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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Wow. You literally just proved my point.

And where can I buy so much as a christmas tree ornament made from bioplastic?

so you are arguing that fracking must continue so that the people's right to buy cheap plastic garbage shall not be infringed? theres already enough oil now for the plastic crap to keep coming for a while, just not as cheaply as before. once the true cost of fossil fuel based plastics reach the consumer, there will be more incentive to pursue better options.

There's 250 million cars in the US. If every single one of them was replaced with an electric car, that would mean at least 1 billion new tires.

How much oil is needed to manufacture 1 billion tires?

Christmas decorations are the least of our problems.

Probably not very much compared to the amount of oil used to drive those cars - tires are quire thin. I wouldn't be surprised if the oil used in transporting them dominated the equation. Also, 1 billion tires is about the number manufactured annually and it's unlikely everyone would replace their car with an electric one within a year, or eve a few years.

Tires are really the least of our problems.

Manufacturing a car tire requires 7 gallons of oil. 5 are raw materials to produce the synthetic rubber, while 2 gallons supply the energy required.

Lets assume the energy is produced by alternative means, that leaves us with 5 gallons of oil per car tire.

That's 5 billion gallons of oil for 1 billion tires.

There's around 35 gallons of oil per barrel. That's 142,857,143 barrels of oil.

The US produces roughly 9.5 million barrels of crude per day. It would take around 15 days to make 1 billion new tires if 100% of US oil was dedicated to the cause.

Now that I've done the maths, it doesn't seem like such a huge problem. So I concede to your point.

> There's 250 million cars in the US. If every single one of them was replaced with an electric car, that would mean at least 1 billion new tires.

Huh. I didn't know that gasoline-car-tires are incompatible with electric-car-tires. That's too bad, because if they weren't, you could continue using the tires from your previous car on your new car.

Good luck getting the same tires to fit on two different vehicles. Even within the same model line, rim diameters and widths change year to year.

Long gone are the days when most vehicles on the road had 15" rims.

When I was young ornaments for Christmas trees were usually glass. The move to plastic was only so that they could be made cheaper.

You know, I'd much rather drop a plastic ornament on the floor than a glass one.

Thinking about the ornaments I'm familiar with, there are a couple glass ones, which need special care. Mostly they're wood / cloth / metal. Plastic is rare, mostly cheap souvenirs of elementary school.

The glass ornament likely uses a comparable amount of oil to create. Making glass in pretty energy intensive.

"The glass ornament likely uses a comparable amount of oil to create"

The energy might come from renewables, not necessarily oil.

The plastic might also come from renewables. In practice both glass and plastic use fossil resources.

Only because it is still cheaper than renewables, but that won't be for too long.

Don't celebrate x-mas would be a start. /s

I'll sell you one freshly printed on my 3d printer from PLA bioplastic, which is the most common material in use in desktop 3d printing (because of material properties, not because of the bio-ness of it)

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