. This means most of those diets miss their mark and since that diet narrows the alternatives it's far easier to lose those benefits.
And can't see anything about any disbenefits of introducing animal products in that diet in "appropriately planned" quantities. Would introducing certain amounts of animal products in your diet affect in in any direction? So would adding a moderate amount of fish in your vegad diet sabotge or improve it? Or no difference?
In terms of CO2, chicken is about as environmentally friendly as animal proteins get. Chickens also don’t really require any special diet and grow quickly. Dealing with chicken waste is a problem, but if you live in the US, chicken “litter” is fed to cows.
Among "Effective Altruism" rationalist circles, some of them prefer eating beef because a single cow produces a lot more meat than a single chicken, hence less suffering-year units per kilo of meat.
Chickens are also often kept in tiny cages, often mutilated. Cows are too, sometimes, but on average I think cows spend more time outside than most other farm animals. Though this varies wildly of course.
Sadly, growing cattle costs enormous amounts of food that could also feed people. And they seem to contribute quite a bit to greenhouse gasses. So eating beef may be better than eating chicken when it comes to animal welfare, but worse when it comes to the environment.
Supposedly for ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) 85% of their feed is not suitable for human consumption. Quite a lot of agricultural waste (e.g., corn stalks, spent mash/grain left from beer production) is upcycled through livestock. For this reason it's common to integrate cultivation of crops along with livestock.
To be honest that makes little sense to me. If you care enough about animal suffering to limit the numbers of animals who suffer, why eat the cow at all when you can avoid it?
Farmed fish is mostly fed with industrially caught wild fish (the species and sizes that don't fetch a good market price for direct consumption), they are not a solution to overfishing or the feeding of billions at all. Traditional farming of freshwater fish fish is an exception, but I don't see carp reaching global mass appeal any time soon (and it quite likely either would not scale or it would turn nasty as well from scaling, just like everything we touch in search for excessive yields)
Doesn't farmed fish undo some of the advantages of eating fish? The big advantage of fishing over farmed meat is that we do not feed fish food grown on fields that could have fed people (which is a big part of the reason why meat is so economically inefficient). Fish just roam the seas and we scoop them out, with very little investment on our part.
Of course the fact that fish is such a relatively efficient source of food is also a good reason why we should take better care of the oceans. We can't eat fish if they die to our pollution. We also can't eat them if we hunt them to extinction. Sustainable fishing and cutting back on our pollution are vital to our food supply.
For anyone not aware yet, MSC is a certification for sustainable fishing and ASC for sustainable farmed fish. I eat no fish anymore that doesn't have either of those two certifications. But that does nothing to stop this kind of pollution.
Unless we miraculously figure out some way to convince people to stop attempting to exponentially increase the human population, it's pretty much a sure thing that we'll strip or pollute the oceans free of food sources.
As it happens, we have figured out a way to reduce population growth: education. Educated people tend to have less kids. Countries with a highly educated population tend to have less population growth, in some cases even having a shrinking population.
You don't have to convince European-demographics of this, they're already an overwhelming worldwide minority and shrinking. You need to stop importing third worlders into the West and go to their sources: Latin America, India, Africa, and convince them there to stop breeding (with Africa, cutting off food aid and letting nature take its course should do just as well).
Claims that on average it's about 20% worse than farmed fish, and about 1/6 of the impact of beef.
I've not read the study to back it, but the article doesn't differentiate between sources of poultry. The environmental impact of factory farmed vs organic free range corn fed chicken may be vastly different
Then stop eating fish and meat, you can be healthy taking care of your environment and without killing any animal. Everything you are saying are still environmentally unfriendly options.
Industrial farming is not remotely environmentally friendly. Local food production has scaling issues. It's not just meat... we're simply overpopulated.
> stop eating fish and meat, you can be healthy taking care of your environment and without killing any animal.
Sadly, this is an illusion. All agriculture is based on killing animals and distroying biodiversity, and if scaling to cover all population, would lead us to a world plenty of Fabian Tomasi.
Many vegetarians just take the choice to be blind to the huge problems with soy culture (for example), but those problems are not trivial at all.
a lot of the fish products I buy mention that it's "wild caught". do people really have a problem with eating farmed fish? I wish "farm-raised" were a label, so I can support more sustainably sourced fish.
The reason for that is the practices of fish farming has a reputation of being less than environmentally friendly in themselves, often and frequently less than clean. Although one of the cleanest ones (isolated GMO fast-growing salmon) faced the biggest pushback about issues they took pains to prevent (dessert located ponds are extra hard to escape from without someone delivers releasing live specimens) because people are stupid. All while complaining about water usage.
I suspect "premium" practices and standards might help here
This is still framed as a consumer problem rather than a regulatory problem--eat fish or don't, market participation isn't going to get you nearly as far as regulation.
Regulation is slow and difficult, particularly when there are industries with a lot of lobbying money ready to fight it. I'm all for regulation but it will be too late if we don't do anything in the meantime.
Certainly difficult, but would it be easier or harder than trying to organize a sustained global boycott of industrial fishing? Not trying to be cute, seriously--regulation would also have to be on a global scale for it to matter. I agree, something needs to be done now.
You think blanket laws fixes it either? You need good, well thought out law free from lobbyist influence that tackle the heart of the issue. In other words, something extremely difficult to produce and often times hard to enforce.
Or else you get more trash laws like making it illegal to serve water without asking in San Francisco.
These kind of comments are akin to "why bother with laws if people break them?" Environmental crimes like using plastic nets should be treated as smuggling or piracy is. Total elimination of plastic nets likely won't be possible, just as total elimination of smuggling and piracy hasn't been achieved, but usage would certainly be reduced and any reduction is a win for the environment.
it is easy to pass a law and then turn the other way when it's violated. happened leading up to financial crisis. or that law about registering as a foreign agent in the us.
Most people are unable to discipline themselves even if it affects directly their own health (smoking, heavy drinking, lack of excercise, unheathy eating), color me skeptic if we are to rely on people willing to change their habits for the greater good.
You think illegal fishermen in the Philippines (where the bulk of the waste in the whale originated according to the article) really care you’ve outlawed plastic fishing nets?
Your solution needs to be extremely incentivized and also easy to enforce in those places of the world. “Banning” something will have a laughable impact and only affect people who never created the waste in the first place.
What you could do is subsidize biodegradable fishing nets so that they're cheaper than plastic ones. Then everyone everywhere stops using plastic ones because the only reason they were used to begin with was that they're cheaper.
That also requires the government rather than industry to pay the cost of its regulations, and explicitly choose how to raise the money rather than implicitly taxing fishermen (and fish) without ever evaluating whether that is the optimal funding source.
Why would the fishermen not be the optimal finding source? Basically the premise here is that their use of plastic nets is already externalizing a cost onto society. Forcing them to pay for nets that cause less externalities just means we're moving the cost away from all of society and back to those who are benefitting from it.
You're assuming that they're the ones benefiting from it.
Suppose they use plastic nets and that makes fishing less expensive, but they all do that and it's a commodity market so they don't get to keep any of that money, it just means that it reduces the price of fish.
Now we need them to use more expensive nets. If we put the cost of them on the fisherman, it raises the price of fish, a healthier source of protein than many of the alternatives (e.g. red meat), and raises the price of food in general. Not super great as an outcome.
If we put the cost of them on coal companies, it raises the price of coal. Coal has nothing to do with fishing net, but we're actually trying to discourage coal, so since taxing coal burning is better than taxing fish eating, that may be a better choice.
I'm from that part of the world and laws here are more like "recommendations". It rarely gets enforced until there's a complaint. And the authorities are more likely to be focusing on factories dumping cyanide in a river or bauxite strip mining, rather than plastic nets.
The other side of it is that people are extremely poor. Possibly negative net value, lots of debts and no other way to pay next months bills. These people are going to use whatever it takes to live, and authorities who try to enforce it will look like villains.
Well you could ban at the manufacturing level, and ideally use political pressure to get other countries on board. It wouldn't be a %100 fix, but seems like it would be a simple step in the right direction.
Ya know, it should not matter how much lobby money is thrown at a politician or political party when the desire of the lobby money harms the nation. That right there is a litmus test for a captured, useless to the citizens, politician.
It's not really all that useful to place the blame on the individual politician when they are all susceptible to this behaviour.
It's like how in my town there's a stretch of road that is really shitty. All potholes and uneven road. Almost all drivers I've seen go over it way too fast and often damage their vehicles. Sure, I can blame each individual driver for not being 100% attentive, but when they all fuck up in the same way, some blame must be placed on the conditions that allowed them to all make the same error.
Depending on how small your "town" is, if these people damaging their vehicles are locals and not out-of-towners, I'd say they deserve a lot of the blame: they should know about this road by now. Out-of-towners, of course, I wouldn't blame the same way as I wouldn't expect them to know.
Now if by "my town" you really mean a city, then I might be expecting too much of the drivers.
The survey linked is what they found in the great pacific garbage patch, but the numbers are a bit fishy if we use them generally. The yearly amount of fishing net sold world-wide is as far as I can see is significant less than the amount of plastic dumped into the ocean each year.
That said, there are two large areas that contribute to ghost fishing. The fishing industry is getting centralized into fewer entities, and those might find it cheaper to discard nets rather than use costly manual labor to repair them or pay the cost of proper disposal. The second area is theft. A fishing net is basically an unguarded month of wages marked out with a bright buoy. I know fishermen that once they have a net stolen they will start removing the buoy for a while and simply drag for the net, which naturally increase the risk of loosing the net. If they can't find the net they don't even know if it is because they can't locate it or if it is because of more theft.
You only need to walk along any beach in the UK. There are little 10cm to 2m lengths of rope mixed in with the seaweed all along the beach. We have local beach cleans every weekend and most locals pick up litter when we see it.
But it is futile.
Next high tide and more washes in. It's all along the coast. Every tiny bay, every rocky outcrop, the sea floor, in the waves, tangled in seaweed out to sea.
It's crazy. Madness. And more boats go out and more nets are produced and more dolphins wash up dead and more seals wash up dead and more birds wash up dead.
Farmed fish spend their lives in overcrowded and filthy enclosures (too much fish defecating and feeding in the same cubic meters of water). Their feed is ridden with chemicals and antibiotics.
It's the same issue as "normal" poultry vs "aviary" poultry.
I personally prefer to eat less fish and meat than eating animals that are bred and raised in awful conditions that optimize for revenue; the quality of the output speaks for itself.
> too much fish defecating and feeding in the same cubic meters of water
Please don't spread fake ideas created for propaganda purposes without a minimum of critical thinking. This is false.
Maybe you aren't aware of this, but the water in marine aquaculture tanks is replaced constantly by fresh, clean water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If the pumps stop the fishes would die in hours. Not to mention that many, many species of fishes love to school and feel much better when are crowded. Specially when they are young.
Some fishes just do not care about being kept in water of lower quality. Carps for example work tirelessly to mudd its tank stirring sediments from the bottom. Are brain-wired to do this. Aquaculture of marine fishes is a totally different world than Pangasius or Tilapia aquaculture.
First of all this is not your common kind of whale, Is a beaked whale. As a sort of self-declared (minor) expert in the diet of Ziphius cavirostris I can tell you than this whale is not attracted by fishing nets normally IMHO. This species feeds at very deep waters and do not eat fishes normally. This plastic is sunken plastic.
I had personally get some kg of plastic from stomachs of the same species named in the article. I remember a sac (from manure I think), and a lot of the same plastic bags that you can find in the supermarket. I remember also a small commotion in the faculty by, uh, a lot of diluted blood that ended in the wrong pipeline slowly leaking just in front of the main entrance but this is a different history... don't make me talk about it :-)
Thanks for the links. I'm confused though, as everyone seems to claim something else is the "bulk of plastic". The links seem to talk about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch only, do you happen to have any insights into oceans at large? Or is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the part of the ocean where most waste is and the rest is not interesting? I find it hard to find sources.
If you do an image search for "Darrell Blatchley whale", you can see some pictures of various whale stomach contents... Unfortunately regular shopping plastic bags and rice bags appear to be the most common in terms of whale stomach contents. Perhaps because they float well...
Citation needed. 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean every year. You're telling me there's 4 million tons (8 billion pounds) of fishing nets every year? Nope.
FTA: "Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today."
Meanwhile, from the other link (which also has numbers in the 10s of thousands of tons, not millions):
"Cutting down on the amount of plastics we buy and learning to use this tricky material sensibly is still one of the most effective things we can do to live responsibly, help the planet, and inspire others to do the same. To find out how you can help make a change, check out One Green Planet’s #CrushPlastic campaign!"
Please don't distract by blaming fishing. And please read your own links. Fishing nets are a huge problem no doubt, but looking at numbers, we need to stop single-use plastics.
Those statements are not mutually exclusive. Cutting down on the plastics we buy might still be one of the most effective things we as consumers can do even if fishing nets are an even bigger problem. Just like buying low-emissions cars might be an effective thing to do as a consumer even if most pollutants are emitted by industry.
The fact is that we need to address both fishing and consumer use. Over-focusing on either one could be seen as distracting from the other, but it's not particularly helpful to bash other environmentally aware people over it. The problem is the people who don't even know or care.
The US generally has sustainable fishing and farmed-fishing laws and monitor catches and stocks. I don't know if there is a law that tracks nets per boat, but maybe there should be. Regardless, if you keep track of where your fish comes from (US wild caught and US farm-raised [farmed excluding salmon because they eat more protein than they produce]), then you (as far as I know) are not contributing to these problems. Buying fish exported from countries lacking oversight is the real problem.
Just like Climate Change, oceanic plastic pollution is a case of Tragedy of the commons. I can separate my waste and recycle as much as I want (and I do!) but it’s all useless if a random idiot proceeds to dump my weekly household recycling output into a river and call it a day.
This is nothing that can be solved with personal initiative and responsibility; it requires international regulation and enforcement. There’s no other way
I don't think "random idiot" here meant another consumer. It meant an idiot at the recycling company, though it might not be idiocy. The stuff you put out on the curb doesn't just magically vanish the moment the big green truck pulls away. They have to put it somewhere. As one article I read recently put it, most of us (in the US) haven't really been recycling for years. We've just been shipping our carefully sorted garbage to China, so it just piles up there instead of here. Until they stopped accepting shipments. Now "recyclers" in the US have to find other markets, or figure out how to do some actual recycling on their own. Since neither of those is as profitable as what they've been doing, it wouldn't be too surprising if some resort to just negating consumers' efforts by dumping what they collect wherever they think they can get away with it.
Is this fake recycling happening on any kind of scale?
This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization.
It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.
> Is this fake recycling happening on any kind of scale?
Guess who will be the lowest bidder?
Even if there is some actual recycling and the trash can be sold for a positive value, chances are that someone who only picks the easiest valuables and then illegally dumps the rest will be able to outbid a more responsible competitor. It's just the natural outcome of a disposal market and it is incredibly difficult to regulate away from that outcome.
If you look for "recycling crisis" or similar on Google News you'll find many more. I kind of knew that recycling wasn't as eco-efficient as it should be, but I had no idea just how bad it has been and it's getting worse. :(
On HN a few days ago I saw [0] that US cities are in fact actively reducing the scope of or removing their recycling programs. Id be furious too if I lived there (not sure if the UK fares any better)
"With China no longer accepting used plastic and paper, communities are facing steep collection bills, forcing them to end their programs or burn or bury more waste."
The phrasing is telling. "China no longer accepting", "communities are facing", "forcing them".
He is saying that the "random idiot" throws OPs waste in the river when disposing of it. As in the sorting the OP does, makes absolutely no difference because further down the chain they do not use the sorted waste for anything.
Considering the current state of recycling, it may be better to just throw our plastics away instead of putting them in recycling bins. With China turning away our recycling, some cities have started burning them (according to recent headlines - I don't have a source). I would think that would be worse for our environment that putting them in landfills.
According to the study by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research [1], 90% of ocean waste comes from 10 rivers - 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa. I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact on the oceans.
I think that how bad burning is depends upon the temperature. The level of control of the temperature and the sortedness of the plastic. Also whether the generated heat is actually used.
> I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact
It's not like all of that plastic is just domestic consumption. Right? We just exported our negative externalities. We don't really have a moral high-ground here. Even if you are a Jedi master.
I disagree. Tragedy of the Commons is a situation that is about the management of wildlife and natural resources for the purposes of maximizing yield, with the lesson being regulated consumption results in maximal natural harvest. Pollution is just a negative economic externality, or consequence of an action that is unseen by the participants, where more pollution is always worse. Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner.
Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons is not accurate. Cases of pollution in public waters are typically prime examples of tragedies of the commons. Just because it's a "negative economic externality" does not mean that it is not a tragedy of the commons. Even the wiki page for tragedy of the commons lists "water pollution" as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example...
Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.
Still, I disagree, the mainstay of Tragedy of the Commons is about resource management through regulation, which does not apply well to oceans plastics. The "Water Pollution" example provided is about water management for the purposes of irrigation, and pollution of groundwater that needed for said irrigation. Ocean plastics could be different, if its just the systematic degradation of an ecosystem, orthogonal to resource management interests.
i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does.
> the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner
That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?
More pollution isn’t necessarily worse. The polluting activity can produce benefits that outweigh the harm of the pollution.
Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.
the pasture equates to environment, the cows are industry [...]
That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem.
(Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.)
There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters.
More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.
Yes, I see. What I mean is that no single nation-state owns the oceans, so unlike most other examples of tragedy of the commons, where an organization has domain over the commons, the oceans are particularly difficult because there is no governing entity to resolve disagreements.
China. Indonesia. Philippines. Vietnam. Sri Lanka. This chart says it all: https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting... They are everyone's oceans and these countries are disproportionately choking them with plastic. Blame must be focused on them for meaningful change to happen.
I'm a foreigner living in one of these countries and it is shocking how absolutely careless and ignorant the majority of the population is with their plastic waste. Tons and tons of it. I see it every day. First hand. They view waterways as trash cans. Formal waste management is rare. Ask a local where to throw a plastic bottle and they are more than likely going to point to the ground.
Doesn't China buy up a lot of US / EU plastic waste via recycling programmes? Are these numbers offset because once China buys the waste, they simply dump it? Are we knowingly selling our plastic waste to a state that will miss-manage it? I know China lately has stopped buying plastic waste from states.
The article that GP linked uses data from 2010. It might take longer than two years for the effect of China refusing the US's trash to actually make a change in media graphics.
So called "developed" countries were once similarly careless with their waste. And their developed status was a result of such carelessness and the free expansion of their industries. It seems slightly unfair to expect developing countries to achieve a similar level of development via a sustainable methodology immediately, when that has not been the path for the richest countries in the world. (Given that developing countries are likely more concerned about the health of their population, and as such, focused on raising GDP, then the health of the ocean). Skipping to sustainable-led development is not impossible and obviously would be hugely advantageous for all, but it is still equally unfair to assign blame to such countries and label them as careless.
So we should give all developing countries a pass on destroying the habitability of the planet because we used to be as bad ourselves when we didn't know better? While it may be 'fair', I don't think that's sustainable. Even if these countries eventually become 'developed' and start behaving better, there will be new countries that will become 'developed' to take their place, and we'll just keep having these issues over and over until it's too late.
We're already (collectively) fucking the ecosystems and wiping out tons of species of flora and fauna, and making the living situation of billions (and possibly trillions) of life forms on this planet more toxic and less comfortable all in the name of convenience and growth. And it seems like we're on a trajectory of only making things worse in the future.
We need to start doing something about it, the developed countries by being an example and by taking advantage of our desirable trade status by providing incentives (trade, foreign aid, whatever) for developing countries to clean up their act sooner than later.
I don't dispute that it is unsustainable. I agree with the sentiment of what you are saying (and did in the end of my comment) despite you strawmanning my comment. I was just making the point that assigning blame to current developing countries is unfair because blame should be equally apportioned to today's developed countries who, throughout their period of industrialisation, kicked off the anthropocene.
I mean... no where I personally traveled in Indonesia had trash service. Maybe Jakarta and Java do, IDK. But it’s REALLY common to just dump your trash behind your place and burn it. It’s just what you do.
Malaysia was better, but I’m sure people there and in Taiwan still burn trash.
Asking people who are still burning trash to recycle might be a step too far just yet.
Of course they have the ability to recycle. They even have the ability to be 100% sustainable (e.g. Costa Rica). My point was on the matter of anthropocene blame culture.
The attitude to recycling needs to change. Right now it is something you have to do or something that makes you feel good about yourself. But it is fundamentally still an optional thing and an afterthought. It's nice that that iphone is packaged nicely but that wasn't the reason you bought it.
It needs to stop being optional and it needs to be something that is part of the product design process. Companies are not currently doing more than the bare minimum here because it is not their problem and mostly they do it to look good and there are a lot of companies for whom looking good is not much of a priority or for whom it is more about the looks than the reality. That needs to change. It needs to be their problem.
Sustainable production processes are not sustainable unless they consider the whole product cycle from production to discarding. And the simple truth is that everything gets discarded eventually. Forcing companies to think about the post sales life of their products changes how they build their products. Planned obsolescence is a lot less lucrative if you have to clean up the obsolete mess you helped create. If they are forced to think about efficiently recycling used products they produced, the economics change. Durability becomes a topic. Repairability as well and facilitating recycling by using materials that are easy to recover and products that are easy to disassemble.
Not producing the plastic is a better solution. Making disposing of that plastic the producers problem is the way to get there. It will cause them to rethink whether they need that plastic and what type of plastic to use. When dumping in a landfill, bio-degradable becomes a nice feature.
Landfills are already overflowing. Nobody likes living on a toxic waste dump. That's why the current madness of shipping waste halfway across the planet persists.
Third grade me believed that my recycling got recycled. But it didn’t. We paid extra taxes for corrupt deals to get it dumped in the ocean. That was my plastic that killed the whale. Why did they lie to me? I did always wonder where all the recycling plants were. Would it really have been worse if we had put it in the landfill?
Did your plastic really end up in the ocean? I'm guessing most of my plastic went to a landfill to be dealt with later or was shipped to a reprocessing facility. I understand your western guilt, but I'm guessing most of the plastic comes from places that aren't economically able to deal with their waste streams properly.
As already mentioned, many Western countries ( and others, like Japan ) shipped their plastic waste to China, until recently China refused to take it in anymore.
They had lots of poor people and their children separate it, wash it and slice it up into lots of strips that then get compressed together into bundles of 'raw feedstock'.
In this process lots gets washed away, the local water is no longer drinkable (so they have to buy water to drink from trucks that do the rounds).
Any guesses where the river leads to?
The ocean.
Also many plastics are hard to identify. So you were having kids with lighters burn a bit of that microwave tray (in black) to sniff it and then guess what the rest of the tray was made of. Then it would be put in one of the twenty or so piles of different types of plastic.
The Chinese President saw the film about all of this banned the imports and banned the film. That is how we got here.
The bit you didn't see (because the film was band) is how water intensive the process is. The leftover food on the microwaved tray does not clean itself. When it has been sliced up into lots of small pieces, washed and compressed into some block of recyclable stuff you get bits of it washed away to end up eventually in the ocean, even if it blights local fields first before the rains come.
I am not saying such thing. Quite the opposite. First of all, China was paid to receive it. And I am pointing to the fact that the Western plastic waste problem ( to the point of the comment saying if you're in the West, whatever happens in China is not something to feel guilty about ), is not limited to the West, when for processing it is sent to Asia.
That is completely wrong, you'll need to provide evidence here, it's strange so many replies say the same.
China pays for their recycling imports and get a good deal on shipping. Current tariff wars have changed this environment and now they won't take it.
California alone earns billions selling waste to them
> In 2016, California’s exports of recyclables amounted to 15 million tons, worth an estimated $4.6 billion. Some 62 percent of that exported material went to China in 2016
Tariffs are not an issue between China and the EU / Japan as they are with the U.S., that has little to do with China's decision to ban imports of trash globally.
You pay recycling companies to process waste, and the cost of doing so locally in the U.S. now after the Chinese ban is so high that it means cities cannot afford it, thus waste that would have been sent to China for recycling is now piling in landfills or being burnt.
That article contradicts your assertion that “China was paid to receive it”, it says, “Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton.“
Its not the worst solution. Problem is a load of it doesn't make it to the bin and everywhere that isn't carefully cleaned daily is covered in bits of plastic.
How is no-one linking to any sources in this thread?
Seriously, it's easy to be misinformed on this topic, mostly because the truth is hidden and because people make all sorts of claims without any evidence.
Third grade me was told that partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (margarine, crisco, etc) was healthier for my heart vs other fats.
For 30+ years "they" were basically slowly killing us. Whether they knew it or not.
In this case - with "recycling" - they likely knew what was really going on - but because money - they sold us a bill of goods; though we happily went along with it, too.
I mean, the article mentions right away that it's in the Philippines, and the whale's stomach was full of rice bags as sold in local grocery stores. It also says the Philippines is one of the worst plastic polluters in the world. Flagellate yourself as much as you want, but you can't take much blame for this one.
The thing is non-bio-degradability is a feature not a bug when you want to preserve the contents from microbes and possibly other larger things. There were even a few cases with Honda wiring based on soy leading to recalls from it attracting rats. They even tried capsaicin tape wraps and it didn't work well.
Government did that? They had no reason to unless it's policies were dictated by someone who stood to benefit from such a thing. And then you shouldn't simply blame the government who is just an intermediary in this case.
My reading was that electric cars were edged out because of poor battery life compared to gas. Edison tried for many years to invent a better battery, and failed.
This is true. Edison would have loved for cars to be electric and stood to profit a lot from it. He was also great friends with Henry Ford. Folks act like there's a conspiracy here. 1910 battery tech was pretty primitive. We didn't even discover Lithium tech until the 70s.
The motor speed controller was essentially a giant multi-tap resistor (such a motor controller is still used for most automobile HVAC blower speed control, because it is cheap to manufacture - though PWM systems are becoming more common in newer vehicles).
Electric motors were brushed series or shunt wound devices (not permanent magnet, not brushless, not multi-phased). Today's electric cars are virtually all 3-phase systems with a controller that converts from DC to 3-phase AC, with appropriate brushless motors.
Major power losses all along the way, coupled with poor battery technology. It is honestly amazing that they were able to get any workable range at all in the vehicles that were manufactured.
> The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly known as the American Dietetic Association), Dietitians of Canada and the British Dietetic Association[6] state that well-planned vegan diets can meet all human nutrient requirements and are appropriate for all stages of life, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence,[1] while the German Society for Nutrition does not recommend vegan diets for children, adolescents, or during pregnancy and breastfeeding.[7] The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics adds that well-planned vegan diets are also appropriate for older adults and athletes, and that vegan diets may reduce the risk of certain health conditions, such as cancer.[1]
> Special attention may be necessary to ensure that a vegan diet will provide adequate amounts of vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, calcium, iron, zinc, and iodine.[1][2] These nutrients may be available in plant foods, with the exception of vitamin B12, which can only be obtained from B12-fortified vegan foods or supplements. Iodine may also require supplementation, such as using iodized salt.[8]
There's well-known athletes that are vegan as well:
Our bodies evolved to make us omnivores, I don't see why we should restrain ourselves to such extent.
What we need is moderation and sustainable means of production. This is clearly misaligned with our current lifestyles though. [0]
In a few generations we went from "meat/fish is a once in a week delicacy" to "cheap meat at every single meal" (see the so called "meat lovers" thinking they're entitled to 2 pounds of bacon a day).
Talk to your grandparents or great grandparents if they're still alive, they solved sustainability with low tech and no money, at the cost of convenience and comfort obviously, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
> What we need is moderation and sustainable means of production. This is clearly misaligned with our current lifestyles though. [0]
> In a few generations we went from "meat/fish is a once in a week delicacy" to "cheap meat at every single meal" (see the so called "meat lovers" thinking they're entitled to 2 pounds of bacon a day).
> Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets.
> The researchers found a global shift to a “flexitarian” diet was needed to keep climate change even under 2C, let alone 1.5C. This flexitarian diet means the average world citizen needs to eat 75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs, while tripling consumption of beans and pulses and quadrupling nuts and seeds. This would halve emissions from livestock and better management of manure would enable further cuts.
> The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good.
My phrasing wasn't the best, but I'm not taking any moral ("what is good") stands here.
If we can solve all the issues with moderate and sustainable meat/fish/eggs/dairy consumption, or even vegetarianism, I fail to see the appeal going the extra mile and going full vegan (unless we go into a moral argument but I don't think it's the point here), knowing that it most likely requires closer monitoring for deficiency. I might be wrong, but to me it seems to be the path of least resistance.
I don't have time to look into it longer, but typing "enough resources for vegan world" in google gives me these. Either I chose very poor keywords, or veganism isn't the messiah that'll save us all. I tend to think that moderation is the key in pretty much any domain.
I'm not advocating only veganism but I think what you wrote was a nice summary:
> In a few generations we went from "meat/fish is a once in a week delicacy" to "cheap meat at every single meal" (see the so called "meat lovers" thinking they're entitled to 2 pounds of bacon a day).
None of this means a vegan diet might not be healthy for _some subset_ of the population.
No one on earth has ANY diet that can be said to be "healthy" for anyone and everyone.
Putting allergens, auto-immune disorders, GI disorders, etc. aside, people have been shown to process various energy sources with varying degrees of consequences.
> None of this means a vegan diet might not be healthy for _some subset_ of the population
> No one on earth has ANY diet that can be said to be "healthy" for anyone and everyone.
Why the hair splitting? Obviously nobody is claiming that. If the word "healthy" is supposed to be used in that way it wouldn't be useful for anything.
"Well-planned" is easier said than done, and requires artificial supplements (we don't have the right hardware for B12 production and plants don't have it).
I personally don't think its a good idea for children unless you really know what you are doing and monitor things closely.
> "Well-planned" is easier said than done, and requires artificial supplements (we don't have the right hardware for B12 production and plants don't have it).
What's so hard or wrong with taking supplements or B12 enriched foods you might have daily anyway(e.g. soy milk)?
As far as I understand, our plants lack B12 because B12 comes from soil and pesticide use + sanitising robs plants of the B12 we'd normally get from them. Modern farming practices mean some farm animals have to be given B12 supplements for similar reasons so you're not getting B12 from how you'd traditionally be getting it anyway if you're going from that angle.
> I personally don't think its a good idea for children unless you really know what you are doing and monitor things closely.
Are people that bring up kids with no other monitoring than letting them eat meat going to fare much better?
Is there documented evidence than vegan parents are regularly putting their kids at risk more-so than non-vegans or this is a theoretical objection?
Cows and sheep have special cultures of B12-producing bacteria held in seperate chambers of their digestive tracts. Rabbits pass food multiple times so they can get B12 from bacteria.
Are you that B12 is abundant enough in natural soil? When I looked before, I couldn't find any reliable natural source humans could reasonably consume.
> Cows and sheep have special cultures of B12-producing bacteria held in seperate chambers of their digestive tracts. Rabbits pass food multiple times so they can get B12 from bacteria.
Are they able to do this without any special supplements on modern farms though (e.g. with cows on antibiotics eating grain instead of grass)?
> Are you that B12 is abundant enough in natural soil? When I looked before, I couldn't find any reliable natural source humans could reasonably consume.
I'm not sure to be honest. My point is modern farming interrupts how nutrients would normally get into our food chain anyway so I don't see the big deal in taking supplements directly.
As far as I can tell cows can still produce B12 with the help of their symbiotic bacteria and digestive tract, and humans can't.
The point is that it takes a lot of attention and artificial help to have a healthy vegan diet. That's not great for children or half-committed adults.
Eating meat, or at least eggs or dairy, cuts out a lot of that effort. The animals have already done the work of turning a vegan diet into the large variety of nutrients that we need.
The problem is that micro-plastics are eaten by the fish and end up in our plate.
It gets worse because pollutants in fish bioaccumulate a lot (fish eats smaller fish, gets eaten by larger fish etc.).
Fish high in the food chain like salmon have a lot higher concentration of these pollutants, to the point that it's not even recommended food for pregnant women anymore.
Farmed fish also creates bioaccumulation, because it gets fed other smaller fish, like sardines.
Why hasn’t Amazon, Costco, or Walmart used their clout to effect a positive change? Have you seen all the plastic and unnecessary packaging in the goods they sell. The size of the packaging relative to the actual product is so ridiculous sometimes.
Did you read the article? It says that "more than half of that waste comes from just five countries in East and Southeast Asia — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam". All the companies you listed are irrelevant there.
They should start thinking about producing enough waste for themselves if they're unable to get by without imports, this creates a huge dependency on the US and most developed countries are completely self-sufficient when it comes to waste production.
Well.. Walmart is a large chain of supermarkets in China, and Costco operate there too, so they're not entirely irrelevant (http://www.wal-martchina.com/english/walmart/index.htm). Fortunately China has like many countries moved to forcing shops to charge for plastic bags so plastic bag waste has gotten a lot less bad in China at least.
It would be great if businesses decided to differentiate themselves from their competition by using biodegradable, environmentally friendly packaging. I wouldn't mind shopping with them instead, even at a slightly higher cost, just so that I as a consumer don't feel like I'm killing our marine life for no good reason.
I once had a large garbage bag of them get caught by the wind and they blew all over the yard. It took a couple hours to pick them all up, as they'd dance away from my fingertips.
I found that it barely helps. You end up being In a minority of a minority. Low prices will trump environment friendliness or even convenience sometimes.
I routinely reply on Amazon's feedback that packaging was clearly excessive whenever I am given the change to do so. To receive a micro SD card in (1) a plastic container, inside a (2) cardboard container, inside an (3) A4 Amazon cardboard envelope is bordering criminal.
True, at least the stuff that's not glossed up with bonded plastic coating.
Easy to DIY recycle at home, too. Makes good mulch for the garden, just flatten it out and lay it underneath whenever you put compost/soil down anywhere.
Not so sure about the packing tape that inevitably comes with it.
But their latest option is going to be “reusable plastic bags”, which means stronger plastic bags, containing more plastic, which many customers will still treat as disposable.
I’m confused as to how that’s a step forward.
How fucking hard is it to use the trolley to move your goods to your car, and then into your cupboard? You managed to collect all the goods and get them to the register without any bags...
> How fucking hard is it to use the trolley to move your goods to your car, and then into your cupboard?
Addressing the sibling comments on this:
I don't know if it's common elsewhere, but some supermarkets in the UK have hand-held self-scanners that you can use while you walk around the shop. You pick things up, scan them with the scanner and put them in your (reusable) bags that you brought. Once you've got everything you go to a separate till where everything you've scanned comes up and you pay and go. Your groceries are already bagged and that makes it lots easier to unload into the house at the other end.
I've noticed as a result that some shoppers turn up with much more substantial reusable bags than the normal 'bag for life' variety. Ones made from fabric that are constructed to stay open.
It's surely less convenient than paying for and using a cheap bag.
Also, it would work in the specific situation you're describing (driving up to the store, parking back close to your house), but it doesn't really help in a lot of other use cases, so it can't be a universal solution.
The trouble with paper bags is that they don't biodegrade without oxygen, which is what happens when you bury paper under tons of other material in a land fill. So the paper and the plastic are both there 100 years later, but the paper takes up more space in the long run because it doesn't compress as small. Unfortunately there's no good answer here yet that I've seen.
Not only that it was all pretty easy to recycle and often reused. None of the countless types of plastic, and composite materials that can't be currently recycled.
I do wonder when humanity will change our ways to stop wrecking the only planet we have, while there's still a chance.
First step is acknowledging plastic is a systemic problem that is rapidly becoming more trouble than it is worth. Then regulation to require degradable alternatives, re-use and dramatically reduce our consumption in the first place.
Or do we just keep relying on the economic myth of infinite growth until collapse? Which, of course, doesn't even make sense economically.
Plastic is just an example. Greenhouse gases are another.
The system in which it's a systemic problem already has and will continue to introduce other such problems. And it's more than just that "under capitalism there is no incentive to eliminate negative externalities", which is certainly true; without a way to avoid unaccountable concentrations of power, concentrated power will reinforce itself and find a way to cheat any system oriented toward the greater good.
I'm not convinced it's possible in the long run to avoid the existence of these problems. Our best hope is faster and faster problem recognition, and magically broad solutions that work faster than the problems' deterioration.
Agree with most of this. I don't want to though - I find it inherently depressing that we simply can't or won't do better. I want my kids to have a half decent life. We seem destined to keep right on trucking until we drive right off the cliff of collapse.
I don't agree it has to be the way of capitalism though, it's a problem of unfettered capitalism. We have more than enough history to know. Post war we were happy to constrain and limit capitalism to give an unprecedented period of rising standards with rising regulation, services and low inequality. Neoliberalism broke it. Rowing back the excess power and politicisation of unions was one thing - removing them as a usable concept for two generations entirely another. If negative externalities can be ignored, then regulate until they can't, even if it has to be an entirely arbitrary tax on plastic, emissions or whatever.
No country seems willing to go first, so we're stuck with the lowest common denominator of international agreements. Agreements where one or two derail any chance of global action and the rest won't get on without unanimity. Which starts to look insane.
I don't mean it has to be the way of capitalism, but I've become pretty cynical about how long the kind of capitalism we'd prefer can last, precisely because capitalism (which is actually superbly poorly defined wherever it's used and you and I likely aren't even referring to the same thing in the end) seems to inherently enable concentrations of wealth and power.
That said, I recognize that I don't know what the right alternative should be.
I've taken to burning paper trash to offset the CO2 depletion caused by greenies' reduction programs. I can't do it alone, it takes a team effort to ensure there's more CO2 in the air for plants to breathe in the future!
"According to the U.N. Environment Programme, some 9 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year. According to a 2017 study from the environmental group Ocean Conservancy, more than half of that waste comes from just five countries in East and Southeast Asia — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam."
Does anyone know how this fits in with plastic 'recycling'? These nations either were or are big importers of waste plastic.
I don't really want to separate out my waste, only for it to be dumped in the ocean somewhere else.
More emphasis is needed on the Reduce and Reuse aspects of recycling. The ordering of the slogan is intentional: Reduce, Reuse, and only after those we should then Recycle.
How can we better minimise the amount of plastic that is thrown out in the first place?
I'd like to know this as well. The only solution I know is to buy everything at a local farmers market and make everything yourself which seems extremely impractical for most people.
How for example do I not end up with waste shampoo bottles? Its not like I can reuse them because I don't have any way to get shampoo without another bottle.
Not sure much can be done here without global investment and adherence to never dumping plastics that are not biodegradable.
The solution must be possible, but finding the will and the support to convince every country in the world to switch sounds incredibly tough.
The US could flex its economic muscle here and say that it will not accept products from abroad unless they're packaged according to its new standards within the next 5 years. And of course adhere to the standards internally as well to take a global lead on this issue.
> global investment and adherence to never dumping plastics that are not biodegradable.
Or not producing the unnecessary packaging in the first place. We really don't need every single cucumber wrapped in its own plastic film. (Like it's common in the shops recently...) Lots of other packaging is completely useless as well.
We may not strictly need it, but it is there for a reason. Be it less pesticides (my organic cucumbers come wrapped, the non-organic don't) or less waste (because damaged cucumbers are thrown away).
The real question is, how does the plastic end up in the ocean? Bonus points for: can there be a biodegradable replacement?
They don't spend much time on the shelf at the grocery store. They last longer in the supply chain, which means they can be shipped from farther, where it is even cheaper to produce. Make no mistake, the plastic wrap is there for one reason and one reason alone: to allow producers to make more fucking money.
Take a canvas bag, wet it, put your vegetables in it, put the bag into the fridge - they'll last weeks. You can do this with a plastic wrap as well... but why?
There's no such thing as "biodegradable" plastics. Plant-based plastics only biodegrade in commercial composting facilities. This is not something that's commonly known.
The discussion here was initially geared towards trying to reduce plastics but leaned more over the food that people eat. Just a causal way of observing how people tend to veer away from the point of the original issue needing to be resolved.
I've been wondering how a fine on companies' products that are found in the wild could affect their behaviour.
Of course, that means forcing (degradation-resistant) mandatory identification of anything at any point of the supply chain, but I feel like it would incentive companies to, at the very least, educate their customers and encourage them to cleanly get rid of their product. It could also shift them to more eco-friendly packaging, and I wouldn't be surprised if some companies decided to implement their own recycling ecosystem.
Our government recently asked citizens to submit proposals on a few themes, so I ended up submitting that very one [1]. I am curious to see how it will go, or whether it will be considered at all.
Another cynical thread derail on HN. The serious problems with plastics, out of control plastic use and waste is swiftly trivialized into an individualized 'consumer problem' and 'meat eating' problem ie let's not do anything.
The first comment is splitting hairs about what kind of plastic waste with an irrelevant link to a story about plastic nets? This when the article clearly shows and mentions 40kg of plastic bags and there are thousands of articles and studies on the toxic impact of plastic on marine life. These kind of irresponsible comments are a serious problem as it makes readers feel we live in an uncaring world.
Eat less fish? Only those who haven't thought about the world or those who profit from plastic respond in this cavalier fashion to serious global issues. Not a word about the packaging industry, regulating the use of better packing and nets, or the inability of consumers to make choices because race to the bottom leaves no effective alternatives.
Instead lets dissipate responsibility, affect 'helplessness' and do nothing while the destruction of the planet continues unabated. This is a small minded ideology that puts the 'freedom' of a few to profit without constraints above all else.
There was an article on the front page recently where they found plastic particles in the cells of creatures in the Marianas Trench. It's plastic all the way down.
Sorry I didn't see this when you posted but here are stories I found on the topic, the news doesn't cover concentration but does mention they found plastic in a higher percentage of samples versus earlier years surveys did not find nearly that much:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/02/deep-...
source article:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.1806...
I distinctly remember reading the researchers made sure their probes and sensors were plastic free somehow before they sampled the digestive systems.
Not uncommon at all. Every organization that has anything to do with marine rescue (including pelagic or shore birds) has to deal with this kind of thing routinely.
Isn't it going as intended Ballen whales have bad design, their filter mouth is used for filtering plankton out of the sea water, now they are vunerable to plastics.
I eat McDonald's once or twice a month and I'm looked down upon for eating junk food, meanwhile a whale eats nothing but _literal_ junk and it makes the news and the whale is called a victim? Something doesn't add up here.
You had a choice. The whale didn’t. Its also not that smart enough to reason about stuff. If someone forced you to eat plastic for the better part of a year, you’d be called a victim too.
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/ocean-plastic-made-disca...
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
Getting ocean based fishing to not use plastics will be very difficult but moving the majority of fishing into farms by making it more profitable could very well make that problem go away by reducing ocean fishing in general.
Make trade restrictions on non-farmed fish and the demand for ocean fish from nations fishing with plastic would hopefully go down. If fish from the ocean now contains plastic it would probably be a health boon to only accept farm fish anyway.
You might create a new problem of corporate fish farms decimating local fishermans livelihoods, which sucks. But at this rate they will overfish and pollute their own jobs away anyway.
Quota systems and controls keep fisheries from immediately collapsing, but there is a real difference between "won't collapse in 3 seasons" and "sustainabe over generations." The wider ecosystem effects are not really known. Big ocean, millions of species, lots of side effects.. bycatch, pollution. There are species we don't know exist going extinct, almost certainly, because of commercial fishing.
Commercial fishing is something we need to grow out of. On land, hunting is rarely a conservation issue today. Habitat is the problem. In the ocean, there is no reason (besides fishing) why we can't have mostly undisturbed ecosystems.
Agriculture replaced market hunting. Sustainable agriculture can replace market fishing. It's the responsible choice to make as a society.
> The wider ecosystem effects are not really known.
that's not really true. it is pretty well known that there are major detrimental effects of fish farms. of course we are still learning more and more, but we know at least something. salmon farms tend to take out good stuff from the ocean (fish) and return bad stuff (disease, waste, genetic changes, etc.).
> There are species we don't know exist going extinct, almost certainly, because of commercial fishing.
there are species we know about going extinct due in part to commercial fishing. for example, the southern resident orcas have been struggling heavily due to commercial fishing, pollution, poisoning, capture, river damns, salmon farms, and more. there are very clear actionable things that can be done to save them, but none are even close to being acted upon. it is possible the population there has passed a point of no return such that that particular population will go extinct. they have struggled to even birth new orcas, and due to captures 30-50 years ago, they don't have the leadership they are used to. their behavior has already began to showcase how hard it is for them to even find salmon, as the normally tight knit pods have been seen breaking up to find salmon. there was a month in 2018 where almost none of the pod was seen for an entire month by whale watchers and scientists, an event that hasn't happened in decades or ever since they've started being observed.
Tree farms seem to work, iirc the amount of forested land in the US actually started increasing in the past few years.
Two points though.
(1) Even some of the worst practices are at least relatively localized. For a given tonage of fish, commercial fishing fleets affect far larger areas, with the most productive areas usually most affected. I think practices need to improve a lot, but even with the current below-par methods... Imagine a ranch with terrible environmental practices. They indiscriminately poison predators, overgraze, use bad fertilizers, run effluent into streams... That 1,000 acre ranch is surrounded by 100,000 acres of wilderness (or good tree farms). The ranch is bad, but enough wilderness can dilute its effects.
(2) A lot depends on the species of fish. With land agriculture, we tend to farm a handful of species that lend well to farming. Before farming, people ate different species. Still, agriculture didn't produce bear meat, otter or some other hard-to-raise species to suit the preferences of hunter-gatherers. With aquaculture, we're still often trying to farm otter and bear.
Tilapia & carp (for example) have a long history of aquaculture. It's cheap and efficient and can be done in environmentally sound ways. The problem is that salmon (raised in environmentally unsound oceanic pens) sells for 5X per kg.
To me that means regulation can be sharp. If salmon, cod or tuna are replaced by more agriculturally enclined species... that's a reasonable compromise, IMO. We can have fish, just not any fish.
http://www.alexandramorton.ca/salmon-confidential-booklet/
Tree farms are also not a forest. There's no real ecosystem there. They're just rows of commercially viable trees planted and left until they're old enough to harvest.
Note: I am not a ecogeek, I just have a brother in law who is a wildlife biologist and works at a firm that does this stuff for the state, and, I regularly recreate (dirt bike, mountain bike, deer hunt) in a few different "working forests" here in oregon. These working forests aren't pristine old growth, but then again I wouldn't dirt bike etc in a virgin forest either.
- I started eating animal products again for health reason; I believe many people can thrive on a vegetarian or vegan diet, but I couldn't. It makes me unhappy, but there I am.
- Similarly vegetarian and vegan for a long time, my wife started craving animal products the minute she got pregnant. And after birth she became very ill, and survived on chicken broth. In short, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
- There is no reason for anyone to eat meat twice a day; and above all there is no reason for heavy subsidies so that everyone can eat meat cheaply twice a day.
So my preferred solution: animals raised humanely and sustainably to allow for healthy, limited consumption of animal products, with products priced at actual cost in order to eliminate over-consumption.
It would be more impactful get three people to reduce meat by 50% than to get one to reduce by 100%. Unfortunately, "meals that don't have a chunk of meat as their centerpiece but that are still far from vegetarian" does not have the same ideological zeal as veganism (speaking in the context of a western industrial background).
When eating out (again: western cuisine), the meat-free choices are getting better and better and I applaud that, but it seems to just get more polarized. In aggregate, either vegan or an ever bigger focus on a meat centerpiece is hardly an improvement. Low meat dishes seem to have a serious branding problem.
When eating out, I still eat vegetarian unless I know where the restaurant got its meat from. Increasing numbers of restaurants in Amsterdam do care where their meat comes from, fortunately.
Farming animals for meat has its problems but it does impose much stricter controls on the inputs. No farmer raising livestock for human consumption is feeding their animals contaminated food and water if there are other options available. If DuPont is upstream of your farm you're probably SOL but that's the exception not the rule.
[0] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-03-09/un-report-supp...
It means exactly what you heard. The USDA Organic label doesn't mean that organic crops are sustainable. The organic label doesn't address problems associated with commercial agriculture: monocultures, wide-spread use of pesticides, fertilizer run-off into streams/rivers/ponds/lakes causing them to become hypoxic, destruction of wetlands to create arable land etc.
I think the way you make this work is using meat for flavor rather than as a centerpiece- a lot of noodle dishes from China do this (e.g. https://thewoksoflife.com/2014/11/dan-dan-noodles/).
(I say "diaspora Asian" because I can only talk about what we get under the Asian brand in Europe, which for all I know might be completely unrelated to what actually happens in the namesake regions. But that's completely unrelated to the point we are making here: meat for flavor instead of for status, kudos to them)
So, work to get people to try a different appreciate meatless options; as you note, they are getting better. You can reduce meat consumption by eating meat-centered meals less frequently as well as eating some-but-less meat in each meal.
It's not like meat is a natural part of every dish that must be eradicated at some kind of effort to produce a meatless dish, though I'd agree that dishes they start with a meat dish and take that approach are often among the worst of meatless dishes.
We should be calling for people _limiting_ their meat consumption in a way that works for them. It's far more effective to have 50% of the population limit their meat consumption than 5% eschew meat all together.
I personally eat meat about once a week, and that's something that's worked for me. I also try to source my meat and dairy from humane sources. And it's been a minimal effort. I don't feel that I've been denied meat. I can still have it once in a while, and it does not affect me in my daily life whatsoever.
Yea, this is pretty common (as many comments above yours will also attest to). “Vegetarian” and “vegan” are awful diet plans, in that they only tell you what not to eat. People coming from a standard diets based around meat/cheese/eggs undoubtedly have a hard time, and often become sick.
Fortunately, you don’t need that much knowledge. This stuff has been figured out by dietitians. If you’re interested in what a plant-based diet could look like, check out nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger has a “daily dozen” checklist that will pretty easily get you to a very healthy diet. It includes: cruciferous vegetables, other vegetables, whole grains, flax, berries, other fruits, spices (turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, etc), greens, nuts/seeds, beans/legumes, water, and exercise. If you consistently knock all 12 of those out, you’ll be healthy as a horse.
it's a christian cultural thing, mostly catholic. because the church decided fish aren't meat.
Take a multi-vitamin supplement, some linseed oil for the essential fatty acids and maybe some mineral supplement if appropriate according to the blood test.
You should do that anyway no matter your diet.
Dr Garth Davis: Americans have become obsessed with Protein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQCt3IhaUtU&feature=youtu.be...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/supplements-are-a-30...
From the linked article:
> Overall, multivitamins are not recommended for the generally healthy. There’s just no clear evidence to prove that they have any benefit. A 2013 analysis of 27 trials involving more than 400,000 people concluded that there was no clear evidence that they reduce cardiovascular disease, cancer risks, or reduce all-cause mortality.
This makes no sense.
You have a vegan diet to reduce cardiovascular disease, cancer risks, or reduce all-cause mortality.
You take vitamin supplements to prevent potential deficiencies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d1Ca6SsKfE
http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19562864/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27886704/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21139125/
The need for vitamins and essential fatty acids is scientifically proven.
Better safe than sorry. Multi-vitamin supplements are cheap enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid
So it is possible.
All experts recommend vitamin B12 supplements for vegans, vegetarians and older people.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4042564/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17959839
https://www.b12-vitamin.com/algae/
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency:
> Vitamin B12 deficiency in the US and the UK is estimated to occur in about 6 percent of those under the age of 60, and 20 percent of those over the age of 60.[1] In Latin America rates are estimated at 40 percent and they may be as high as 80 per cent in parts of Africa and Asia.[1]
There are other real problems than plant-based diets.
For example I rarely have meat-based food waste, however, I have all kinds of Fruit, and veg food waste do to spoilage.
Meat is easy to freeze and preserve, it is hard to freeze a salad ;)
My muscles were literally blocked to make that movement of my arms, swiping a plate of meal to the bin. Around ~25 other people did not have any problems with it, so I guess the problem is in me.
We should buy and cook less food, or maybe have a quick way of sharing left-over food with people who are hungry.
It looks like the number of obese [1] and undernourished [2] humans are both currently 700-800+ million.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5477817
2. http://www.fao.org/3/I9553EN/i9553en.pdf
(Yes, take less on your plate, save leftovers for future meals, etc.)
Whether your concerns are environmental, for health reasons, or about the ethical treatment of animals, you can adjust your diet as much or as little as you want and still have some sort of impact. Just like you don't have to sell your car and bike to work every day in order to cut down on your footprint by, say, biking to the nearby stores instead of driving.
And honestly it seems a bit selfish to not at least try the less environmentally damaging option.
* all cuts of steak
* chicken
* pork
* salmon, tuna, mackerel, eel, sea urchin, shrimp...
Ground beef seems like low hanging fruit, making convincing sushi seems more difficult.
> And honestly it seems a bit selfish to not at least try the less environmentally damaging option.
I can think of several reasons people may not want artificial meat. Maybe they think it's gross (test tube meat) or it goes against tradition and culture. I don't think the "shaming" angle works well to get people to change their diet. I know I immediately tune out or get defensive when people tell me what I should do with my personal life. Especially since almost everything is "bad" for the environment. So unless someone lives in a dirt hut, eating veggies they grow themselves, wearing clothes made from their own hemp and never traveling, I really don't take what they have to say about the environment into consideration.
But red meat doesn't cause very much cancer. There's a low risk of colorectal cancer, and red meat (even processed red meat) increases that risk by a small amount.
To prevent one case of cancer from red meat a large number of people have to give it up.
I disagree with parent poster. If people can assess risk they'll see a small increase of a low risk, and decide there are other things to worry about. If people can't assess risk (the vast majority of people) they'll decide if they like bacon enough to keep eating it, just as they do with alcohol or anything else.
We used to give cigarettes out in Red Cross parcels. https://www.loc.gov/resource/anrc.08956/
It did? Where? In what world?
Here in America, which has much lower smoking rates than many other developed nations and has indeed lowered the smoking rate a lot since ~50 years ago, there's tons of young people taking up smoking and "vaping". A bunch of my tech coworkers do.
It’s also a huge part of family life. These dishes have been passed down through the generations and it’s actually moderately offensive to suggest that it’s not socially acceptable to eat what my family has been eating for as far back as anyone can remember. I know my children are growing up learning to love all of the dishes their family cooks and enjoys together.
I don't trust anything that comes from these people. They don't have the ability to properly test their hypotheses.
Other people's opinion about my diet isn't one of those factors. You can't shame someone out of doing something they enjoy.
> Maybe you enjoy meat, but if you also enjoy many non-meat foods, you can eat those and still fulfill the need to eat and the need to enjoy food
But I like eating meat so I will continue to do that in addition to eating other foods I also enjoy.
>We don't need to eat meat or fish at all to be healthy
Is still heavily disputed in nutrition circles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864
There's currently quite a bit of debate over whether or not plant-based diets are better than other diets, but not over whether or not they are healthy.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704
[2] https://jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(16)31192-3/fulltex...
https://www.eatrightpro.org/practice/position-and-practice-p...
>POSITION STATEMENT It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage.
And it was never actually a big deal in the first place, because they have maintained more-or-less the same position for several decades, and the removal didn't actually change their position in a significant way.
https://retractionwatch.com/2015/11/16/inaccuracies-and-omis...
>Following the release of the “Vegetarian Diets” position paper, the Academy Positions Committee received correspondence from respected experts in the area of vegetarian nutrition, including Academy members, expressing concern about what they cited as inaccuracies in the paper. Upon receipt of the memoranda, the APC sent the paper out for a secondary external blind, unbiased review. Based on the result of these reviews, as well as the received correspondence from experts in the field, the APC voted to remove the paper from the Journal with the goal to revise and publish at a future date. Until then, individuals should refer to the “Vegetarian Diets” position paper published in the July 2009 Journal (Volume 109, Issue 7, pages 1266-1282).
This is the 2009 version:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19562864/
>It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
Furthermore, most similar organizations take similar positions
https://www.livekindly.co/myth-buster-vegan-diets-are-unheal...
Even for babies?
>[Vegetarian and vegan] diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
From an economic/environmental perspective, severely limiting your intake of animal products is nearly as good as avoiding them completely, and nutritionally you're on much more solid ground.
I was vegan for 5 years and about 6 months ago started eating meat and dairy again for reasons unrelated to food. I was raised in a household that ate meat with almost every meal. I have personally experienced pros and cons to both lifestyles, but would argue that in practice, a vegan diet is healthier for most people due to the nature of food options available to them.
Thanks for sharing & best wishes for your family's health. I hope you have allowed for proper vaccinations.
As I continued being vegan, I realized that the spectrum which is actually important is raw vs. processed foods, and less so meat vs plants. I think a lot of people who "do vegan right" end up just eat less processed crap in general and end up being healthy, not necessarily because of eating less/no meat. However, there are vegans that get on the "oreo diet" and just eat junk food 24/7 - those are not healthy vegans.
Thank you for the kind words, and likewise.
I agree 100%. Some of the biggest benefits of any diet are obtained by getting back to simple foods and away from highly processed foods/carbs mixed with seed oils and sugars. Ditch that stuff and you'll likely do well on just about any diet.
I really don’t think any nutritional scientist would claim it’s impossible to be healthy as a vegetarian. Whether it’s easier with meat or feasible for all people is something else
It is impossible for some people. Nutrition claims should always be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, the advice surrounding cholesterol over the past 30 years.
For example, the following highly processed and sugary foods are considered vegan/vegetarian-friendly: French fries from most fast-food chains, Oreo cookies, Fritos corn chips, Lays potato chips, unfrosted Pop-Tarts, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Graham Crackers.
I would not trust an endorsement of a diet from a health organization. Over the past 30-40 years most modern countries have been experiencing a surge in chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and strokes. If you look at the places around the globe where Western diets have been introduced (e.g., Hawaii and Polynesia, Aboriginal tribes of Australia, Inuit in polar regions etc.), you see wrecked health markers for those populations after abandoning their local indiginous diets. Health organizations have done a disservice in the realm of nutrition and health.
Bollocks! Meat is one of the healthiest and nutritionally rich sources of food available! Toxic transfat is made from polyunsaturated vegetable oils, and diabetes causing sugars is from grains and high sugar plants! The easiest weight loss in the world is a meat based, 70% kcal from animal fat, minimal vegetable, zero carb diet: lost 80 lbs/yr myself on it without an extra step taken to exercise. Just sat on my @ss and lost the weight! Veganism as healthy is a big fat unhealthy meme!
The environmental footprint of a vegan diet is way lower than even that of a pescavore.
Supplements have challenges too (and in fact many studies show supplements to be of little value). In order to attain sufficient B12 via supplements, a person needs to consume many times the RDA value. For example, only 10 mcg of a 500 mcg oral supplement is absorbed by healthy people.
So while technically you may need minimal amounts of B12, it remains an essential vitamin. Getting it in a format which is both absorbable and bioavailable is not trivial and serves as a clue that human physiology evolved in an ecosystem which, to varying degrees, involved eating animals.
Note: For now I'll set aside probable/common deficiencies among vegans/vegetarians in B6, heme iron, the vitamins A, D3, K2, micronutrients and fatty acids DHA, CLA, Carnatine, Carnosine, Taurine, Creatine and others. In fairness, a western/standard american diet can also score poorly in many nutrients.
I can't find much support for B12 in these foods in online databases.
If these must be home-made or of similar quality, supplementation of B12 is still going to be important.
Edit: and you need look no further than Harvard's explanation of how to become a vegetarian and choose your foods to ensure a healthy diet: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/becoming-a-ve...
How many ordinary people do you think have sufficient understanding of these factors to become healthy vegetarians?
I'll admit it's currently not that easy to follow a strictly plant based diet if you mostly eat in restaurants and don't live in a first tier Western city.
If you're willing to do your own shopping and mostly eat at home it's actually not only easy but really enjoyable to take back control of your health and what you eat.
The standard American diet is composed of 70% plant-based foods, which is the same ratio found in the Mediterranean diet which is lauded as one of the most healthful.
It's not the meat that's causing the issues, it's the processed plant foods and plant-derived oils that destroy one's health on a western diet. Or in other words, the horrible food quality. Any diet that doesn't include processed plant foods and oils will be an improvement from one that does, regardless of whether it includes meat.
I'm asserting that it's harder to be nutrient deficient given a meat/fish-based diet. The only "work" in this diet is not eating too much.
> western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases
Mostly due to overconsumption, not due to the composition of the diet. Controlling for caloric intake eliminates most differences in health outcomes between the various diets, assuming no nutrient deficiencies are present.
I think you will have to back that statement up if you want to be taken seriously. I for one am certainly not going to stop eating fish and meat, I have been a vegetarian for over a year and I did not fancy it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704
[2] https://jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(16)31192-3/fulltex...
This is such a mainstream statement that it seems to me entirely reasonable to omit a source. You can find dozens of them by looking up "vegetarianism" on wikipedia and navigating to the "health effects" section.
It also makes me believe less in the statements, since there is not apparently any sources that can be used to back the statements up.
Only in circles where alternative medicine is practiced, health-advice taken from unscholared internet-blogs and science is generally shunned.
This very extreme claim certainly needs a source to have any sort of credibility.
More than a third of East Asians have a deficiency in one of the enzymes involved in the breakdown of alcohol (aldehyde dehydrogenase). They cannot properly metabolize it.
Inuits have mutations in genes that code for enzymes that desaturate carbon-carbon bonds in fatty acids. This means they can handle diets that are very high in certain types of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.
A mutation of the melanocortin-4-receptor (MC4R) leads to a markedly increased preference for high fat, but a significantly reduced preference for high sucrose food.
So what I'm saying is that blanket statements like "well if I/those guys can do it then everybody should be able to" have no real value. Diets are strongly influenced by and relying on genetics. Since we don't have the same genes we won't handle the same diet in the same way. Linking to statements that have since been withdrawn due to omissions also doesn't help.
Edit. Huh... getting downvoted for saying diet and genetics go hand in hand, with evidence that hasn't been retracted. If anybody was wondering why some people are never taken seriously, it's because they reject reality thinking this will change it.
Not just genetics, but a lifetime of bacterial and other environmental exposures that defines your microbiome, which is obviously essential to processing all food. An environment with a long history of vegetarians will be well suited to vegetarians. Not so much if that hasn't been the case.
> appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets
Most people's diets are not "appropriately" planned because most people never actually consult a nutritionist. This means most of those diets miss their mark and since that diet narrows the alternatives it's far easier to lose those benefits.
And can't see anything about any disbenefits of introducing animal products in that diet in "appropriately planned" quantities. Would introducing certain amounts of animal products in your diet affect in in any direction? So would adding a moderate amount of fish in your vegad diet sabotge or improve it? Or no difference?
Completely false. Also, unscholared isn't a word
https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=unscholared&s=t
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unscholared
https://www.onelook.com/?w=unscholared&ls=a
>This very extreme claim
It isn't
In terms of CO2, chicken is about as environmentally friendly as animal proteins get. Chickens also don’t really require any special diet and grow quickly. Dealing with chicken waste is a problem, but if you live in the US, chicken “litter” is fed to cows.
Sadly, growing cattle costs enormous amounts of food that could also feed people. And they seem to contribute quite a bit to greenhouse gasses. So eating beef may be better than eating chicken when it comes to animal welfare, but worse when it comes to the environment.
Best just eat less meat in general.
That depends. Sometimes it is true, sometimes it isn't. People can't eat grass, for instance.
Of course the fact that fish is such a relatively efficient source of food is also a good reason why we should take better care of the oceans. We can't eat fish if they die to our pollution. We also can't eat them if we hunt them to extinction. Sustainable fishing and cutting back on our pollution are vital to our food supply.
For anyone not aware yet, MSC is a certification for sustainable fishing and ASC for sustainable farmed fish. I eat no fish anymore that doesn't have either of those two certifications. But that does nothing to stop this kind of pollution.
://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46459714
Claims that on average it's about 20% worse than farmed fish, and about 1/6 of the impact of beef.
I've not read the study to back it, but the article doesn't differentiate between sources of poultry. The environmental impact of factory farmed vs organic free range corn fed chicken may be vastly different
Sadly, this is an illusion. All agriculture is based on killing animals and distroying biodiversity, and if scaling to cover all population, would lead us to a world plenty of Fabian Tomasi.
Many vegetarians just take the choice to be blind to the huge problems with soy culture (for example), but those problems are not trivial at all.
I suspect "premium" practices and standards might help here
Or else you get more trash laws like making it illegal to serve water without asking in San Francisco.
Environmental protection is a better casus belli than most wars get.
Your solution needs to be extremely incentivized and also easy to enforce in those places of the world. “Banning” something will have a laughable impact and only affect people who never created the waste in the first place.
That also requires the government rather than industry to pay the cost of its regulations, and explicitly choose how to raise the money rather than implicitly taxing fishermen (and fish) without ever evaluating whether that is the optimal funding source.
Suppose they use plastic nets and that makes fishing less expensive, but they all do that and it's a commodity market so they don't get to keep any of that money, it just means that it reduces the price of fish.
Now we need them to use more expensive nets. If we put the cost of them on the fisherman, it raises the price of fish, a healthier source of protein than many of the alternatives (e.g. red meat), and raises the price of food in general. Not super great as an outcome.
If we put the cost of them on coal companies, it raises the price of coal. Coal has nothing to do with fishing net, but we're actually trying to discourage coal, so since taxing coal burning is better than taxing fish eating, that may be a better choice.
The other side of it is that people are extremely poor. Possibly negative net value, lots of debts and no other way to pay next months bills. These people are going to use whatever it takes to live, and authorities who try to enforce it will look like villains.
It's like how in my town there's a stretch of road that is really shitty. All potholes and uneven road. Almost all drivers I've seen go over it way too fast and often damage their vehicles. Sure, I can blame each individual driver for not being 100% attentive, but when they all fuck up in the same way, some blame must be placed on the conditions that allowed them to all make the same error.
Now if by "my town" you really mean a city, then I might be expecting too much of the drivers.
That said, there are two large areas that contribute to ghost fishing. The fishing industry is getting centralized into fewer entities, and those might find it cheaper to discard nets rather than use costly manual labor to repair them or pay the cost of proper disposal. The second area is theft. A fishing net is basically an unguarded month of wages marked out with a bright buoy. I know fishermen that once they have a net stolen they will start removing the buoy for a while and simply drag for the net, which naturally increase the risk of loosing the net. If they can't find the net they don't even know if it is because they can't locate it or if it is because of more theft.
Good one. :)
https://facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=26893462877586...
But it is futile.
Next high tide and more washes in. It's all along the coast. Every tiny bay, every rocky outcrop, the sea floor, in the waves, tangled in seaweed out to sea.
It's crazy. Madness. And more boats go out and more nets are produced and more dolphins wash up dead and more seals wash up dead and more birds wash up dead.
https://qz.com/730794/the-future-is-here-people-are-now-eati...
It's the same issue as "normal" poultry vs "aviary" poultry.
I personally prefer to eat less fish and meat than eating animals that are bred and raised in awful conditions that optimize for revenue; the quality of the output speaks for itself.
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/farm-raised-fish-...
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/01/is-farmi...
- https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-fa...
- http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1663604,0...
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/10/scottish...
Please don't spread fake ideas created for propaganda purposes without a minimum of critical thinking. This is false.
Maybe you aren't aware of this, but the water in marine aquaculture tanks is replaced constantly by fresh, clean water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If the pumps stop the fishes would die in hours. Not to mention that many, many species of fishes love to school and feel much better when are crowded. Specially when they are young.
Some fishes just do not care about being kept in water of lower quality. Carps for example work tirelessly to mudd its tank stirring sediments from the bottom. Are brain-wired to do this. Aquaculture of marine fishes is a totally different world than Pangasius or Tilapia aquaculture.
I had personally get some kg of plastic from stomachs of the same species named in the article. I remember a sac (from manure I think), and a lot of the same plastic bags that you can find in the supermarket. I remember also a small commotion in the faculty by, uh, a lot of diluted blood that ended in the wrong pipeline slowly leaking just in front of the main entrance but this is a different history... don't make me talk about it :-)
Whales filter plankton out of millions of gallons of water but now they also end up eating plastic.
We need to emulate whale design and power them through wind and solar energy then clean up the ocean.
So I wonder if we can build huge whales which run on solar energy and filter the ocean.
FTA: "Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today."
79,000 tons < 8 million tons.
"Cutting down on the amount of plastics we buy and learning to use this tricky material sensibly is still one of the most effective things we can do to live responsibly, help the planet, and inspire others to do the same. To find out how you can help make a change, check out One Green Planet’s #CrushPlastic campaign!"
Please don't distract by blaming fishing. And please read your own links. Fishing nets are a huge problem no doubt, but looking at numbers, we need to stop single-use plastics.
The fact is that we need to address both fishing and consumer use. Over-focusing on either one could be seen as distracting from the other, but it's not particularly helpful to bash other environmentally aware people over it. The problem is the people who don't even know or care.
It's not clear that this goes for all garbage in the oceans.
Still very surprising though, seems like something that could be regulated.
https://www.seafoodwatch.org/
This is nothing that can be solved with personal initiative and responsibility; it requires international regulation and enforcement. There’s no other way
Even if that random idiot dumps their recycling, it is anything but useless.
If you didn't recycle, that would be at least 2 idiots dumping their recycling.
Sorry for being pedantic, but it troubles me when people worry they aren't making a difference because some other random idiot doesn't participate.
This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization.
It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.
Guess who will be the lowest bidder?
Even if there is some actual recycling and the trash can be sold for a positive value, chances are that someone who only picks the easiest valuables and then illegally dumps the rest will be able to outbid a more responsible competitor. It's just the natural outcome of a disposal market and it is incredibly difficult to regulate away from that outcome.
Unfortunately yes. Here's the article I was thinking about.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos...
If you look for "recycling crisis" or similar on Google News you'll find many more. I kind of knew that recycling wasn't as eco-efficient as it should be, but I had no idea just how bad it has been and it's getting worse. :(
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410187
The phrasing is telling. "China no longer accepting", "communities are facing", "forcing them".
...no, it would go in the garbage and also not a river.
According to the study by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research [1], 90% of ocean waste comes from 10 rivers - 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa. I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact on the oceans.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
It's not like all of that plastic is just domestic consumption. Right? We just exported our negative externalities. We don't really have a moral high-ground here. Even if you are a Jedi master.
Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.
i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does.
> the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner
That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?
Hmm, so if we want to reduce human pollution of the oceans... we just need to colonize the oceans!
Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.
That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem.
(Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.)
There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters.
More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.
I'm a foreigner living in one of these countries and it is shocking how absolutely careless and ignorant the majority of the population is with their plastic waste. Tons and tons of it. I see it every day. First hand. They view waterways as trash cans. Formal waste management is rare. Ask a local where to throw a plastic bottle and they are more than likely going to point to the ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-b...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We're already (collectively) fucking the ecosystems and wiping out tons of species of flora and fauna, and making the living situation of billions (and possibly trillions) of life forms on this planet more toxic and less comfortable all in the name of convenience and growth. And it seems like we're on a trajectory of only making things worse in the future.
We need to start doing something about it, the developed countries by being an example and by taking advantage of our desirable trade status by providing incentives (trade, foreign aid, whatever) for developing countries to clean up their act sooner than later.
Malaysia was better, but I’m sure people there and in Taiwan still burn trash.
Asking people who are still burning trash to recycle might be a step too far just yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_...
It needs to stop being optional and it needs to be something that is part of the product design process. Companies are not currently doing more than the bare minimum here because it is not their problem and mostly they do it to look good and there are a lot of companies for whom looking good is not much of a priority or for whom it is more about the looks than the reality. That needs to change. It needs to be their problem.
Sustainable production processes are not sustainable unless they consider the whole product cycle from production to discarding. And the simple truth is that everything gets discarded eventually. Forcing companies to think about the post sales life of their products changes how they build their products. Planned obsolescence is a lot less lucrative if you have to clean up the obsolete mess you helped create. If they are forced to think about efficiently recycling used products they produced, the economics change. Durability becomes a topic. Repairability as well and facilitating recycling by using materials that are easy to recover and products that are easy to disassemble.
Disposing of plastic waste in landfills is by far the best environmental option.
Landfills are already overflowing. Nobody likes living on a toxic waste dump. That's why the current madness of shipping waste halfway across the planet persists.
That's my reasoning: today's waste zones will become tomorrow's resource mines, once the economics of recycling finally become organically profitable!
Seems incredibly implausible.
In this process lots gets washed away, the local water is no longer drinkable (so they have to buy water to drink from trucks that do the rounds).
Any guesses where the river leads to?
The ocean.
Also many plastics are hard to identify. So you were having kids with lighters burn a bit of that microwave tray (in black) to sniff it and then guess what the rest of the tray was made of. Then it would be put in one of the twenty or so piles of different types of plastic.
The Chinese President saw the film about all of this banned the imports and banned the film. That is how we got here.
The bit you didn't see (because the film was band) is how water intensive the process is. The leftover food on the microwaved tray does not clean itself. When it has been sliced up into lots of small pieces, washed and compressed into some block of recyclable stuff you get bits of it washed away to end up eventually in the ocean, even if it blights local fields first before the rains come.
The current situation is that they stopped doing that because it's not economic anymore (and some "green backlash").
If they were just being payed to buy plastic and dump it in the rivers there would be no problem in continuing to do that.
Id happily wager net payments are huge and going in the other direction.
That is completely wrong, you'll need to provide evidence here, it's strange so many replies say the same.
China pays for their recycling imports and get a good deal on shipping. Current tariff wars have changed this environment and now they won't take it.
California alone earns billions selling waste to them
> In 2016, California’s exports of recyclables amounted to 15 million tons, worth an estimated $4.6 billion. Some 62 percent of that exported material went to China in 2016
https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2018/01/24/china-fal...
You pay recycling companies to process waste, and the cost of doing so locally in the U.S. now after the Chinese ban is so high that it means cities cannot afford it, thus waste that would have been sent to China for recycling is now piling in landfills or being burnt.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...
But on statistics everything is fine for some.
Seriously, it's easy to be misinformed on this topic, mostly because the truth is hidden and because people make all sorts of claims without any evidence.
Enough with the FUD
For 30+ years "they" were basically slowly killing us. Whether they knew it or not.
In this case - with "recycling" - they likely knew what was really going on - but because money - they sold us a bill of goods; though we happily went along with it, too.
I don't think there's any way out of this mess.
Why in all this time haven’t some alternatives to non-biodegradable plastic emerged?
I'd suggest taking your analysis a step further.
The whole electric powertrain was primitive.
The motor speed controller was essentially a giant multi-tap resistor (such a motor controller is still used for most automobile HVAC blower speed control, because it is cheap to manufacture - though PWM systems are becoming more common in newer vehicles).
Electric motors were brushed series or shunt wound devices (not permanent magnet, not brushless, not multi-phased). Today's electric cars are virtually all 3-phase systems with a controller that converts from DC to 3-phase AC, with appropriate brushless motors.
Major power losses all along the way, coupled with poor battery technology. It is honestly amazing that they were able to get any workable range at all in the vehicles that were manufactured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_nutrition
> The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly known as the American Dietetic Association), Dietitians of Canada and the British Dietetic Association[6] state that well-planned vegan diets can meet all human nutrient requirements and are appropriate for all stages of life, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence,[1] while the German Society for Nutrition does not recommend vegan diets for children, adolescents, or during pregnancy and breastfeeding.[7] The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics adds that well-planned vegan diets are also appropriate for older adults and athletes, and that vegan diets may reduce the risk of certain health conditions, such as cancer.[1]
> Special attention may be necessary to ensure that a vegan diet will provide adequate amounts of vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, calcium, iron, zinc, and iodine.[1][2] These nutrients may be available in plant foods, with the exception of vitamin B12, which can only be obtained from B12-fortified vegan foods or supplements. Iodine may also require supplementation, such as using iodized salt.[8]
There's well-known athletes that are vegan as well:
https://www.businessinsider.com/vegan-athletes-and-why-they-...
What we need is moderation and sustainable means of production. This is clearly misaligned with our current lifestyles though. [0]
In a few generations we went from "meat/fish is a once in a week delicacy" to "cheap meat at every single meal" (see the so called "meat lovers" thinking they're entitled to 2 pounds of bacon a day).
Talk to your grandparents or great grandparents if they're still alive, they solved sustainability with low tech and no money, at the cost of convenience and comfort obviously, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
[0] https://www.nrdc.org/resources/wasted-how-america-losing-40-...
How is this not just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy?
> What we need is moderation and sustainable means of production. This is clearly misaligned with our current lifestyles though. [0]
> In a few generations we went from "meat/fish is a once in a week delicacy" to "cheap meat at every single meal" (see the so called "meat lovers" thinking they're entitled to 2 pounds of bacon a day).
This seems to agree with you:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-red...
> Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets.
> The researchers found a global shift to a “flexitarian” diet was needed to keep climate change even under 2C, let alone 1.5C. This flexitarian diet means the average world citizen needs to eat 75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs, while tripling consumption of beans and pulses and quadrupling nuts and seeds. This would halve emissions from livestock and better management of manure would enable further cuts.
> The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good.
My phrasing wasn't the best, but I'm not taking any moral ("what is good") stands here.
If we can solve all the issues with moderate and sustainable meat/fish/eggs/dairy consumption, or even vegetarianism, I fail to see the appeal going the extra mile and going full vegan (unless we go into a moral argument but I don't think it's the point here), knowing that it most likely requires closer monitoring for deficiency. I might be wrong, but to me it seems to be the path of least resistance.
I don't have time to look into it longer, but typing "enough resources for vegan world" in google gives me these. Either I chose very poor keywords, or veganism isn't the messiah that'll save us all. I tend to think that moderation is the key in pretty much any domain.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/16/v...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/vegani...
https://www.businessinsider.de/veganism-may-be-unsustainable...
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
> In a few generations we went from "meat/fish is a once in a week delicacy" to "cheap meat at every single meal" (see the so called "meat lovers" thinking they're entitled to 2 pounds of bacon a day).
No one on earth has ANY diet that can be said to be "healthy" for anyone and everyone.
Putting allergens, auto-immune disorders, GI disorders, etc. aside, people have been shown to process various energy sources with varying degrees of consequences.
> No one on earth has ANY diet that can be said to be "healthy" for anyone and everyone.
Why the hair splitting? Obviously nobody is claiming that. If the word "healthy" is supposed to be used in that way it wouldn't be useful for anything.
I personally don't think its a good idea for children unless you really know what you are doing and monitor things closely.
What's so hard or wrong with taking supplements or B12 enriched foods you might have daily anyway(e.g. soy milk)?
As far as I understand, our plants lack B12 because B12 comes from soil and pesticide use + sanitising robs plants of the B12 we'd normally get from them. Modern farming practices mean some farm animals have to be given B12 supplements for similar reasons so you're not getting B12 from how you'd traditionally be getting it anyway if you're going from that angle.
> I personally don't think its a good idea for children unless you really know what you are doing and monitor things closely.
Are people that bring up kids with no other monitoring than letting them eat meat going to fare much better?
Is there documented evidence than vegan parents are regularly putting their kids at risk more-so than non-vegans or this is a theoretical objection?
Are you that B12 is abundant enough in natural soil? When I looked before, I couldn't find any reliable natural source humans could reasonably consume.
Are they able to do this without any special supplements on modern farms though (e.g. with cows on antibiotics eating grain instead of grass)?
> Are you that B12 is abundant enough in natural soil? When I looked before, I couldn't find any reliable natural source humans could reasonably consume.
I'm not sure to be honest. My point is modern farming interrupts how nutrients would normally get into our food chain anyway so I don't see the big deal in taking supplements directly.
The point is that it takes a lot of attention and artificial help to have a healthy vegan diet. That's not great for children or half-committed adults.
Eating meat, or at least eggs or dairy, cuts out a lot of that effort. The animals have already done the work of turning a vegan diet into the large variety of nutrients that we need.
It gets worse because pollutants in fish bioaccumulate a lot (fish eats smaller fish, gets eaten by larger fish etc.).
Fish high in the food chain like salmon have a lot higher concentration of these pollutants, to the point that it's not even recommended food for pregnant women anymore.
Farmed fish also creates bioaccumulation, because it gets fed other smaller fish, like sardines.
I think you meant to say that's a problem. There are others, even if that one looms largest for you.
Is it a european thing? Have I just been incredibly lucky?
I once had a large garbage bag of them get caught by the wind and they blew all over the yard. It took a couple hours to pick them all up, as they'd dance away from my fingertips.
Easy to DIY recycle at home, too. Makes good mulch for the garden, just flatten it out and lay it underneath whenever you put compost/soil down anywhere.
Not so sure about the packing tape that inevitably comes with it.
“No, we’ve run out of the paper bags. We’re switching to plastic bags tomorrow”
Seriously? Wow.
But their latest option is going to be “reusable plastic bags”, which means stronger plastic bags, containing more plastic, which many customers will still treat as disposable.
I’m confused as to how that’s a step forward.
How fucking hard is it to use the trolley to move your goods to your car, and then into your cupboard? You managed to collect all the goods and get them to the register without any bags...
Addressing the sibling comments on this:
I don't know if it's common elsewhere, but some supermarkets in the UK have hand-held self-scanners that you can use while you walk around the shop. You pick things up, scan them with the scanner and put them in your (reusable) bags that you brought. Once you've got everything you go to a separate till where everything you've scanned comes up and you pay and go. Your groceries are already bagged and that makes it lots easier to unload into the house at the other end.
I've noticed as a result that some shoppers turn up with much more substantial reusable bags than the normal 'bag for life' variety. Ones made from fabric that are constructed to stay open.
Waitrose also have a version as an app so you can use your phone to do the scanning: https://www.waitrose.com/home/about_waitrose/quick_check/qui...
Getting the groceries into your car is easy, but the last step of carrying them into your kitchen is hard. Unless you take the trolley home.
Also, it would work in the specific situation you're describing (driving up to the store, parking back close to your house), but it doesn't really help in a lot of other use cases, so it can't be a universal solution.
In italy those have been the norm for many years. They actually seem to decay quite fast (i.e. you can't reuse them for too many times).
That question practically answers itself. It's all about the money, and "using their clout to effect a positive change" would be less profitable.
And with the glass, you didn't even have to worry about getting man-boobs or low sperm count from pseudoestrogens.
Nothing more expensive than something too cheap, and it looks like the kids will have to settle the final bill.
First step is acknowledging plastic is a systemic problem that is rapidly becoming more trouble than it is worth. Then regulation to require degradable alternatives, re-use and dramatically reduce our consumption in the first place.
Or do we just keep relying on the economic myth of infinite growth until collapse? Which, of course, doesn't even make sense economically.
The system in which it's a systemic problem already has and will continue to introduce other such problems. And it's more than just that "under capitalism there is no incentive to eliminate negative externalities", which is certainly true; without a way to avoid unaccountable concentrations of power, concentrated power will reinforce itself and find a way to cheat any system oriented toward the greater good.
I'm not convinced it's possible in the long run to avoid the existence of these problems. Our best hope is faster and faster problem recognition, and magically broad solutions that work faster than the problems' deterioration.
I don't agree it has to be the way of capitalism though, it's a problem of unfettered capitalism. We have more than enough history to know. Post war we were happy to constrain and limit capitalism to give an unprecedented period of rising standards with rising regulation, services and low inequality. Neoliberalism broke it. Rowing back the excess power and politicisation of unions was one thing - removing them as a usable concept for two generations entirely another. If negative externalities can be ignored, then regulate until they can't, even if it has to be an entirely arbitrary tax on plastic, emissions or whatever.
No country seems willing to go first, so we're stuck with the lowest common denominator of international agreements. Agreements where one or two derail any chance of global action and the rest won't get on without unanimity. Which starts to look insane.
That said, I recognize that I don't know what the right alternative should be.
Does anyone know how this fits in with plastic 'recycling'? These nations either were or are big importers of waste plastic.
I don't really want to separate out my waste, only for it to be dumped in the ocean somewhere else.
FTA (you linked to) "estimates that China’s waste purchases this year amount to just one percent of the eight million tons it once bought every year."
[1]https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/plastic-produced...
How can we better minimise the amount of plastic that is thrown out in the first place?
How for example do I not end up with waste shampoo bottles? Its not like I can reuse them because I don't have any way to get shampoo without another bottle.
The solution must be possible, but finding the will and the support to convince every country in the world to switch sounds incredibly tough.
The US could flex its economic muscle here and say that it will not accept products from abroad unless they're packaged according to its new standards within the next 5 years. And of course adhere to the standards internally as well to take a global lead on this issue.
Or not producing the unnecessary packaging in the first place. We really don't need every single cucumber wrapped in its own plastic film. (Like it's common in the shops recently...) Lots of other packaging is completely useless as well.
The real question is, how does the plastic end up in the ocean? Bonus points for: can there be a biodegradable replacement?
Of course, that means forcing (degradation-resistant) mandatory identification of anything at any point of the supply chain, but I feel like it would incentive companies to, at the very least, educate their customers and encourage them to cleanly get rid of their product. It could also shift them to more eco-friendly packaging, and I wouldn't be surprised if some companies decided to implement their own recycling ecosystem.
Our government recently asked citizens to submit proposals on a few themes, so I ended up submitting that very one [1]. I am curious to see how it will go, or whether it will be considered at all.
[1]: https://granddebat.fr/projects/la-transition-ecologique/coll...
The first comment is splitting hairs about what kind of plastic waste with an irrelevant link to a story about plastic nets? This when the article clearly shows and mentions 40kg of plastic bags and there are thousands of articles and studies on the toxic impact of plastic on marine life. These kind of irresponsible comments are a serious problem as it makes readers feel we live in an uncaring world.
Eat less fish? Only those who haven't thought about the world or those who profit from plastic respond in this cavalier fashion to serious global issues. Not a word about the packaging industry, regulating the use of better packing and nets, or the inability of consumers to make choices because race to the bottom leaves no effective alternatives.
Instead lets dissipate responsibility, affect 'helplessness' and do nothing while the destruction of the planet continues unabated. This is a small minded ideology that puts the 'freedom' of a few to profit without constraints above all else.