[replicatorblog]

Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco.

This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging.

Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.

The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.

[Kluny]

Banning stuff is rarely my preferred solution. My take on producer responsibility is that producers should be prepared to take their stuff BACK - meaning, if someone turns up at their headquarters (or some more reasonable location) with a dump truck full of, for example, empty coffee cups, they should be required to accept the delivery and find a way to dispose of it, paying for landfill if necessary, but hopefully something more constructive. I just want the cost of disposal to come straight back to them.

The coffee cup example is contrived, but let's say every producer of plastic zip ties was required to receive returned plastic zip ties each year, equal to the volume that they sold the previous year?

[konjin]

>Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.

>The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.

That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer research the real trade off isn't uranium baby powder or regular baby powder, it's uranium baby powder or oncology".

[replicatorblog]

I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.