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Is petroleum for chemistry and plastics a GHG source? It seems like the carbon involved stays out of the atmosphere.
by ebikelaw 8y ago
Is petroleum for chemistry and plastics a GHG source? It seems like the carbon involved stays out of the atmosphere.
- Woberto 8y ago"Plastics emit GHG as they degrade": https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-greenhouse-gases-as-they-degrade-64600 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-gre...
- ebikelaw 8y agoAccording to the last paragraph, the magnitude of the effect is insignificant.
- gus_massa 8y agoObviously plastics emit GHG as they degrade. If you burn the plastic now, you get all the CO2 now. Some plastic last for hundreds of years, so the same amount of CO2 will be released more slowly. An optimistic view is that half of the "CO2" will be trapped for a few additional hundred of years. A slightly more interesting part is that a part of the emission is methane (that is like 100x worse than CO2), but the article says that the level of methane emission is insignificant anyway.
- ars 8y agoThat's because plastics are basically hydrocarbon fuel, in solid form. You can burn them, or manipulate them to make other hydrocarbons, same as you can oil.