Plastic packaging is not the enemy

[Fishnut]

In the "unintended consequences" category for electric cars, a lot of the lithium for the batteries comes from the salt flats in South America and the mining is doing a lot of environmental and economic damage to the region. The BBC had a podcast on this a few months ago and the Washington Post has an article on it from a couple of years ago.

That sucks, and cobalt mining sucks as well, does it suck more than the oil industry?

I honestly don't know. But I do find myself being troubled that a relatively new industry is exploiting impoverished people and destroying their water supply so that people in the west can drive "environmentally friendly" cars. The oil industry at least had the excuse that it didn't know about environmental impact assessments and stakeholders when it began. The lithium mining industry doesn't.

[bjn]

I’m wondering currently if I should replace my diesel car with an electric. It’s nowhere near the end of its life.

Running an electric car still causes CO₂ emissions at the power station obviously, at least some of the time, and the overall efficiency of generating and transmitting the electricity and then charging and discharging the battery is a lot less than that of a modern diesel engine. There was a German paper cited on Twitter recently that even claimed electric cars are no better than diesel ones for carbon, partly because of that but also because of the much greater embodied energy in manufacturing the battery.

If it was me (and we’re in a similar place as it happens) I would start by trying to find out what the actual NOx emissions of your diesel are, as I believe the ones that are bad for that are really bad while the ones that aren’t are a while lot better. Not sure where you find that info most easily but if I discover I’ll share it.

I can share the German paper too, but it is in German.

I have me doubts about the veracity of that. The union of concerned scientists did a cradle to grave analysis of BEVs vs ICEs and, BEVs come out on top. There has quite a bit of deliberate FUD spread about the CO2 costs of BEVs, mostly stemming from a heroically poor Swedish study.

From my understanding (an arstechica article I can’t find again), well over 50% of the embedded CO2 from battery production is from drying out various chemical solutions. Note that this isn’t intrinsic to battery production, dry them out with renewable energy and you drop the CO2 emissions. Something you can’t ever do with an ICE.

Found the Arstechica Article. I misremembered the energy proportions due to drying, but it is still large.

[Grumble]

In the "unintended consequences" category for electric cars, a lot of the lithium for the batteries comes from the salt flats in South America and the mining is doing a lot of environmental and economic damage to the region. The BBC had a podcast on this a few months ago and the Washington Post has an article on it from a couple of years ago.

I don’t doubt it, but I’ve seen coal and oil extracting areas and they aren’t pretty either. At least the lithium has a nice long useful life afterwards.

[bjn]

In the "unintended consequences" category for electric cars, a lot of the lithium for the batteries comes from the salt flats in South America and the mining is doing a lot of environmental and economic damage to the region. The BBC had a podcast on this a few months ago and the Washington Post has an article on it from a couple of years ago.

That sucks, and cobalt mining sucks as well, does it suck more than the oil industry?

I honestly don't know. But I do find myself being troubled that a relatively new industry is exploiting impoverished people and destroying their water supply so that people in the west can drive "environmentally friendly" cars. The oil industry at least had the excuse that it didn't know about environmental impact assessments and stakeholders when it began. The lithium mining industry doesn't.

The oil industry still doesn’t really pay attention to its environmental impact in the third world, or include local people in their calculations.

Why the scare quotes?

[Fishnut]

That sucks, and cobalt mining sucks as well, does it suck more than the oil industry?

I honestly don't know. But I do find myself being troubled that a relatively new industry is exploiting impoverished people and destroying their water supply so that people in the west can drive "environmentally friendly" cars. The oil industry at least had the excuse that it didn't know about environmental impact assessments and stakeholders when it began. The lithium mining industry doesn't.

The oil industry still doesn’t really pay attention to its environmental impact in the third world, or include local people in their calculations. (1)

Why the scare quotes? (2)

(1) I know. But surely we should be doing better rather than just finding different populations of people to screw over? We are trying to save the planet for everyone aren't we? Yet it seems it's always those with the least who have to endure the biggest sacrifices.

Further to what Disco was saying earlier,

I have nothing sensible or evidenced based to add atm but overall i feel (broadly speaking) we are almost hard wired to see the solution to problems such as plastic, food waste etc as being to replace one type of consumption with another, rather than just trying to look at how we can reduce consumption.

There's the Jevons paradox, where increases in efficiency lead to increases in demand. I didn't know the term but I knew the concept and I don't know how we get around it. I remember hearing about how saving people money on their utilities, for example, didn't mean that consumption went down, they just use their savings to buy more stuff that then uses more of the utilities. Saved £50 on the electric? Why not have a cheap short break to the continent courtesy of Easyjet?

We somehow need to get people to stop using resources, rather than just shifting from one resource to another. Personally (and not just because I don't drive) I'd be in favour of phasing out privately owned cars all together and improving public transport. But that'll never happen.

2) Because they're not environmentally friendly. They are just a bit less awful than diesel and petrol cars (and I'm not even entirely convinced of that tbh when you consider all aspects of their manufacture and use).

[Grumble]

There's the Jevons paradox, where increases in efficiency lead to increases in demand. I didn't know the term but I knew the concept and I don't know how we get around it. I remember hearing about how saving people money on their utilities, for example, didn't mean that consumption went down, they just use their savings to buy more stuff that then uses more of the utilities.

I’m not sure that this paradox actually is happening. It may do to some extent, but electricity use in the U.K. has consistently fallen for the last few years so increase in consumption isn’t keeping up with increases in efficiency

See the Death of Fossil fuels thread for a report from the Carbon Brief. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=109&start=125#p13649

[sTeamTraen]

We somehow need to get people to stop using resources, rather than just shifting from one resource to another. Personally (and not just because I don't drive) I'd be in favour of phasing out privately owned cars all together and improving public transport. But that'll never happen.

For a lot of people, consuming things is a huge part of what gives their life meaning, cf my recently started thread about the people you encounter in local Facebook groups.

[GeenDienst]

... electricity use in the U.K. has consistently fallen for the last few years so increase in consumption isn’t keeping up with increases in efficiency

So what's that, increased price plus increased insulation and better designed appliances?

The uptake of electric cars will change that, presumably.

[nekomatic]

I’d assume a lot of the decrease in electricity use is down to the decline in manufacturing, which doesn’t put extra cash in consumers’ pockets.

[Gfamily]

I’d assume a lot of the decrease in electricity use is down to the decline in manufacturing, which doesn’t put extra cash in consumers’ pockets.

Hard to tell - manufacturing has been in decline for a long time, but the sustained drop in electricity demand (amounting to over 30% !) only started in 2006

[Grumble]

I’d assume a lot of the decrease in electricity use is down to the decline in manufacturing, which doesn’t put extra cash in consumers’ pockets.

Hard to tell - manufacturing has been in decline for a long time, but the sustained drop in electricity demand (amounting to over 30% !) only started in 2006

Some of the decrease may be to do with offshoring of industry, but LED lightbulbs reduce electricity usage by 90% compared with incandescents and new fridges and freezers can use 75% less than the ones they are replacing. I replaced my TV recently and I did look at the energy usage sticker as one factor when choosing a new one, I’m sure other people do too. Also, energy bills have come down for the majority of people due to reduced demand. (Article from 2016)

https://www.carbonbrief.org/uk-energy-b ... e-2008-ccc

[Martin_B]

I remember listening to a BBC podcast a year or two ago (wish I could remember which one) which talked about this topic. It said that while people complain about things like plastic-wrapped cucumbers and the packaging on fruit, without it there's much greater spoilage and wastage from bruising.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to have occurred to the campaigners that the supermarkets don't spend money on this for no reason.

An additional irony is that very often the organic variety will be the (only) one that is plastic-wrapped. For example, my local supermarket might sell loose lemons at say €1.50 per kg but a 500g pre-sealed bag of organic lemons costs €1.00. The organic ones have to be wrapped because if they were also loose in a separate bin, people would bag them and weigh them (if weighing is self-service; if not, the weigher or cashier has no way to tell the difference) as non-organic. I pointed this out once to an acquaintance who is a big fan of organic and she said "Well, they should just train the cashiers to tell the difference, I'm sure I can tell, the organic ones are so much <whatever>er".

Yet here both organic and not-organic lemons are sold loose side by side, with no issue.

There's little stickers on them with the product code.

Plastic stickers?

[Martin_B]

I don’t doubt it, but I’ve seen coal and oil extracting areas and they aren’t pretty either. At least the lithium has a nice long useful life afterwards.

Grumble, I suspect actually that you have probably seen oil extracting areas which were pretty, you just didn't know that they were oil extracting areas because they didn't look like the aftermath of the Exxon Valdes. The largest oil field in the UK is Wytch Farm, which is located in the middle of the Jurassic Coast world heritage site, with numerous SSSIs and AONBs. They haven't had a single serious, reportable spill in 40 years.

The oil industry still doesn’t really pay attention to its environmental impact in the third world, or include local people in their calculations.

OK, but let's ignore the Nigerian coast(1) and the Soviet Union's horrendous treatment of the environment in places like the Kazakhstan oil fields(2).

The oil industry tends to go out of it's way to prevent oil spills, if for no other reason than it's lost revenue. Arguably the biggest environmental impact from the oil industry in recent years has been the damage caused by fracking in America (I think Tennessee would be upset if you called it the 3rd world!) when fracking was a new technology and still not well understood, so they: a) fracked where the geology wasn't suitable, and b) didn't clean-up their water properly before disposal.

Not that I'm trying to paint the oil industry as saints (hey, I work for them) - they are capitalist industries who try to maximise profits for their shareholders - but they aren't the rapacious environmental murders that many people seem to believe.

(1) Most of the Nigerian spills were caused by local people trying to get compensation for damage to their land, and underestimating the extent of the spills they would cause.
(2) The Soviet's simply didn't care about the locals, they needed the oil for their industry and didn't care about the environment. But this had nothing to do with the oil industries.

[Pucksoppet]

There's the Jevons paradox, where increases in efficiency lead to increases in demand. I didn't know the term but I knew the concept and I don't know how we get around it. I remember hearing about how saving people money on their utilities, for example, didn't mean that consumption went down, they just use their savings to buy more stuff that then uses more of the utilities.

I’m not sure that this paradox actually is happening. It may do to some extent, but electricity use in the U.K. has consistently fallen for the last few years so increase in consumption isn’t keeping up with increases in efficiency

See the Death of Fossil fuels thread for a report from the Carbon Brief. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=109&start=125#p13649

Some of that may be that people are spending their money on imported goods, so the embedded carbon/energy costs are external to the UK economy. In other words, even though we are using less energy in the UK, some (or all) of that saving is actually being used elsewhere to make goods that we buy from elsewhere.

To give a fictitious example: if Andorra were to switch to electric vehicles entirely, importing power from Spain and France to charge them, Andorra's carbon emissions would drop (and those in France and Spain would go up). Auditing energy use, you would see the inflow of energy.
If Andorra shuts down its steelworks and buys Chinese steel instead, then Andorran carbon emissions would go down, and Andorran energy use would go down: but Chinese carbon emissions and energy use to manufacture the steel would go up. Of course, it might be that China can make steel more efficiently so it is a net positive, but this fictitious example illustrates the complexities, especially if cross-border trade in energy and goods is taken into account.

There is a strong incentive on business to externalise costs and other liabilities.

[Grumble]

There's the Jevons paradox, where increases in efficiency lead to increases in demand. I didn't know the term but I knew the concept and I don't know how we get around it. I remember hearing about how saving people money on their utilities, for example, didn't mean that consumption went down, they just use their savings to buy more stuff that then uses more of the utilities.

I’m not sure that this paradox actually is happening. It may do to some extent, but electricity use in the U.K. has consistently fallen for the last few years so increase in consumption isn’t keeping up with increases in efficiency

See the Death of Fossil fuels thread for a report from the Carbon Brief. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=109&start=125#p13649

Some of that may be that people are spending their money on imported goods, so the embedded carbon/energy costs are external to the UK economy. In other words, even though we are using less energy in the UK, some (or all) of that saving is actually being used elsewhere to make goods that we buy from elsewhere.

To give a fictitious example: if Andorra were to switch to electric vehicles entirely, importing power from Spain and France to charge them, Andorra's carbon emissions would drop (and those in France and Spain would go up). Auditing energy use, you would see the inflow of energy.
If Andorra shuts down its steelworks and buys Chinese steel instead, then Andorran carbon emissions would go down, and Andorran energy use would go down: but Chinese carbon emissions and energy use to manufacture the steel would go up. Of course, it might be that China can make steel more efficiently so it is a net positive, but this fictitious example illustrates the complexities, especially if cross-border trade in energy and goods is taken into account.

There is a strong incentive on business to externalise costs and other liabilities.

Yes, but you were talking about people’s overall consumption remaining steady despite the increase in efficiency. I don’t think that is happening.

[bjn]

I honestly don't know. But I do find myself being troubled that a relatively new industry is exploiting impoverished people and destroying their water supply so that people in the west can drive "environmentally friendly" cars. The oil industry at least had the excuse that it didn't know about environmental impact assessments and stakeholders when it began. The lithium mining industry doesn't.

The oil industry still doesn’t really pay attention to its environmental impact in the third world, or include local people in their calculations. (1)

Why the scare quotes? (2)

(1) I know. But surely we should be doing better rather than just finding different populations of people to screw over? We are trying to save the planet for everyone aren't we? Yet it seems it's always those with the least who have to endure the biggest sacrifices.

Further to what Disco was saying earlier,

I have nothing sensible or evidenced based to add atm but overall i feel (broadly speaking) we are almost hard wired to see the solution to problems such as plastic, food waste etc as being to replace one type of consumption with another, rather than just trying to look at how we can reduce consumption.

There's the Jevons paradox, where increases in efficiency lead to increases in demand. I didn't know the term but I knew the concept and I don't know how we get around it. I remember hearing about how saving people money on their utilities, for example, didn't mean that consumption went down, they just use their savings to buy more stuff that then uses more of the utilities. Saved £50 on the electric? Why not have a cheap short break to the continent courtesy of Easyjet?

We somehow need to get people to stop using resources, rather than just shifting from one resource to another. Personally (and not just because I don't drive) I'd be in favour of phasing out privately owned cars all together and improving public transport. But that'll never happen.

2) Because they're not environmentally friendly. They are just a bit less awful than diesel and petrol cars (and I'm not even entirely convinced of that tbh when you consider all aspects of their manufacture and use).

There are several things being conflated here.

1) Do battery electric vehicles (not just cars) have a smaller environmental impact than internal combustion engined vehicles? When it comes to CO2 emissions, undoubtedly yes, they are better. See my links above. To do that they currently need more upfront resources in terms of materials and embedded energy than an equivalent ICE vehicle does, but win out on not having to burn oil, even if they are charging from fossil fuel generated electricity. So if we are going to have vehicles in the future, they should be BEVs.

2) How should resources be mined in a way that minimises environmental and societal impacts? Regulations that force externalities be costed in would be a start. That is going to be hard given the hold mining has over countries with resource extraction based economies. Not just in the third world, but Australia (coal) and Canada (tar sands).

3) How should we change society so that people don't need to drive? Improved public transportation will help with that, but that won't work in suburban Sydney or Houston, let alone rural Western Australia or Scotland. Massive societal change will be needed to make that happen, which can only happen over a longer term and will be met with huge resistance.

4) How should we change society so that people's consumption minimises environmental and societal impacts but still have fulfilled lives? Regulation and Pigovian taxes are an obvious one here. But some fool will cry "FREEDOM!" and demand to consume as much as they can.

So give society as it stands now and will be over the next while, roll on battery electric cars as opposed to ICE cars.


ETA: Jevon's Paradox WRT BEV cars. Will people just drive more because they are emitting less CO2? Is driving more always necessarily a bad thing if the environmental costs are halved?

[bjn]

OK, but let's ignore the Nigerian coast(1) and the Soviet Union's horrendous treatment of the environment in places like the Kazakhstan oil fields(2).

The oil industry tends to go out of it's way to prevent oil spills, if for no other reason than it's lost revenue. Arguably the biggest environmental impact from the oil industry in recent years has been the damage caused by fracking in America (I think Tennessee would be upset if you called it the 3rd world!) when fracking was a new technology and still not well understood, so they: a) fracked where the geology wasn't suitable, and b) didn't clean-up their water properly before disposal.

Not that I'm trying to paint the oil industry as saints (hey, I work for them) - they are capitalist industries who try to maximise profits for their shareholders - but they aren't the rapacious environmental murders that many people seem to believe.

(1) Most of the Nigerian spills were caused by local people trying to get compensation for damage to their land, and underestimating the extent of the spills they would cause.
(2) The Soviet's simply didn't care about the locals, they needed the oil for their industry and didn't care about the environment. But this had nothing to do with the oil industries.

Nigeria and Russia was mainly what I was thinking of. But the Alberta tar sands are bastard things as well, consuming a huge amount of water to process them, even if they don't spill that often.

[bjn]

@mods, this thread probably needs splitting.

[Tessa K]

I'm glad Fishnut brought up marine plastics because I was going to but she knows so much more about it. Although it is good to stop using plastic straws and bags it does feel a bit like the wartime initiative to make people hand in their pots and pans and railings to turn into weapons. Most of them were unusable and just got dumped but the campaign continued to make people on the home front feel they were contributing to the war effort.

There was mention of tuna fishing now being pole and line but what many people are not aware of is that tuna has been downgraded . First they said that only fresh tuna counts as an oily fish, not tinned. Now not even fresh tuna counts.

Current data shows that levels of long chain n3 poly-unsaturated fatty acids in fresh tuna are comparable to that found in most white fish. As the evidence no longer supports fresh tuna being classified as an oily fish, Public Health England have changed government advice to reflect this.

Maybe Fishnut can explain what the article didn't - is this because of overfishing or pollution or some other cause?

Note to self: when you start a topic, remember to subscribe to it

[discovolante]

@mods, this thread probably needs splitting.

Please can you use the report button for things like this?

[bjn]

@mods, this thread probably needs splitting.

Please can you use the report button for things like this?

Will do in future. Soz.

[Fishnut]

I'm glad Fishnut brought up marine plastics because I was going to but she knows so much more about it. Although it is good to stop using plastic straws and bags it does feel a bit like the wartime initiative to make people hand in their pots and pans and railings to turn into weapons. Most of them were unusable and just got dumped but the campaign continued to make people on the home front feel they were contributing to the war effort.

There was mention of tuna fishing now being pole and line but what many people are not aware of is that tuna has been downgraded . First they said that only fresh tuna counts as an oily fish, not tinned. Now not even fresh tuna counts.

Current data shows that levels of long chain n3 poly-unsaturated fatty acids in fresh tuna are comparable to that found in most white fish. As the evidence no longer supports fresh tuna being classified as an oily fish, Public Health England have changed government advice to reflect this.

Maybe Fishnut can explain what the article didn't - is this because of overfishing or pollution or some other cause?

Note to self: when you start a topic, remember to subscribe to it

I should note before I start that biochemistry is most definitely not my strong suit. However, reading the linked government report it looks like this is largely down to better analytical methods. The last time seafood was analysed was in the 1980s and technology has moved on a lot since then. The report also notes that production methods have changed which may have affected nutrient composition (though that probably doesn't affect fresh tuna). Although the report came out in 2013 it seems that dietary recommendations were only updated in 2018. Frustratingly nowhere in the 2013 publications do the have any conclusions or discussions about what their results mean, though that's possibly standard procedure for these sorts of things.

[dyqik]

An additional irony is that very often the organic variety will be the (only) one that is plastic-wrapped. For example, my local supermarket might sell loose lemons at say €1.50 per kg but a 500g pre-sealed bag of organic lemons costs €1.00. The organic ones have to be wrapped because if they were also loose in a separate bin, people would bag them and weigh them (if weighing is self-service; if not, the weigher or cashier has no way to tell the difference) as non-organic. I pointed this out once to an acquaintance who is a big fan of organic and she said "Well, they should just train the cashiers to tell the difference, I'm sure I can tell, the organic ones are so much <whatever>er".

Yet here both organic and not-organic lemons are sold loose side by side, with no issue.

There's little stickers on them with the product code.

Plastic stickers?

Standard shop type stickers like you'll find on the outside of the shrink wrapped veg plastic or closing a bag of lemons, except only about 1 cm². No idea about the biodegradability.

Usually a bit smaller than the stickers you get on bananas.

[dyqik]

Similarly, Whole Foods and many other grocery shops are happy selling coffee beans from hoppers, at prices ranging from $7.99 to $15.99 a lb, with no labels. They just ask you to write the product code on the paper bag.

[Martin_B]

OK, but let's ignore the Nigerian coast(1) and the Soviet Union's horrendous treatment of the environment in places like the Kazakhstan oil fields(2).

The oil industry tends to go out of it's way to prevent oil spills, if for no other reason than it's lost revenue. Arguably the biggest environmental impact from the oil industry in recent years has been the damage caused by fracking in America (I think Tennessee would be upset if you called it the 3rd world!) when fracking was a new technology and still not well understood, so they: a) fracked where the geology wasn't suitable, and b) didn't clean-up their water properly before disposal.

Not that I'm trying to paint the oil industry as saints (hey, I work for them) - they are capitalist industries who try to maximise profits for their shareholders - but they aren't the rapacious environmental murders that many people seem to believe.

(1) Most of the Nigerian spills were caused by local people trying to get compensation for damage to their land, and underestimating the extent of the spills they would cause.
(2) The Soviet's simply didn't care about the locals, they needed the oil for their industry and didn't care about the environment. But this had nothing to do with the oil industries.

Nigeria and Russia was mainly what I was thinking of. But the Alberta tar sands are bastard things as well, consuming a huge amount of water to process them, even if they don't spill that often.

True, and not the cleanest way of producing hydrocarbons, but again I think it's off to call Canada a 3rd world country!