Scientist knew plastic recycling was impossible. But marketing companies working for plastics producers came up with the idea of lying to the public about it to stave off a ban they were looking at.
Today, it's basically impossible to convince people that plastics are not recyclable - at least not in the same way that glass or metals are - because of that little recyclable symbol ever piece of plastic has on it.
Plastic recycling is not impossible, it's just not economical to turn plastic back to essentially oil if you can pump the stuff from the ground essentially for free (by comparison). That could be changed by taxes, but there is no political will to make plastic expensive.
In the same way, carbon capture is not impossible (plant some trees and bury charcoal), it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
Plastics can be beneficial for global warming. They need less energy for making them and for transporting them than the alternatives. And they sequester CO2 when they are landfilled at the end of their useful life. We should be pushing them back underground through the same holes we used to dig up the carbon.
Plastics don’t sequester additional carbon. You literally have to pump oil out of the ground, where it was already sequestered naturally, to create plastics in the first place.
Yeah, but we are pumping oil anyways and there's all the money in the world against stopping it.
If we convert some of that pumped oil into a plastic that won't be burned but landfilled then we prevented some release of CO2.
If we use the plastic for packaging (instead of glass or metal) we saved energy (which translates today to CO2) and we saved fuel by transporting lighter packaging.
Plastic is pretty much the best thing that happened to humanity in relation to CO2 emissions.
Too bad we want to get rid of it because we find it unsightly, because we fail to properly sequester it at its end of life.
Unfortunately your logic is incredibly naive… it ignores the fact that (a) the money behind pumping oil is partly due to the plastics industry itself, (b) that creating plastic already burns fuels and releases emissions, and (c) that plastics are horrible for our ecosystems for reasons other than pure carbon emissions accounting.
It’s sad to see someone having been on HN for so long having such a myopic view of things.
I totally agree with (c) and believe it should be addressed. Plastics need to be collected when they become garbage and reused as building material and if not possible stored properly for next hundred or few hundred years. We need to create proper incentives for that. Reduction of plastic use should of course be encouraged but not at the cost of functionality. So peeled bananas in plastics should be banned, but juice bottles shouldn't be glass.
As for (a) plastic uses up about 6% of oil we dig up so political influence of plastic manufacturers is probably roughly proportional. That explains why we have paper straws while oil extraction and burning continues and increases completely unrestricted. Plastics are just the easiest political target.
And as for (b) making plastic takes less energy than making glass or metal for the same purpose, plastics also are lighter so produce less emissions in transport so if we magically waved away all the plastics our emissions would rise by many percent, not fall. And we can't just not use packaging because the we would waste even more food which would also cause emissions.
It's like with ethanol for cars. In theory it was supposed to save emissions. In practise it caused greater emissions due to land use change for the purpose of growing corn to make methanol.
Probably half of the things we do (my wild guess) to help the environment or emissions specifically actually increases emissions in the end.
It's sad to see that even on HN there is huge representation of mainstream simplistic views that don't recognize complexities of the world and the need for carefulness to not make things worse.
Lol you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
(a) The massive plastic producers are multinational oil companies, and they see it as a growing industry to capitalize on, so they are extremely influential lobbyists for maintaining plastic production.
(b) Anything that makes shipping lighter, cheaper, and generally more viable will result in much more shipping and thus much greater emissions, not less. This is always the problem with efficiency-driven arguments. (But it takes understanding the complexity of systems to understand this.)
(c) Of course the ecosystemic outcomes are devastating, and we still barely have the knowledge to understand the full impact.
(a) It's a developing market for them. They happily make investment there taking a slice of this pie. It's quite interesting that they do it despite all the media narration against plastic. I'm guessing they know that all the narration won't significantly impact actual volume of plastics sold. Maybe they already planned narration change. Maybe to something closer to reality of plastics impact on climat change?
(b) People won't reduce shipping when you make it more fuel intensive. They will just use more fuel. As long as the demand is there capitalism will mold everything to fullfill it. And the demand is already there.
(c) what could realistically be done is forcing plastic manufacturers foot the bill for cleanup. For example to be allowed to sell 1kg of plastics they should collect and recycle or landfill 1kg of plastic from the environment. To sell one kg of new plastic you need to buy 1kg of plastic waste. With full scruitany of the government paid for by special tax on plastic producers.
Thanks for the link. I'll read it even though I doubt I find anything new in there. It's basically mainstream narration at this point. Which means people with money paid for promoting it because it serves their profits. It's basically a smokescreen for the most profitable and harmful activity to peacefully continue.
And honestly, the a lot of the problems with plastics are actually a very specific and fixable problem. 90% of the plastics in the Pacific Ocean come from 2 rivers.
It's 10 rivers [1] passing through some of the largest population centers on earth. That is still a big problem. Micro-plastics is, imho, a scarier one since they're now showing up in many water supplies.
The problem is that those populations lack the infrastructure and organization so they made the rivers ad-hoc trash disposal system. And it works too well for them.
It's not the plastic that's a problem. It's poverty and lack of organization of those regions. If humanity never invented the plastic those rivers would still be the most polluted (with population waste) rivers on the globe.
The reason I am reducing my plastics use in personal life is because of all the new issues with plastics we are discovering. I'm worried about unknown dangers of plastic. First it was 10 years ago we were worried about BPA, now we are worried about microplastics and pfas. What is next.
