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California governor signs law banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores.
(www.voanews.com)
Another tax on the poor.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Good and the Europeans have been doing this for this decades.
Why not just mandate the green bio ones?
Excellent! Now, please ban single use plastics in most consumer packaging. We devised solutions to many of these for centuries or longer before most stuff went to plastic unnecessarily. Very little actually requires single-use plastic.
I don't consider petrochemical wax paper much better and that's what they were using before for many things like meat. Glass would be good though.
Even just food aside, we use so much plastic for things like LED light bulb packaging, toys, packing materials like bubble wrap and air bags, monobags for clothes, plastic shrink wrap or uncuttable plastics at hardware stores, markets, etc.
Like, outside of sterile single use plastics for keeping needles clean at the doctor, and maybe certain biohazards like raw meat juice, we don't really need most plastics in consumer applications. Balsa wood, cardboard, metals, glass, rubber, paper, and waxed paper can do much of the heavy lifting.
for us there is a law that if there is one item they wont give us plastic bags
I remember save the trees campaign years ago. I'm convinced it was all started by the plastic industry.
Yup. Logging industry, at least in the US, is remarkably renewable. I remember reading that we have significantly more trees than we did 100 years ago because we’ve improved logging methods. No more clear cutting for pulp or lumber, proper replanting, and age-tracking for proper harvest.
In other words, saying “don’t use paper, save a tree” is akin to saying “don’t eat fries, save a potato.”
We have more trees, yes, but we have fewer forests.
Forests are where the biodiversity is. Not monoculture straight-row tree farms.
And we've gotten rid of a lot of old growth forests before we came into renewable forestry. That's partly why lumber these days isn't as good (quality, in general) as it was 50 or 100 years ago.
And we're still tearing down old forests. This time, it's to grow soy to feed to cows.
hardly any soy goes to cows at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Global-soy-production-to-end-use.png
The cultivation of soybeans, primarily for export and the production of biodiesel and animal feed, has been a significant driver of forest loss in the Amazon.[41]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest
almost all soy that becomes animal feed is a byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil. about 80% of all soybeans are pressed for oil and the byproduct is what is fed to animals. but cattle, as you can see in the chart I provided, hardly get any of the global soy crop
Are you ..defending deforestation of the Amazon? For what, cheaper burgers? Cattle ranching is the number one cause of deforestation by a wide margin. Soy is just one of the causes.
Are you …defending deforestation of the Amazon?
no. I'm pointing out a lie about Amazon soy being fed to cows
While this is true, we should also remember that old growth forest, not tree plantations, are the most efficient at sequestering carbon and filtering/storing water.
Just because the timber industry is has been adopting renewable aspects, doesn't justify expanding it recklessly. Reducing demand and recycling as much paper as possible is still a key part of keeping our usage sustainable. Even if the trees grow back, there is still energy being lost to harvesting and processing. Tree falls are a major source of carbon sequestration in forests, which enrich the soil. If the trees are being harvested, that piece of the local cycle stops. I try to vary the locations that I collect kindling wood in my back woods so as not to deplete any area.
Trees are the most visible and obvious carbon sink. You can watch a tree grow over a few years by literally sucking carbon out of thin air. I live in a bog where the trees all fall down after a few years. Quite a few come down every windy season. You can see how they shape the landscape, dam waterflow, and turn into soil mounds. The dammed water helps to trap more plant matter and sequester more carbon. Removing the trees from this ecosystem by harvesting would interrupt this process. This process maintains the soil fertility. The trees still grow back for now, but our lack of consideration for soil health and for soil as a carbon sink reminds me of our attitude towards conventional industrial agriculture. If we keep treating the soil like this, will the trees keep growing back in 50 years without requiring artificial fertilizers and water filtration to replace the trees we extract?
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