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Also, if you don't reuse cardboard and instead put it in landfill then you now have a form of carbon capture!
by concordDance 4y ago
Also, if you don't reuse cardboard and instead put it in landfill then you now have a form of carbon capture!
- pfdietz 4y agoUntil it gets wet and is decomposed to CO2 and methane. Hopefully the landfill gas is burned instead of just being released to the atmosphere.
- sph 4y agoWasn't the CO2 in the cardboard once in the atmosphere and absorbed by the tree when it was alive? So the net CO2 is the same, in the same carbon cycle. Probably the same with methane: enters the atmosphere, gets decomposed in H2O and other stuff that go back to Earth and are still part of the same cycle.
- pfdietz 4y agoMethane does ultimately turn back to CO2, but until it does it's a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. In any case, the decomposition in the landfill aborts the carbon storage argument, as the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
- woodruffw 4y agoI don’t think this is carbon capture in the sense that most people mean: you still had to expend a lot of energy to fell the tree and process it into cardboard. Putting it somewhere where it won’t decompose will probably only prevent a tiny percentage of the carbon required to produce it. Thus the goal of cutting down fewer trees, and thus reusing and recycling.