I am glad to see Bill Gates being more vocal about this. There has been an unrealistic optimism when it comes to how easy it is to find alternatives to what we are currently using.
What people forget is that things like plastic ever-present not because of some evil conspiracy by oil companies to push an inferior material on the market but because it's superior to all other materials we know of.
The problem isn't product innovation but fundamental science and we have had no new discoveries since oil to fundamentally change how we approach progress.
Having listened to a lot of pitches by claimed alternative to plastic it's been very obvious to me that we simply need improvements in fundamental science not just in technology. I.e we lack fundamentally new discoveries to truly change our ways.
Nanotech might help us some of the way but we are nowhere near the utopia a lot of people seem to be thinking.
Excuse me what are those? I can list just a few negatives just off the top off my head, hormonal dysfunction in humans and animals, microplastics in the sea, no way to know if plastic contains carcinogens, are safe for food or not, contain heavy metals, litter, and new problems we don't even know about yet, because there is a never ending stream of new products and materials getting shoved out in our lives.
And what a defeatist attitude - what about enumerating the plastics we, standardising and regulating additives etc? Today it's total chaos with a very thin veneer of recycling.
Fine, but are these unaccounted positive externalities? Don't you choose plastic exactly because you want its nice properties? But looking back the next day I think I may have over-reacted a bit to your comment. Of course plastic is in many ways very nice. Let's keep a fair subset. But we could benefit from paring down the variations, and the volume, a lot, IMHO.
It's not just nice it's crucial for our survival. Keep in mind plastic can be as soft as velvet and as durable and hard as diamonds. No other material does that and that allow us to make things that would be impossible otherwise. We simply have no alternatives to them yet.
The unaccounted externalities are that fossil fuel and thus ex. plastic makes modern life possible with everything from increased age, to the ability to cure the sick, to lowered childbirth, to increased living standards, food production, cleaner environments and so on.
Of course there are negative externalities too and we need to deal with them but all in all plastics and thus fossil fuels improve our lives tremendously IMO.
Ironically the problem the modern society is facing is how to deal with abundance rather than scarcity.
I don't believe anything about you. I am simply telling you what I consider to be the reality.
Some parts of the plastic industry can and will be replaced but far less both short term and long term than people want to think, unless; some new fundamental scientific discoveries are done.
What people forget is that things like plastic ever-present not because of some evil conspiracy by oil companies to push an inferior material on the market but because it's superior to all other materials we know of.
The problem isn't product innovation but fundamental science and we have had no new discoveries since oil to fundamentally change how we approach progress.
Having listened to a lot of pitches by claimed alternative to plastic it's been very obvious to me that we simply need improvements in fundamental science not just in technology. I.e we lack fundamentally new discoveries to truly change our ways.
Nanotech might help us some of the way but we are nowhere near the utopia a lot of people seem to be thinking.