Environmentalism

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Humanity's Unpaid Debt: The Climate, Pollution, Sustainability, and Biodiversity Crises

Conversations surrounding the environmental crises that we face today can often feel confusing and muddled--as though Expert A's recommendation is directly at odds with Expert B's recommendation, even though they are both billed as environmental scientists. This is because after the past few hundred years of human-caused environmental destruction we are actually facing multiple simultaneous overlapping environmental crises that need to be addressed all at once. Although average exposure to toxic substances has declined for typical people in the developed world due to regulations on chemical usage and disposal, even waste that is disposed of responsibly can affect the environment at large once enough builds up. To solve the problems we face, we need to not only stop causing further damage, but also repair the damage that was ignorantly caused over the past few hundred years. That is humanity's unpaid debt--it isn't fair that we need to clean up the messes our ancestors l...

Environmental Question #10 [Tap Water]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/binders4588 Q: Drinking water. Is tap water better than bottled? What’s the best way to get drinking water with the least amount of harm? I lived in a developing country as a Peace Corps volunteer and after that experience came back to U.S. with such an appreciation for our “clean” tap water. But after Flint and the rising studies on microplastics, drugs, etc in tap water I’m again back to thinking my daily water intake from the tap is going to slowly give me cancer or other issues. A: Tap water is totally safe basically everywhere in the US, with a few exceptions like you mentioned in Flint. If you get your water from a municipal system then it has been thoroughly filtered and cleaned by your local government before it reaches your home, and they generally do a very good job. If you get your water directly from a well, then it depends more on your area, but you can still clean it up plenty with a typical well filtration system. Either way if you...

Environmental Question #9 [Teflon]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/elizajaneredux Q: How bad is non-stick/teflon coating for the consumer and the environment? How about ceramic? Thanks! A: Teflon is pretty bad, and it is currently going through the process of being banned in several rich countries, but that said I don't think you should throw away your pans if you have them, just don't buy more. Teflon is a very tough material, which is part of why it became so popular. I'm sure you've heard not to use metal utensils on teflon pans, and that is because it can scrape the teflon off and cause it to get into your food. Also if the teflon is scratched up already it has a higher chance of leaching into the food. That said though, if your pans are scratch-free, since teflon is so tough it leaches a negligible amount. So if you have scratch-free teflon pans, I suggest you continue using them until you start to see scratches, then throw them out. For the environment teflon is pretty bad because it cannot...

Environmental Question #8 [Synthetic Fabric]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/moonflower311 Q: I’m a sewist and have noticed a majority of the more affordable fabrics are synthetic (rayon, polyester, etc.). Is there a “better” synthetic to use in terms of long term effects? Also in your opinion does the affordability of synthetic fabrics make up for any health or environmental drawbacks they may have? A: Cool! I do leatherworking as a hobby, although I'm not very good at it, so I have a ton of respect for what you do! So I have kind of mixed feelings about rayon and viscose specifically. Both of those synthetics are made from wood, and can even be made from even more renewable materials like bamboo. They are both also totally biodegradable and break down into nontoxic materials. Overall from an environmental perspective they're pretty good. The problem with them however, is that to make them it requires some forms of sulfur that are extremely toxic to human health. In a properly run factory though, those sulfur mater...

Environmental Question #7 [Substitutions]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/swimThruDirt Q: What needs to be done to prevent companies from engaging in, "regrettable substitutions"? (subbing out a problematic chemical for a similar but less studied alternative) Like BPA is replaced with BPF and a "BPA Free" sticker A: Smarter regulatory agencies. Innovation often happens faster in industry than regulators can keep up, so when a company presents a new chemical to government regulators to ask for approval the regulators don't always know what they're looking at. So in cases like that the regulators will ask to be educated on the new chemical and its effects by the company that invented it. On some level this makes sense because presumably the inventor knows more about it than anyone, but of course the inventor is also incentivized to omit or lie about the danger of their invention. Similar molecules don't always carry the same risks, so if a company tells the government regulators that BPF is...

Environmental Question #6 [Plastic vs. Aluminum]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/springreturning Q: Are there any cases where plastic is better for the environment than a similar non-plastic alternative? For example, I’ve heard people say tin foil is worse than plastic wrap. A: This answer varies case by case depending on the particular material. Tin foil vs plastic wrap is a good example, so I'll use it to illustrate my point. Plastic wrap isn't very recyclable because plastics break down a little bit every time they're recycled until they are no longer usable. Plastic wrap also isn't biodegradable, so it can remain hazardous to ecosystems for millennia. On the other hand, tin foil is extremely recyclable because it can be melted back down and remolded an infinite number of times with no adverse effects on quality, and when tin foil ends up in the environment it's just a mineral, no more dangerous than having a rock lying around. From those factors it might seem like tin foil is overall better than plastic...

Environmental Question #5 [Plastic Pollution]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Grandemestizo Q: How worried should I be about plastic in the environment? Because I’m pretty worried about it. Also, what is the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of materials which are not biodegradable and cannot be recycled? A: The history of humanity is a story of us getting gradually better at not poisoning ourselves and our ecosystems. I expand on this idea in my article here . If you look back in time we went from pooping in the same rivers we drank from and wondering why people kept getting sick, to using mercury in hat manufacturing and breathing soot without masks which gave us mad hatters and black lung, to using lead in gasoline and paint which caused generations of cognitive problems particularly for children. In the modern era we know about and mostly avoid the dangers of bacterial infections, mercury, smoke inhalation, and lead poisoning, because we have grown smarter and more responsible about pollution very slowly. The mo...

Environmental Question #4 [Recycling]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/lunalovegood Q: Is it possible to come up with a better/economically feasible process for recycling plastic? A: Yes, but there will always be serious limitations to recycling. Plastics are made up of chain-shaped molecules called polymers, and the recycling process involves unweaving those chains, then reweaving them into something else. As an analogy, if you think of a plastic as a sweater, with some effort you could unweave a sweater back into being yarn so you can make a new sweater from it, but you're bound to cut or break some of the fibers in the process. Each time you unweave and reweave the sweater, the fibers will gradually get shorter and shorter until the yarn you get from it has such short fibers that you can't make a decent sweater out of it. That is the problem of recycling plastic, no matter what you do the quality of the plastic goes down a little bit every time it's recycled until its performance is so bad it's unus...

Environmental Question #3 [Microplastics]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/makingitgreen Q: Do micro plastics themselves ever break down into their elemental constituents and become harmless? I always see talk of micro plastics getting smaller and smaller over hundreds of years etc but I've always wondered what's the actual end game and how long it's taken for say, a polythene bag to actually fully go away in soil.

Environmental Question #2 [Predictions]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Trensocialist Q: What are your hopes in the next decade or two on overcoming our reliance on plastics? A: That is a very good and very complicated question. The short answer is that I have total confidence that our reliance on plastics can be overcome, but it comes down mostly to a matter of how fast and how much of a shock to people's current habits they're willing to tolerate. I'll give one simple example to illustrate my point. Nontoxic biodegradable bioplastics have come a long way toward safely and reliably replacing conventional plastics, but one property that will be difficult if not impossible to replicate is transparency. Some good advancements have been made in this sphere, but given the current state of polymer science it appears unlikely that we can make something that is biodegradable, transparent, durable, and impermeable to air and water. You pretty much have to pick two of those four properties. This is a problem, because over the p...

Environmental Question #1 [Biodegradability]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Kischter Q: Aren't biodegradable and compostable different? Compostable breaks down into natural materials and biodegradable means that the environment can break it down but it isn't fully broken into naturally found materials?

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