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Careful polymer selection can work around that. PLA can be digested back into starch by an enzyme or composted at high temperature. There are plastics that can

by Kliment 13y ago

Careful polymer selection can work around that. PLA can be digested back into starch by an enzyme or composted at high temperature. There are plastics that can be cleanly incinerated or ground up and embedded in concrete mixes as insulation. You can chemically depolymerize a number of plastics and end up with much more manageable products. The real problem is getting all that stuff out of the world at large and into a processing plant.

yardie 13y ago
> The real problem is getting all that stuff out of the world at large and into a processing plant. The problem with plastics is its cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs. One of the good things about living in a developed country is we sorta manage the disposal costs well. In developing countries they don't manage plastic disposal at all. In all my travels one of the overriding themes I've seen is plastic on the sides of road, in rivers, on the beach. When I removed the wooden door from a house we didn't need to call the city to send a special truck to dispose of it. We chopped it into pieces and used it for bbq. Then we mixed the ashes into the compost. Disposal was $0. While plastic is cheap in the short term I think there are a lot of long term costs that get ignored.
- jaggederest 13y ago
  You can burn most plastics too, it's not like polyethylene doesn't burn like frozen gasoline. Sure, some of them will offgas toxic byproducts but so, too, does wood smoke.
- nwenzel 13y ago
  "cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs" Great point. Simple and head-smack obvious when you read it. Hits right at the core. Immediately after reading, I generalized to "cheap up-front, expensive back-end costs."
frogpelt 13y ago
Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_garbage_patch

by Kliment 13y ago

yardie 13y ago

> The real problem is getting all that stuff out of the world at large and into a processing plant. The problem with plastics is its cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs. One of the good things about living in a developed country is we sorta manage the disposal costs well. In developing countries they don't manage plastic disposal at all. In all my travels one of the overriding themes I've seen is plastic on the sides of road, in rivers, on the beach. When I removed the wooden door from a house we didn't need to call the city to send a special truck to dispose of it. We chopped it into pieces and used it for bbq. Then we mixed the ashes into the compost. Disposal was $0. While plastic is cheap in the short term I think there are a lot of long term costs that get ignored.

jaggederest 13y ago
You can burn most plastics too, it's not like polyethylene doesn't burn like frozen gasoline. Sure, some of them will offgas toxic byproducts but so, too, does wood smoke.
nwenzel 13y ago
"cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs" Great point. Simple and head-smack obvious when you read it. Hits right at the core. Immediately after reading, I generalized to "cheap up-front, expensive back-end costs."

frogpelt 13y ago

Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_garbage_patch