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Plastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking. - It's a carbon sink, - it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions) - it takes very little
by missedthecue 3y ago
Plastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking.
- It's a carbon sink,
- it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions)
- it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces
- and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint.
The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper disposal place. This isn't Coke's fault, people can just as easily dump a paper carton in the street. I think you'd get more dividends by ensuring the public has the motive (stick or carrot) to not dump their garbage into waterways, and in very poor countries, funding sanitation infrastructure.
- stevage 3y agoWhat do you mean it is a carbon sink? Extracting oil from underground then turning it into plastic above ground? Or do you mean something different?
- missedthecue 3y agoBasically yes. Petroleum burned produces CO2. Petroleum plasticized does not. The more market share that plastic packaging eats up, the lower emissions are.
- beeeeerp 3y agoI’d call that being more neutral than a sink unless I’m misunderstanding you. I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.
- staplers 3y agoStanding trees will aways be more of a carbon sink than dead flat trees.
- datascienced 3y agoA tree captures CO2 so, of course, but tangental.
- tiagod 3y agoOlder trees fix less carbon than newer trees. Paper products are essentially made of carbon extracted from the air, and you just plant new trees in the farm afterwards. Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint. All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.
- staplers 3y agotrees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing My god. I may have to leave this website for good. Just cut down all the forests they said! It'll be better for the environment!
- tiagod 3y agoYou're twisting my words. Trees can't be the solution to our carbon problem, because they have no way to compete with humanity burning millions of years of carbon storage as fuel. That doesn't mean trees aren't extremely important in countless different ways. Which also doesn't mean that we shouldn't use wood as a material, if it's produced with principles.
- staplers 3y agoif it's produced with principles. Timber industries have shown for centuries they aren't concerned with carbon capture of forests and actively try to monoculture "regenerating" forests with herbicides which drastically reduces carbon capture. This documentary gives a good idea into my reasoning on why believing timber propaganda that "trees are better when cut down and regrowing" is false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDgzOcsNm9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDgzOcsNm9g
- stevage 3y agoWell it's certainly an unusual take
- scotty79 3y agoTimes are unusual. Plastic is to humanity what coal was to carboniferous plants.
- Workaccount2 3y agoIt's not a take, it's strictly true. Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago> orders of magnitude more manageable Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute
- Workaccount2 3y agoIt's more manageable because the impact on the climate is very small. Oil that is burned is far more harmful to the climate than oil that is turned to plastic.
- arrowsmith 3y agoPlastic pollution is the pollution that is causing climate change. The process of producing plastic emits huge amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that's nearly 300x more potent than CO2. "Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. " - https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-Climate-Executive-Summary-2019.pdf https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-...
- datascienced 3y agoAn Iran Israel war would have the same effect.
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoNo, the more plastic we produce, the more oil we'll dig up. In addition to the part we burn.
- dgroshev 3y agoOnly if plastic packaging ends up in a landfill, if we burn it we still release the carbon into the atmosphere. "Bioplastics" (ie made from atmospheric carbon captured by plants) are a better example, and if we landfill those they're a true carbon sink.
- dotancohen 3y agoBut what happens to that carbon when the plastic decomposes, biodegrades, burns, is digested, or meets any other end? That once-below-ground carbon is now in the atmosphere, whether it takes a year or a decade to break down.
- missedthecue 3y agoIf the plastic is properly desposed of, this doesn't happen. When it gets into rivers and oceans is when this happens.
- dotancohen 3y agoEven Orient disposed of plastic decomposes and biodegrades, and is often burned. And recycling most common types of plastics actually releases more CO2 than creating new plastic products. There is no panacea one the carbon has been pumped out of the ground.
- arrowsmith 3y agoNot true. Plastic has a huge carbon footprint because huge amounts of greenhouse gases, in particular nitrous oxide, are emitted by the process of manufacturing it. (Source: Saul Griffith's excellent book Electrify, which cites this report: https://www.ciel.org/plasticandclimate/ https://www.ciel.org/plasticandclimate/)
- klysm 3y agoCalling plastics a carbon sink is dubious because you have to spend energy to get the oil out in the first place. How about calling it an oil sink?
- scotty79 3y agoStill good. Way better than burning it.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoNot making it is way better
- scotty79 3y agoDepends on what you do with dug out oil instead of making plastic. If you do almost anything else it's worse than making plastic and landfilling it neatly at the end of useful life.
- klysm 3y agoThat’s leaning into a false dichotomy. Not extracting it in the first is clearly the best option
- scotty79 3y agoOf course. However if not making plastic means extracting more to burn to haul around heavier glass then it better to make and landfill plastic. We are in terrible situation and nothing is simple and even simple stuff is hard to implement and can turn out negative when we implemented. Things backfire. People are buying plug-in hybrids but then they almost never charge them so material is wasted and de facto ice cars are unnecessarily heavier.
- missedthecue 3y agoYou have to burn much more energy to get sand out of the ground (glass), bauxite out of the mine (aluminum), or trees out of the forest (paper). It doesn't take much energy to get a ton of petroleum out, compared to a ton of sand, aluminum ore, or lumber.
- scotty79 3y ago> This isn't Coke's fault Maybe we can make it Coke's problem. For example by requiring them to collect and properly landfill weight in plastic of every bottle they intend to sell to customers?
- bratwurst3000 3y agoIs it the fault of Purdue that people have zero self control towards Oxycoton? Irony off
- liotier 3y agoPlastics erode and degrade into microplastics, that get into the food chain... A carbon sink of sorts, but I would do without it.
- Workaccount2 3y agoRather than focusing on recycling plastic, we should be focusing on properly sequestering it. Dig tunnels deep in the earth were it can sit for millions of years before breaking back down into whatever simpler hydrocarbons.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoThe drive for profit created plastics, where's the profit in your suggestion
- Workaccount2 3y agoThere is none, it would have to be tax payer funded.
- liotier 3y agoThe costs and carbon emissions of digging deep tunnels vast enough to contain our plastic waste might make it negative value.