Political Memes

I make things for a living. Every time I order screws, brackets, or any other small component, it dawns on me how many more single use plastic bags we use than most people realize. I've been making this big thing at work that uses a ton of aluminum extrusion (aka 8020) and we've been using a ton of these little corner brackets. Every. Single. Bracket. Comes in this plastic bag. Inside the plastic bag there is another plastic bag that contains 4 screws and 4 T-nuts, and a 3rd plastic bag that contains the bracket itself. I started making a bag full of little bags like a year ago with the intention of reusing them, but the bag is now full of several hundred crumpled up little bags and I've used maybe a dozen. I've stopped saving them. On this project alone we're probably going to use over 150 of those little brackets. We have a small operation, I can't even imagine how many little bags an actual factory goes through in a single day.

What about the shareholders! Think of the shareholders!!! Won't someone think of the shareholders!!!!

I bought an air purifier last winter. Now I can't find a replacement filter anywhere. Fuck that forced obsolescence crap.

Eh. Single use plastics are REALLY useful in certain areas of healthcare where sterility is important. Especially for vascular access devices. Nothing is going to beat the ability of plastic to:

1. stay sterile on a shelf for months to years at a time, so that it can safely be used to bypass 90% of a person's immune system to give lifesaving medication and reliably produce quality samples for testing

2. do it while being flexible enough to not damage the vasculature permanently or in a way that causes enough damage / inflammation to render the access point unusable

3. Yet be resistant enough to breakdown that it's unlikely to break off in a large enough chunk that could migrate and damage the brain heart or lungs.

And I suspect someone who works OR has a way longer and more interesting list than I do.

Now there are other areas in healthcare that plastics could be significantly reduced. The big one that occurs to me is hygiene supplies. We use a lot of single use wet wipes and bed pads with plastic backings. If we were willing to give direct care workers more time to spend with each patient they could make better use of washcloths, washable bed pads, etc.

But there are a select few use cases where I expect plastic to outperform all alternatives for the foreseeable future.

I've been reselling my condom for years!