re: #305 lawhawk

It’s the nature of a disposable economy. Convenience trumps frugality and common sense. If you can get a plastic fork instead of having to wash the regular utensil, someone’s likely to go to the plastic.

And bamboo for all of its renewablility is still something that requires quite a bit of energy to turn into a plate/cup/utensil, and the process requires quite a few nasty chemicals at that - similar to those required to make regular paper. So, while you can regrow bamboo quite quickly (but which requires prodigious amounts of water) compared to a tree, which takes a generation or longer to reforest, it isn’t quite the panacea either.

It’s all about tradeoffs and balancing costs.

If you think about the permanence of a metal utensil and ceramic plate versus the plastic and bamboo disposable versions of same, the higher energy cost to make the former will over time be far less than having to make the plastic and bamboo items over and over again.

Same thing with vehicles and pretty much everything else. If you get something durable that’s going to last longer, it will end up saving energy in the long run.

And modern materials and packaging causes a lot of chaos in the developing countries.

Malaysia (chosen as an example since I saw this first hand) has a major educational issue regarding littering and related pollution. In the established culture most things were wrapped/packaged using leaves, bamboo, etc. which were biodegradable and thus could be easily disposed of via a rubbish heap (or arguably dumped in the jungle). So there is an entrenched habit for just throwing stuff away.

Enter packaging using plastic and hard-to-degrade materials and this habit spawns issues with public places getting heavily littered with the attendent problems. Thus your government now needs to start a heavy enforcement and education campaign to change the habit - along with some associated social backlash. (And you also get to complicate the process by adding the “disposable society” complications mentioned above involving many consumer items and even items (like spoons) that used to be kept and used long term.