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Once Again, Oil States Thwart Agreement on Plastics
42 YaleE360 23 8/16/2025, 7:39:32 AM e360.yale.edu ↗
I’ll use the simple example of dental floss. When I was younger, you could purchase dental floss in a small circular metal container. Today, almost every option of dental floss available for purchase is in an often oversized / non-recyclable plastic container with non-recyclable plastic packaging.
This actually prompted me to once again go on the hunt for that little metal container of dental floss from my youth, and I actually found an option! A US company called Poh sells dental floss in metal container. Just thought I’d share, for anyone else that is dumbfounded when they have to buy more plastic wrapped plastic products to practice good dental hygiene.
So, a maladaptive systemic influence was noted, but they continued to focus on lower-level discussions around plastics. When will we start to see that it is the communication protocols that are driving this failure, and that good-faith bargaining is a fallacy, when there is profit to be made? I would like to know how this is being addressed, and which other proposals have been made that represent alternative routes to progress - specifically ones that do not require vested interest to forego their short-term benefits in favour of others' long-term needs.
> But only one speaker was able to give a statement before the United States and Kuwait asked the chair to cut them off and conclude the meeting
If the observers' voices are so important, why schedule them for the very end? Yet another structural failing that demonstrates that the scale of thinking and organisation being employed is insufficient for the stated task.
Put tarrifs on all trade with non compliant nations and their partners.
It's not just the oil states, it's almost all of them.
They are still buying natural gas from Russia at record levels lmao.
You can solve plastic pollution in two ways. Either crackdown on inappropriate waste disposal, or eliminate the use of plastics. One is actually possible, the other isn't.
Edit: although to be fair there are a range of "harm reduction" type measures. But if you focus on those, you might solve 10% of the problem and just drain energy from actually solving waste management.
Only 9% of all plastics ever produced has been recycled. 100% is impossible due to the various composite materials that exist.
Landfills don't work in many places in the world due to lack of space and are expensive, hard to manage and come with methane emissions. Burning is obviously the same as burning fossil fuels and cannot happen if we want to keep our planet habitable. It also happens almost always in poor communities that suffer health consequences because of it.
Even if the disposal was somehow magically solved, we still have the problem with production. Plastics are a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030. Cracker plants for plastics production are also usually placed near communities of colour or in developing countries and create toxic conditions for life around them.
Plastics are a problem. Regardless of the disposal.
What is indigenous science?
we have got to stop the production of plastic
Look back to the early 19th century if you want to know what it's like to live in a "world without plastic".
People believed different things in the past because they had a different understanding of the world. Not sure why you would find that surprising or so contentious as to frame it as a purely radical action.