Restored from Instagram posts ·
do i love working with environmental startups ? absolutely.
do i support them ? whichever gives returns. i am unbiased b/w my personal opinions and those which makes money.
do i draw the line on enviromental stuff going overboard like ESG ? yes.
let's talk about single use plastics.
when i was with autodesk, it's one of the prime areas of concern and I'd say many $ went into ensuring that single use plastics are eradicated because they pose a great threat to the society.
it was clogging up water ways, didn't let the land breathe or drink water, affected water tables, polluted and destroyed the flora and fauna.
what did we do ?
we banned single use plastics.
now let's see the stats.
this is just for a grocery bag use case. these are the number of time a single grocery bag has to be used to make it environmental friendly.
an organic cotton bag needs to be re-used a whopping 20k times for it to attain zero environmental impact level.
[a correction in scope: a reuse threshold compares a bag with a reference bag under a particular lifecycle model; it does not mean zero environmental impact. the result depends on the impact category and assumptions, so one figure cannot establish the best material in every setting. Source.]
this is like crazy. look at other materials.
this makes, single-use plastics defacto the most environmental friendly option.
sounds tough to hear ?
read it again. actually, single use plastics are the most environmental friendly
(the processes which are involved in making those organic and cotton bags involve things that take a toll on the environment including heavy water usage etc.,)
so, what was wrong with single use plastics ?
if you take single use plastics,
they were the cheapest to manufacture, required less energy, less raw materials, ease of transportation (thus lower carbon footprint) and had the ability to reuse/upcycle them.
where did it fail ?
behavioural problems. humans didn't use it properly that they threw it with everything everywhere that it ended up as a problem.
if usage of single use plastics were educated, regulated on its disposal and heavily monitored,
it'd have ended up causing wayyy less environmental problems than the alternative ones that we are using.
whom are we kidding ? an organic cotton bag isn't gonna last 20k time usage. it's lifetime ends way before that, it's torn and out of usage afterwards.
a single use plastic is used only once. (sometimes we use it more than once - actually benefitting the environment by increasing usage times)
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2026 Jason Samuel