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RE: Chemicals in Plastics are Laying Waste to Male Fertility
Sometimes makes me consider the question of "optimal human population size" vs just "How MANY humans can the planet support?" Is it all just self-regulating, in ways we have not even considered? We invent things that "inadvertently" kill us or reduce the population size... because some mechanism senses there are "too many of us."
How do we get rid of plastic, or reduce it? Buy food and other things that come in glass containers, rather than plastic. Tastes better, anyway, and is almost infinitely recyclable and reusable. "But it's HEAVY!" Oh, boo-hoo-hoo... "But it BREAKS!" Sure, and maybe there's a lesson to treat things with more respect, and not just as an eternal chain of "throwaways..."
The first question you pose, regarding carrying capacity, can only be answered in terms of quality of life. In turn the question begs another: how can humanity be supported on Earth?
This is, in fact, the key question, as how support is created determines how much of it there is. For example, to provide grain from a field crop, one can provide a little more if one includes all the seed for next year to consumers instead. Thereafter there's no more grain available.
If support is only provided by commercial farms owned by megacorporations, who spend no little attention on lobbying, lawfare, and marketing, which help it to crush competition and gain a monopoly, so much may be supported. If different mechanisms are used, or banned, or prevented from being options by resource depletion, different answers to the question are arrived at.
There really is no actual limit to how many people can live well on Earth. Given aquaponics and personal control of food production via in home vertical farming, neither is there any limit on the quality of that sustenance. The limits presently are effects of the socioeconomic systems presently employed, and those are selected not for the benefit of consumers, but for investors.
Yeah, glass containers are more handy to resuse, but not everything comes in that format. me and my partner try to live by zero-waste, but some foods are even wrapped in plastic and we can't avoid it if we want to get a good deal on the food ;)
Glass may break, but it doesn't slowly destroy your health ;) I have so many glass jars at my place lol...