Pro-plastic propaganda for kids from 1997 "Plastics Makes It Possible"

If I’m not mistaken, the kitten * minute is the official SI unit for thermal insulation.

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I’m now imagining plastic as an entity like Doonesbury’s character “Mr. Butts,” an anthropomorphic personification of the cigarette industry, whispering in the ears of jurors, “Hey, remember the fun times we had when you were a kid?”

There’s literally no non-nefarious function for such a video!

I remember something that someone said, some decades ago, that’s stuck with me, about the basic function of advertising - something along the lines of, “If advertising is loudly insisting that something is true, it’s almost certainly because it isn’t.”

But it has translational research applications! It isn’t just basic science! By making silicone suits for kittens we could potentially save kittens from house fires!

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You mistake policy and human behavior for science. Plastic absolutely can be recycled in a very cost effective way, and in a way that is fundamentally more cost effective than recycling paper products. (Happy to go down that rabbit hole of chemistry, but even at a higher level if you’re talking about transportation costs required to end up being recycled plastic still comes out on top).

I wasn’t making an argument about any of that however, I was just referring to the tag line “Plastic makes it possible”. For better or worse, things made of plastic tend to be cheaper than things made of other materials you might use for the same purpose. Plastic also offers material properties that are valuable and allow for new applications (that bulletproof vest at the end for example, and although they didn’t go into details for food packaging it CAN (note doesn’t always) reduce food waste and definitely reduces the cost to ship food good around once packaged. As I said, fashionable to hate on plastic, but just be clear about what you don’t like about it (hint: it’s generally the intersection of those materials and human behavior, there’s nothing wrong with the materials themselves).

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They had to know there would be SOME response to Captain Planet

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