microplastics

What I do not like is those 'environment friendly' sort of plastics, that dissolve. I have plastic mains connectors falling apart, plastic boxes falling apart.

It's almost impossible to find Cokes in glass bottles. A rum+coke tastes better from the glass bottle, I think.

Ditto Pelegrino.

Glass is totally recyclable. When I was a kid, we paid a deposit for Coke bottles and got credit or a refund when we brought them back.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

There is a difference between plastics that chemically decompose over time and those where the item physically breaks up into ever-smaller particles but doesn't actually decompose. The latter are responsible for micro-plastics in the environment but no distinction is made (to the public, at least) between them and the slightly less-harmful decomposing type. The result is that thousands of tonnes of plastic items are needlessly thrown away and replaced because the plastic is disintegrating - and the campaigners and politicians have been forcing this upon us for years.

Paper bags, cardboard containers and wooden items are far more environmentally friendly because we can grow more of them and they can be burnt for fuel when we have finished with them without damaging the environment as much as plastics would. They also have the advantage of using up all those trees the campaigners urge us to plant, so reducing the risk of forest fires.

We can harvest solar energy without being dependent on China for solar panels.

Our super market provides paper bags instead of plastic bags. You better remove fresh fruit and vegetables from these paper bags as soon as you get home, because they encourage molds to grow within a day or two.

Paper bags are disgusting.

Jeroen Belleman

Most people here bring their own bags, usually canvass tote bags. Stores are required to charge 10 cents for bags now. We get a choice of paper or plastic; the handles tend to tear off on the paper ones.

But we also have refrigerators here in the USA, so we unload bags when we get home, before the food rots.

We also have a basket sort of thing with a hemispherical mesh cover for things we might not want to refrigerate. The mesh keeps bugs away.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

We can harvest solar energy with plants but a lot less efficiently than with solar panels - the current Chinese parts are about 27% efficient. Plants are closer to 0.1%.

The only reason that China currently dominates solar panel production is that they invested a lot of money in making them in ten times the volume that anybody else had. Germany had pulled the same trick around ten years earlier, and had dominated the market for a while.

The significance of the Chinese initiative was that it made solar generation the cheapest source of electric power around, which meant that they could sell all the solar panels they could make, and they now have 90% of a huge market.

Both India and China have passed peak CO2 emissions while producing more electric power than ever before.

Whether it would make sense for anybody else to invest the money to set up manufacturing on the same scale or larger might be an interesting question. It's certainly possible and practicable, but may not be practical - the Chinese have a habit of selling below cost to squeeze out potential competitors.

We had Hammer soda in the 70s, I think they were 1.5L bottles, and they were returnable.

Cheers

Glass is seen as "more precious" to consumers. Tossing a plastic container out seems like that's its intended destination. Glass, OTOH, folks seem more reluctant to discard.

One of the surprising complaints consumers have had is packaging that uses reusable (or, perceived as such) containers -- because of the psychological pressure to retain those containers (and end up with a closet full of them!). They almost feel relieved if they can discard the container without having to find a place to keep it!

Glass is supposedly very recyclable. Yet, no longer treated as such, here (though junk mail, cardboard, "tin" cans, and some plastics ARE!).

Amusingly, no one captures aluminum foil or aluminum cans!

There has been a move towards reusable "sacks" (often made of recycled plastics -- also often "branded") to replace paper and plastic bags.

Sadly, most folks don't realize that the sacks just accumulate dirt, grime, "germs", etc. so do themselves a DISservice by using them.

Warehouse stores usually pile their discardable cartons/boxes near the check-out area so customers can use those to transport their purchases home. Considerably more "material" than a paper bag but easily recyclable (if you are careful to select based on convenient physical size -- bigger is usually NOT better!)

I never bought into that BS, either. Plastics are constituted from very stable and unreactive species of molecules, so what harm are they going to do?

Plastics are constituted from all kinds of chemical. Polyethylene and polypropylene are about as unreactive as they come, but they can still burn.

Teflon - polytetrafluoroethylene - won't even do that. Polyamide and polyurethanes are less innoccuous.

My food waste bags are made of a plastic that bugs can actually digest. In the late 1980's I knew a graduate student who was doing a Ph.D. on concocting that kind of plastic - her husband was writing software for the real time operating system that ran our electron beam tester.

John Larkin boosts that he skipped most of his chemistry lectures at Tulane, and I can believe it.

I didn 't skip chem classes. I just thought they were boring.

I got A's.

Or is it As?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

If you don't understand what you are being taught, you can find it boring. My parents both had university degrees in chemistry, so I did understand what I was being taught, and went on to get a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. I did develop an interest in electronics along the way, and found that even more interesting

I'd write "A's". I don't think it is any kind of possessive apostrophe - just a spacer. What your grades seem to mean is that Tulane didn't set very high standards.

First year chemistry isn't all that demanding.

Well, we all know how trustworthy the corporations making the stuff are, when it comes to testing and to reporting health side effects.

Their track record on handling waste products accumulated in the manufacture of the 'forever' plastics is also pristine, not to mention their stellar attitiude to employee long-term health and plant environmental controls/litigation.

Don't worry.

RL

The reports of dense concentrations of microplastics in human brains, like a spoonfull, sound bogus. We have effectrive barriers in our guts to keep junk out of our bloodstream, and another barrier to keep stuff out of our brains.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Some public universities use Chem 101 as a washout course, to get rid of the losers fast.

It's not very demanding, nor very interesting. It's basically an IQ test.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Your surprise and scepticism re blood-brain barriers is understandable.

The term, however, is more illustrative, rather than biologically accurate.

Spoonfull is unlikely to occur in any serious research paper, as a unit of measurement.Suggest you review your souces of info.

RL

It's "As" - there's no genetive case here. Might look odd, but it's correct.

Pity it's ineffective against Globalist propaganda.