<story><title>A historian unpacks the origins of our plastic addiction</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/history-of-america-love-affair-with-plastic</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pessimizer</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a &amp;quot;throwaway culture&amp;quot; that&amp;#x27;s the problem, that&amp;#x27;s blaming the victim. It&amp;#x27;s governments who shield business from dealing with externalities, and the fact that if you&amp;#x27;re not going to be responsible for the ultimate disposition of those plastics as a business, your only concern is for margin.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t have a nuclear waste problem because we have some cultural nuclear addiction, or chrome in the soil because we have a chrome addiction. What we have are weak governments where if their regulatory agencies weren&amp;#x27;t captured, they wouldn&amp;#x27;t exist at all; the only regulations that get passed are ones that force small operators out of the market, or allow massive companies to offload liability to subcontractors.&lt;p&gt;edit: How about stopping all of the sin taxes (which are done because they simultaneously bring in revenue and theoretically cut government health care costs), and introduce some environmental taxes. They&amp;#x27;ll get passed down to the consumer anyway, and they can make the choice with their wallet. Cutting sin taxes in proportion to environmental taxes would make it revenue neutral, but it certainly wouldn&amp;#x27;t be environmentally neutral.</text></comment>
<story><title>A historian unpacks the origins of our plastic addiction</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/history-of-america-love-affair-with-plastic</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kuu</author><text>Cheap, lightweight, resistant... The plastic has really good properties, it&amp;#x27;s normal that we like it. The environmental impact was not that easy to foresee...</text></comment>