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I don't get what the big deal about putting plastic in the ground is. It's literally oil. It belongs in the ground. Or we can burn it for energy, and then do
by nostromo 7y ago
I don't get what the big deal about putting plastic in the ground is.
It's literally oil. It belongs in the ground.
Or we can burn it for energy, and then do carbon sequestration, in which case it'll need to end up back in the ground.
- arcticbull 7y agoThe era started in 1987 with a garbage barge floating up and down the eastern seaboard due to lack of allocated space for landfill [1]. Something I just learned researching my other reply :) Dropping it into a well-managed landfill is direct carbon sequestration. [1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3752/4291566/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3752/4...
- saagarjha 7y agoYou're going to have to explain why plastic is "literally oil" in this context, because this is not as obvious as you think it might be. It's a lot harder to convert plastic to something I can put in my car, for example, and there isn't a big oil patch in the Pacific.
- garmaine 7y agoPlastic is oil molecules, sorted and rearranged.
- saagarjha 7y agoI know, but that means very little. Paper is quite different from glucose, even though cellulose is just a polymer of it.
- misterdoubt 7y agoEverything's just atoms, man.
- scythe 7y agoThe quantity of plastic thrown away is small enough that burning it would be a very small proportion of carbon emissions. This becomes clear when you notice that plastic production is a very small part of oil consumption. The world produces 260 Mt of plastic per year but burns 7000 Mt of coal and 3000 Mt of natural gas in that same year. So even if we burn all the plastic and ignore the emissions it’s not large.