Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

nostromo·

I don't get what the big deal about putting plastic in the ground is.

It's literally oil. It belongs in the ground.

Or we can burn it for energy, and then do carbon sequestration, in which case it'll need to end up back in the ground.

View on HN

The era started in 1987 with a garbage barge floating up and down the eastern seaboard due to lack of allocated space for landfill [1]. Something I just learned researching my other reply :) Dropping it into a well-managed landfill is direct carbon sequestration.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3752/4...

You're going to have to explain why plastic is "literally oil" in this context, because this is not as obvious as you think it might be. It's a lot harder to convert plastic to something I can put in my car, for example, and there isn't a big oil patch in the Pacific.

Plastic is oil molecules, sorted and rearranged.

I know, but that means very little. Paper is quite different from glucose, even though cellulose is just a polymer of it.

Everything's just atoms, man.

The quantity of plastic thrown away is small enough that burning it would be a very small proportion of carbon emissions. This becomes clear when you notice that plastic production is a very small part of oil consumption. The world produces 260 Mt of plastic per year but burns 7000 Mt of coal and 3000 Mt of natural gas in that same year. So even if we burn all the plastic and ignore the emissions it’s not large.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com