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Thanks for the response. > * We don't really know what the long tail of plastic in the environment looks like. See my response to another reply - the problem
by jamesrcole 6y ago
Thanks for the response.
> * We don't really know what the long tail of plastic in the environment looks like.
See my response to another reply - the problem with plastic in the environment seems primarily to do with poor waste management practices. They seem to be a better thing to address to address this issue.
Could there be long tail impacts? I don’t know, but “we don’t know” is not a terribly strong argument. Surely that could also be said for lots of things other than plastic.
> * Plastic is a petrochemical product. Like all petrochemical products its extraction and production steps are environmentally devastating
That seems a plausible concern. We’d have to see the specific evidence about just how damaging that is, and how damaging it is relative to the alternatives.
> * Current policies for managing plastic waste fall into two categories: we either put it in a hole and forget about it (see the long tail point above)
I’ve hear that this isn’t actually a bad thing. For one thing, it’s localized (as in concentrated in specific areas). And surely there are ways of ensuring minimal leaching of ‘bad things’ in surrounds (potential eg: choosing a spot with appropriate groundwater).
> or we externalize it to a significantly poorer country for "recycling" (read: dumping into waterways, burning as trash, putting in their own holes in the ground). The former is an unknown, the later is bad and unsustainable
But then why aren’t these specific issues being targeted rather than plastics per se?
- woodruffw 6y agoI think this is going to go down a hole of defending environental claims that have already achieved consensus in the scientific community, so I'm going to limit my response to one point: "Specific issues" are inseparable from waste production, and particularly plastic production, as a whole. Coming up with good ways to manage plastic (because we do need plastic) would be less of a problem if we produced less of it.
- jamesrcole 6y ago> I think this is going to go down a hole of defending environental claims that have already achieved consensus in the scientific community (emphasis added) That's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for - rigorous evidence and arguments. But not abstract claims that they exist, the actual specific evidence/arguments themselves.
- dsohn0 6y agoThen you would be googling it, not asking questions simply to undermine people answering you in good faith. What a fucking asshole.
- conductr 6y agoYou asked about downvoting so I'll just say its is a bit silly to even try and play devils advocate on this topic. Expecting "rigorous evidence" and not accepting common sense deserves a downvote
- jamesrcole 6y agoThere's plenty of evidence that "common sense" is often wrong. If "common sense" is correct, it should be easy to provide a solid argument, backed up with data, that shows the "common sense" view is correct. And I've repeatedly shown the details of poor waste management seeming to be the actual issue that needs to be addressed: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
- musicale 6y ago> An estimated 20 percent of all plastic waste in the oceans comes from marine sources. In some regions, marine sources dominate: More than half of plastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) come from fishing nets, ropes and lines "Marine sources" is an interesting phrase but I assume it refers to human rather than natural sources - presumably the source of the nets is fishing vessels and there may be a lot of other plastic that is dropped or dumped from ships directly into the ocean: https://phys.org/news/2019-09-ocean-plastic-ships.html https://phys.org/news/2019-09-ocean-plastic-ships.html
- jamesrcole 6y agoThat is my understanding as well.
- conductr 6y ago