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The two great ocean plastic patches are hundreds of km large, and made of mostly plastic bags (polyethylene) and plastic containers (polypropylene) from househo

by jiofih 5y ago

The two great ocean plastic patches are hundreds of km large, and made of mostly plastic bags (polyethylene) and plastic containers (polypropylene) from household items. Not any kind of industrial source. It adds up pretty quickly when there are 8 billion of us. I suspect you got it backwards here - the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight. But in the end these different types of environmental issues are not exclusive. You can reduce your plastic consumption and plane travel!

mountainriver 5y ago
Didn’t Seaspiracy show that it was largely fishing plastics
elric 5y ago
People waste time and energy discussing plastic bags. There are laws limiting the use of plastic bags. There "durable" alternatives which are more expensive (and which are inevitably even harder to decompose). Food gets turned into "green" plastic bags. Cotton bags require orders of magnitude more water and energy to produce. Politicians waste their energy debating this stuff, when they could be working on useful legislation to reduce emissions in a meaningful way. This is virtue signalling and is mostly useless. Much of the plastic in the great garbage patches are fishing related. And the countries where there are laws regarding plastic bags are not the ones dumping them in the ocean. That's mostly the "developing world" (pardon that phrase, can't think of a less awful one). They're clearly not going to adopt "vegan spider silk" bags or any other "greener" alternative; they don't have the money. > the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight Nah. ~100% of the single-use plastics I use are incinerated and most of the embodied energy is recovered. I would say 100%, but I can't rule out a garbage truck crashing and losing a bit of cargo or sometihng.

by jiofih 5y ago

mountainriver 5y ago

Didn’t Seaspiracy show that it was largely fishing plastics

elric 5y ago

People waste time and energy discussing plastic bags. There are laws limiting the use of plastic bags. There "durable" alternatives which are more expensive (and which are inevitably even harder to decompose). Food gets turned into "green" plastic bags. Cotton bags require orders of magnitude more water and energy to produce. Politicians waste their energy debating this stuff, when they could be working on useful legislation to reduce emissions in a meaningful way. This is virtue signalling and is mostly useless. Much of the plastic in the great garbage patches are fishing related. And the countries where there are laws regarding plastic bags are not the ones dumping them in the ocean. That's mostly the "developing world" (pardon that phrase, can't think of a less awful one). They're clearly not going to adopt "vegan spider silk" bags or any other "greener" alternative; they don't have the money. > the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight Nah. ~100% of the single-use plastics I use are incinerated and most of the embodied energy is recovered. I would say 100%, but I can't rule out a garbage truck crashing and losing a bit of cargo or sometihng.