Styrofoam

The other cup is silent because it still can't get over those two girls.

Take my upvote and get out...
why would 2 girls use the sa- ohh..
Your comment gave me a gag reflex from a video I watched 20+ years ago.
very distinctive piano music plays

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.

Humans have always been this way. There’s a hill in Rome that’s basically a 2000 years old garbage dump (Monte Testaccio). The Romans even had the ability to recycle their amphoras… but not those ones.
- People haven't always been that way.. but massive, imperialist governments always have.
  
  Just look at the Native American population pre-USA. They learned to coexist with nature and let basically nothing go to waste.

Swap panel 3 and 4.

and the other cup should make an awkward reaction
- and there should be a flashback to reveal it was the guy from ctrl+alt+del who drank out of the cup
- And when Poochies not on screen everyone should be saying "where's Poochie?"
- Nem megfordítva, hanem más sorrendben!

Surprised there’s still grass.

Well it's long after we're gone.
Grass finds a way

I want someone to recreate the intro to Lord of War, but instead of tracking the manufacturing/transport/use of of a bullet, follow a plastic stir straw.

I mean you’ve got surveying, drilling, pumping, transporting, refining, transporting again, processing into plastic, transporting again, injection molding, packaging, transporting again, unpacking/stocking, and then some asshole uses it for three seconds and throws it away.

in 400 years it will be a mush of particals no longer joined but still the same chemistry... poison to anything that thinks it resembles it's meal

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.

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).
- Those packing peanuts are made from corn and are basically edible.
  
  Or if you wet them, they get sticky and you can stick them together to make stuff.
- I think the new ones are made from potato starch
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.

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

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

“Cleanly” as in “clean” coal.

Time flies in the upside down.

styrofoam insulates like a motherfucker, it also has the same problem as plastic, probably because it is plastic.

What an odd material.