• Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    5 days ago

    For me the biggest thing that shattered my worldview was seeing how many people don’t even think about this. It never crosses their mind how the things they use will persist, once it’s out of their hand it’s out of mind.

    Every piece of plastic, every coffee cup, garbage bags, I think about where it will go. How it’ll sit there for hundreds of years just so I could have a cup of coffee, or so it could hold trash, or be packing material.

    I can’t fix it myself, but just be aware of it people, just think about where it goes. How long it will be there.

    For cups now I take my own. Garbage bags I use the compostable ones. Just have to think about it a bit more.

  • GooberEar@lemmy.wtf
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    5 days ago

    Would a styrofoam cup actually stay in reasonably good shape for 400 years after being buried?

    Mostly a curiosity thing. I sometimes use styrofoam peanuts in planters for drainage purposes, and after a single growing season, they’ve already started to show signs of degrading. Not that microplastics are a good thing, but it also makes me wonder if they would actually stick around in good condition for 400 years.

    • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      It would be plastic for a very long time, but the cup wouldn’t likely survive very long. It would get ground down to plastic dust to be ingested within a few years unless it was in a particularly stable area.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      If it’s actually make out of polystyrene, I’ve read that is supposed to take 500 years like a lot of other plastics.

      Many packing peanuts are biodegradable these days though, so it might not be actual styrofoam (polystyrene + air).

  • TheObviousSolution@kbin.melroy.org
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    5 days ago

    In another timeline, single celled organisms warning their brethren about how their use of calcification processes will result in contamination that lasts forever.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    “That thing that can be consumed cleanly in the right equipment return 95% of the energy used to make it” – also styrofoam