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Cucumbers are more harmful than plastic?!? I stopped reading right there. One timely biodegrades, the other doesn’t. That’s the whole problem.

by dd36 8y ago

TylerE 8y ago
This is exactly the kind of tunnel vision that annoys me. Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of. Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive.
- state_less 8y ago
  We can and should do better. What if we had a robot that would drive through the fields, detecting weeds and crushing or cutting them out instead of chemical solutions? Couldn't we deliver the water more directly as well? Shouldn't transportation use battery powered vehicles instead of fossil fuel based vehicles? Can't we steam wash with renewable energy? Maybe it costs more to do some of these things now, but I think folks could use some good goals to work toward.
  - beauzero 8y ago
    On a happy note "no-till" is starting to prove itself. There are mixtures of effectiveness and chemical usage but checkout the No Till vids the USDA is promoting https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS
- chicob 8y ago
  And plastic intensive as well. A single plantation of 1 ha of olive trees in super high-density mode uses around 1700 PE cups, 1700 PVC shoot protectors and 2,5 km of PVC drip irrigation tubes, not to mention the tying. Melon production also directly uses plastic, albeit temporarily. Greenhouses need repair and maintenance. Also worth of mention all the herbicide/fungicide/insecticide plastic containers. Only these last have an actual though-of destination for recycling, which is mandatory. These have to be washed and made unusable, to avoid accidents, which means forgetting about 2 out of 3 Rs in this case.
- dd36 8y ago
  Same response as prior... this article is about plastic waste clogging rivers not CO2. Yes, there are other problems that also need better solutions. Stop conflating different problems. I have news for you: they don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save on CO2. EDIT: And, yes, I have tunnel vision on solving the problem presented in the article not some other problem. There is no price for carbon that is inducing agricultural producers to minimize it.
- dahart 8y ago
  > Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of. Right. Plastic takes a lot more energy to produce than cucumbers (and today a large portion of plastic production is non-renewable energy, compared to the solar that grows cucumbers). Plastic production also results in much more c02 byproduct than the production of cucumbers. The 'evidence' against cucumbers above was to count the c02 byproduct of transporting the cucumbers, not how much c02 they give off while growing. The same applies to all the plastics in the grocery store too, they also have to be transported, so that argument is completely moot. If you want to reduce c02, it's irrelevant to pit veggies against plastic, we simply need to make vehicles more efficient. BTW, I'm not arguing against the paper; if you read the paper's abstract, that exactly the conclusion they come to as well. It seems like @jdietrich is either confused about what it's saying, or is trying to spin or cloud the issue. If you remove the argument of transportation from the equation, plants are a net negative in c02 emissions. Plants absorb more c02 than they produce. The more plants we grow, the more c02 we save. Not so for plastic, which produces 3-6 kg of c02 per kg of plastic in the production of plastic alone, not counting the transportation. > Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive. Right. So what? This sentence seems to completely misunderstand that using energy (the sun), land, and water to grow food is environmentally friendly because it's renewable. All the energy and land and water we use to grow plants we get to keep using over and over again with positive environmental benefits. It's our man-made processes, especially the ones that burn fossil fuels, that are causing almost all the problems we have; cars, machines, plastic production, etc.. c02-wise, farm equipment is a small portion of that, transportation is a much large piece of the pie.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jdietrich 8y ago
Cucumbers do not spontaneously emerge from the ground in an untouched rural idyll and teleport themselves to your supermarket. Putting a cucumber on the shelf of your local supermarket produces about 1kg of CO2 emissions. Atmospheric CO2 isn't biodegradable. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901104000991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110...
- dd36 8y ago
  Ummm... this is about plastic waste not CO2 production. I agree that food can be better recycled into compost.
riantogo 8y ago
I recommend you continue reading. It is an insightful comment and might just broden your horizon on this topic.

Cucumbers are more harmful than plastic?!? I stopped reading right there. One timely biodegrades, the other doesn’t. That’s the whole problem.

by dd36 8y ago

Cucumbers are more harmful than plastic?!? I stopped reading right there. One timely biodegrades, the other doesn’t. That’s the whole problem.

TylerE 8y ago

This is exactly the kind of tunnel vision that annoys me. Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of. Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive.

state_less 8y ago
We can and should do better. What if we had a robot that would drive through the fields, detecting weeds and crushing or cutting them out instead of chemical solutions? Couldn't we deliver the water more directly as well? Shouldn't transportation use battery powered vehicles instead of fossil fuel based vehicles? Can't we steam wash with renewable energy? Maybe it costs more to do some of these things now, but I think folks could use some good goals to work toward.
- beauzero 8y ago
  On a happy note "no-till" is starting to prove itself. There are mixtures of effectiveness and chemical usage but checkout the No Till vids the USDA is promoting https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS
chicob 8y ago
And plastic intensive as well. A single plantation of 1 ha of olive trees in super high-density mode uses around 1700 PE cups, 1700 PVC shoot protectors and 2,5 km of PVC drip irrigation tubes, not to mention the tying. Melon production also directly uses plastic, albeit temporarily. Greenhouses need repair and maintenance. Also worth of mention all the herbicide/fungicide/insecticide plastic containers. Only these last have an actual though-of destination for recycling, which is mandatory. These have to be washed and made unusable, to avoid accidents, which means forgetting about 2 out of 3 Rs in this case.
dd36 8y ago
Same response as prior... this article is about plastic waste clogging rivers not CO2. Yes, there are other problems that also need better solutions. Stop conflating different problems. I have news for you: they don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save on CO2. EDIT: And, yes, I have tunnel vision on solving the problem presented in the article not some other problem. There is no price for carbon that is inducing agricultural producers to minimize it.
dahart 8y ago
> Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of. Right. Plastic takes a lot more energy to produce than cucumbers (and today a large portion of plastic production is non-renewable energy, compared to the solar that grows cucumbers). Plastic production also results in much more c02 byproduct than the production of cucumbers. The 'evidence' against cucumbers above was to count the c02 byproduct of transporting the cucumbers, not how much c02 they give off while growing. The same applies to all the plastics in the grocery store too, they also have to be transported, so that argument is completely moot. If you want to reduce c02, it's irrelevant to pit veggies against plastic, we simply need to make vehicles more efficient. BTW, I'm not arguing against the paper; if you read the paper's abstract, that exactly the conclusion they come to as well. It seems like @jdietrich is either confused about what it's saying, or is trying to spin or cloud the issue. If you remove the argument of transportation from the equation, plants are a net negative in c02 emissions. Plants absorb more c02 than they produce. The more plants we grow, the more c02 we save. Not so for plastic, which produces 3-6 kg of c02 per kg of plastic in the production of plastic alone, not counting the transportation. > Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive. Right. So what? This sentence seems to completely misunderstand that using energy (the sun), land, and water to grow food is environmentally friendly because it's renewable. All the energy and land and water we use to grow plants we get to keep using over and over again with positive environmental benefits. It's our man-made processes, especially the ones that burn fossil fuels, that are causing almost all the problems we have; cars, machines, plastic production, etc.. c02-wise, farm equipment is a small portion of that, transportation is a much large piece of the pie.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jdietrich 8y ago

Cucumbers do not spontaneously emerge from the ground in an untouched rural idyll and teleport themselves to your supermarket. Putting a cucumber on the shelf of your local supermarket produces about 1kg of CO2 emissions. Atmospheric CO2 isn't biodegradable. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901104000991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110...

dd36 8y ago
Ummm... this is about plastic waste not CO2 production. I agree that food can be better recycled into compost.

riantogo 8y ago

I recommend you continue reading. It is an insightful comment and might just broden your horizon on this topic.