3 ms·
Let's not. Even if you could make this work, sort of, plastics have all sorts of other nasty environmental and biological effects that we should try to avoid -
by Syonyk 5y ago
Let's not. Even if you could make this work, sort of, plastics have all sorts of other nasty environmental and biological effects that we should try to avoid - they tend to break into pieces tiny enough to get everywhere in an organism, and then mimic other signaling chemicals well enough to fool systems. There's plenty of writing on microplastics you can dig into if you want to learn more.
Making less out of plastic would be a good step. Making more out of plastic isn't a good idea.
- ziml77 5y agoAlso just producing less useless plastic. Much packaging can be made out of cardboard. If it needs some water protection, a thin wrapping of plastic is plenty. The one thing I'm not sure of is food packaging. There's a lot of plastic used in that, but I don't know if we have any alternatives. It's tough to package food because you want much of it to be sealed air-tight. But food packaging does have an advantage because it only has to last as long as the food inside.
- exporectomy 5y agoI think you're stuck between the anti-plastic and anti-GHG ideologies. This reminds me of when anti-nuclear collided with anti-GHG. Not everything has a single obvious right answer. There are always tradeoffs. In this particular case, the environmental problems are easily solved by using landfills that don't release anything into the environment. Having said that, plastic production itself is a far bigger GHG emitter than burning it. Plastic product production emits 1.5 Gt of CO2e per year while global CO2 emissions are 35 Gt [1]. That's 4% of global emissions coming from plastic production. Incineration is hardly anything in comparison. [1] https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1038/s41558-019-0459-z https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1038/s41558-019-0459-z