Coca-Cola increased plastic use ahead of COP27 summit it is sponsoring | Hacker News Reader

Coca-Cola increased plastic use ahead of COP27 summit it is sponsoring

ft.com

106 pointsmfiguiere96 comments

The EU has done tons of studies on what methods of food packaging are the most environmentally friendly when you consider a large number of secondary and tertiary environmental impact scenarios.

Plastic composites still win until renewable energy is extremely abundant and transport costs go to zero.

China is now mandating reusable bottles and phasing out single-use plastic items.

That’s easier to do in a country with as much government control as China. would that work federally in America?

In WW2 the government simply ordered corporations to do things, and ran a command economy, well I guess they suddenly realised they had that power.

I'm not saying they should do that, but it would be good if they did something, and I'm pointing out that there are steps we can take.

It would if people wanted it to work.

And if they don't, I'm happy the government doesn't foist that on the people, unlike in other places.

Sure... forcing the people to do things they don't want to is bad. But one of the reasons I think people don't want to do this kinds of collectivist tasks is because we've been trained into being hyper-individualistic. It's "nobody has my back, why should I have somebody else's back?". If we fostered a more collaborative "we're all in this together" culture, by y'know... actually being in this together, I think there would be a lot of problems we think of as impossibly hard to solve that would be incredibly easy to solve. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" was once an inspiring thing to hear.

If six marijuana plants grown and consumed in someone's backyard are "interstate commerce", I'm quite sure the bottled beverages industry also is.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/545/1/

Who cleans it? Does the cost structure rely on slave labor?

A century ago when glass bottle reuse was still common in the west, glass bottles were cleaned automatically by machines. A bottle cleaning plant should be able to achieve very high throughput with relatively few workers, paying them properly shouldn't be a problem.

Reusable glass bottles still make up 75+% of beer sold in Germany. No slave labor is involved.

And the homeless population of Berlin is able to afford basics by helping sort the recycling - it's a very nice regenerative system compared to most places.

This is true with other european countries too but in Berlin it’s works especially well. You leave the bottles around trashbins and somebody picks them up in no time. This works though because there are Spätis (corner stores) on every corner and everybody walks around and you can drink alcohol in public. It would make no sense in cultures where you have to drive a car and cant drink outside.

A century ago we did a lot of things, the most important aspect is the ROI and tradeoff. If you're creating more emissions from cleaning than producing a new bottle, you've got a net impact but you'll get to do a lot of virtue signaling to make sure it is justified.

Even if it's true that cleaning is creating more emissions today it can still be worthwhile to get people used to it, because it can be easier to replace a coal-fired plant with solar or wind than it is to change the daily habits of millions of people.

The question then becomes: how much water do you need for that? How are you going to dispose of chemicals used in cleaning?

AFAIK the cleaning is done with steam. As for water needed, the water isn't consumed when you use it, it just gets a bit dirtier. Just put it back in the river you got it from when you're done rinsing out bottles.

> Just put it back in the river you got it from when you're done rinsing out bottles.

Ah yes. Just put potentially contaminated water back into water supply.

Coca Cola (and many other soft drinks) is sold in reusable plastic bottles in Germany. They are slightly thicker than the disposable bottles used elsewhere, especially the rim, presumably so a machine can handle it more easily.

In The Netherlands at least people return them to the point of sale because you get money back for them, so the incentive is not to throw money away.

Finland used to sell drinks in reusable bottles, but then we swapped for "recyclable" ones. Which were thinner, flimsier and generally worse.

And who produces the endless single-use bottles? does that rely on slave labour too?

Oregon is a good model for bottle bills and container recycling in the US:

https://obrc.com/results/how-bottle-bills-compare/

The recycling program operates with no ongoing expense to the taxpayer, through a cooperative

This is a classic example of a 'Wicked Problem' [0]

Plastic is a literal miracle material - light-weight, infinitely formable, strong, flexible, not made from observable natural resources (e.g. trees <> paper), water resistant, rot-resistant, sterile, a meaningful carbon sink (lol - better than burning that oil!) etc.

Other materials that do not have those properties should be recycled for various reasons, but those characteristics do not really apply to plastic.

For example, if we sucked up every drop of oil in the crust, made it plastic and then re-buried it in landfills, there's barely any observable downsides, whereas cutting down every tree or mining/smelting all the aluminum would be noticeably bad.

Humans, being the pattern matchers we are see 'recycling glass/paper/aluminum is good, plastic bottles are similar to glass bottles, recycling plastic must be good too'

So instead of doing the very simple thing of just burying our plastic (like we used to), a bunch of well-meaning pattern matchers spend a lot of effort trying to make plastic recycling work, even though, for reasons intrinsic to the chemical properties that make plastic a miracle material it is a mostly pointless endeavor.

Then, as always happens, bad actors step in to make money of the well-intended who are at the end of their rope (in this case Asian 'recyclers' who would accept plastic trash and recycle it by putting it in the ocean).

And so now, not only do we have a ton more plastic in the ocean, we have airports banning plastic bottles, which increases the weight of flights (glass bottles are heavy! and for some reason almost no vendors at SFO sell tetrapak water!) and burns more jet fuel.

And any reasonable person who argues 'the oil came from the ground, why don't we just put it back when we are done with it is met with vague concerns about microplastics.

So yeah, welcome to society, I guess.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

No downsides expect the environmental impact of resource extraction and refinement.

A 500ml glass bottle weighs approximately 250g, which is inefficient in terms of weight contained. But it's pretty insignificant compared to the weight of the passenger and their luggage. There are also reusable plastic bottles.

I'm not entirely convinced the plastic is inert enough to bury it in a shallow hole, but that's something that could be established if it isn't already. Burning it for power and heat also seems fine to me as long as we're still burning orders of magnitude more oil, gas and coal.

It's not at the scale of "Person holding a bottle of coke" that the packaging is inefficient, but at the scale of "Delivery truck holding a bottle of coke". If we were washing and recycling glass bottles of coke like they used to do with Milk, it may be possible that the resulting efficiency would be better, but washing bottles to the same sanitary level is an energy-and-water intensive process; I am not so sure.

They used to do exactly that with glass coke bottles. You'd buy your coke or whatever drink in glass bottles. You would pay a bottle deposit to encourage returns. You would take the empties back to the store, they would get picked up by the bottler, who would truck them back to the plant where they would get washed and sterilized and refilled.

The glass bottles were heavy. The energy needed to truck them back and forth, and to clean and santize them was substantial. Most of that went away with plastic bottles.

Aluminum cans have similar benefits, and replaced the steel cans that predated them. But plastic is cheaper than aluminum, or even steel.

As for planes, it's not about the weight of the bottle vs. the weight of the passenger, it's about the energy required to move the bottle vs. the environmental impact of how the bottle was made. Small amounts of weight multiplied by many flights equals lots of fuel. American Airlines once saved $40k/year in fuel by taking out a single olive from each of the salads it served.

We don't just bury our trash, that's an oversimplification. Modern landfills are designed to prevent leachate (water that soaks through the landfill) from entering the water supply. Putting something in a landfill is one of the best ways we have to safely store it. Contrast that to dumping plastic in the ocean or remelting it without adequate exhaust gas cleaning and land-filling plastic looks really nice.

I'm not saying plastic pollution isn't a problem. It is. But landfills are a good solution.

>No downsides expect the environmental impact of resource extraction and refinement.

Sure, but those are relatively solvable problems (they extract oil right in the middle of America's second largest city and almost no one notices)

>A 500ml glass bottle weighs approximately 250g, which is inefficient in terms of weight contained. But it's pretty insignificant compared to the weight of the passenger and their luggage. There are also reusable plastic bottles.

Jet fuel burnt is an incremental problem (just like radiation exposure). Even if it's a tiny amount on the margin, it's still more than we otherwise have to and keep in mind, a large US airport like SFO (which does not sell any plastic bottles of any kind) will do 250k+ aircraft movements per year, so an incremental half gallon of fuel burnt per flight is still like 2.5mn tons of CO2 unnecessarily put into the atmospheric carbon well (not counting the trucks that got the heavier bottles to the airport).

>I'm not entirely convinced the plastic is inert enough to bury it in a shallow hole, but that's something that could be established if it isn't already. Burning it for power and heat also seems fine to me as long as we're still burning orders of magnitude more oil, gas and coal.

Well first and foremost, please do not support burning anything other than as a last resort. We are in a climate crisis and we need to keep as much carbon out of our atmospheric well as possible. Again, it's an incremental problem.

And sure, burying it is not perfect (most human actions have some amount of environmental consequence if you look closely enough), but recycling it literally doesn't work, so the only other option is the Ocean (which is weirdly what we've chosen.

Too much time thinking about how to prevent a 250g bottle from flying and not enough time thinking about how to prevent the 85000g accompanying said bottle from flying. Maybe a large airport like SFO should be doing 25k aircraft movements a year instead of 250k, since we're in a climate crisis, and should not support burning anything. I guess flying is the last resort.

The environmental impact of resource extraction and refinement includes its CO2 output, by the way, not just the effects it has on the immediate surroundings which you efficiently hand-waved away. And maybe LA doesn't have as good handle on things as you think[1].

[1] https://theconversation.com/los-angeles-long-troubled-histor...

Too much time according to whom? There are plenty of people that exist and some number number of them are working on aviation biofuel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel

We are allowed to and often have to attack problems of efficiency from both sides – in scaling up zero carbon solutions and minimizing waste in existing solutions.

But note that I said "minimizing waste". It is extremely hard to get people on board with demand destruction. The fed is having a hard time raising interest rates even though it is good for the long term.

Getting people to fly less isn't as simple as telling them "no" – they'll just elect someone who will say "yes" or fly more (yes, that is a thing).

_You need to provide meaningful alternatives_. Like, for example, building a train. But we've proven to be pretty bad at that, so then we go look at biofuels.

Again, these are incremental problems.

You can and should do both. But yours involves changing society at a fundamental level (who decides the people who can no longer see their relatives at Christmas?) and mine involves reversing a recent law.

>People living near Los Angeles oil wells have less lung strength and capacity than average for the region, on par with living near a freeway, researchers found

Hmmm, no potential confounding factors there...

It might be true for glass, but as far as I know aluminium cans and tetrapak packaging are better solutions than plastics for a lot of beverages.

On what metrics? Based on what data?

And btw, tetra pak is 15% plastic by weight! They're just plastic film laminated onto paper (that makes the paper unrecyclable)

And aluminum cans are also plastic vaneered!

Like I said, it's a miracle material that we cannot escape because it is so useful!

This data: https://digital.detritusjournal.com/articles/in-press/life-c...

For Tetra Pak, It's not paper, it's cardboard, and it is recycled.The three parts of tetra pak (aluminium, cardboard and plastic) are separated and recycled separatly.

So just some thoughts on that data.

The three factors that PET scores poorly on are Ozone depletion (not a critical concern in 2022), depletion of oil reserves (good!), and depletion of “other abiotic resources.”

I mean it’s fine that those are the factors that the authors chose for their LCA, but I respectfully disagree with their choices. Take away those factors and PET wins by a mile.

And speaking of what wins: yeah, a 100% recycled aluminum can that has no net new mining?Unfortunately that’s infeasible for a lot of reasons, most notably the fact that we are producing an ever increasing amount of packages, so there are literally not enough already-mined aluminum atoms to recycle for our needs. So we go back to PET being the best feasible option even under their framework.

As for Tetra, welcome to the world of “shipping things to other countries is recycling”

* Team Recology was at pains to point out that not all recycling is equally good for the planet. Aluminum cans and glass bottles are great; easy to reuse, handled locally, they can be back on store shelves within a week. Tetra Pak cartons, however, are shipped in giant bales to a facility in Mexico. Two giant 18-wheel trucks stuffed full of them make the 2,000-mile journey every few months, just from San Francisco alone. And that's just the first part of a carbon-intensive process of separating those plastic, paper, and aluminum layers.* [0]

And that’s San Francisco. Imagine Topeka.

Also, just lol at the cardboards isn’t paper thing. I’m sure it’s meaningful to you but not recyclers [1]

[0] https://mashable.com/article/tetra-pak-recycle

[1] https://www.afandpa.org/priorities/recycling

> For example, if we sucked up every drop of oil in the crust, made it plastic and then re-buried it in landfills, there's barely any observable downsides, whereas cutting down every tree or mining/smelting all the aluminum would be noticeably bad.

There's so many incorrect statements in your post I don't know where to start, but:

We don't recycle aluminium because mining/smelting all the aluminium would be noticeably bad.

Nor do we recycle paper and other wood products because cutting all the trees down would be bad.

Burying plastics in landfills is regularly shown to be less desireable than recycling (and even burning with energy recovery while fossil fuels are still in use).

You've created a world of confusion to justify some vague fossil fuel propaganda you were subjected to. And now you're complaining that people won't listen to your "reasonable" argument.

>We don't recycle aluminium because mining/smelting all the aluminium would be noticeably bad.

Ok then we why do we recycle aluminium?

>Nor do we recycle paper and other wood products because cutting all the trees down would be bad.

Ok then why do we recycle paper?

>Burying plastics in landfills is regularly shown to be less desireable than recycling (and even burning with energy recovery while fossil fuels are still in use).

Ok by whom? And what is plastic being recycled into? How many cycles does it go through? And again what's this insane obsession with burning plastic? You don't like it in managed underground landfills, but you love it and it's smoke in your air?

>You've created a world of confusion to justify some vague fossil fuel propaganda you were subjected to. And now you're complaining that people won't listen to your "reasonable" argument.

You've contributed absolutely nothing except a baseless argument.

> Ok then we why do we recycle aluminium?

Because throwing it away, then digging up more of it in a raw form, then spending time/money/energy on turning it into the thing we just threw away is stupid and inefficient.

It sounds like those are noticeable bad effects of mining/smelting it?

I agree if we could do that with plastic, then maybe we should think about it, but right now, we waste a whole bunch of fuel just to send our plastic to Vietnam where it then goes into the ocean.

> re-buried it in landfills, there's barely any observable downsides

Please elaborate. Its not like we are in a world crisis where marine life is dying and even humans are found to have more and more micro plastics in our bodies.

You do know that landfills are not nuclear disposal facilities, right?

Nature will process that plastic in unimaginable ways, which will lead to unforseen consequences. Consequences we see today, hence why people want to move away from single use plastic.

>Its not like we are in a world crisis where marine life is dying

I'm begging you to look into how plastic gets into the ocean. It's "recycling" it, not landfill escape.

Additionally, you're missing the entire point - the current problem is primarily how we dispose of plastic which is what I'm trying to help people understand. We could avoid most of what you're talking about if we put forth even minimal effort to contain our plastic waste!

Sure, a counter-factual world where everything runs on abundant solar power should also be a world without plastic, but good luck getting there. As of today we burn fuel and put carbon into our atmospheric well to move shit around, and we do that the least when we use plastic Full stop.

You may disagree, but putting more carbon into our atmospheric and oceanic wells is the #1 problem facing humanity right now by a mile and more plastic is a means to slow the rate at which we are doing that.

I'm glad you care about the environment, but please please please pivot your concerns hardcore to the climate. It may feel like a less solvable problem than plastic (and I know it sucks to care about unsolvable problems), but its 1000x more impactful.

>even humans are found to have more and more micro plastics in our bodies.

Still waiting to read the research on why this is so dangerous. Maybe it is, but show me the data! Meanwhile, I know burning any incremental fuel is very very bad.

And again, don't you think plastic in the ocean subject to constant kinetic energy is much more of a problem than stationary plastic?

>You do know that landfills are not nuclear disposal facilities, right?

You realize plastic doesn't emit gamma radiation, right?

>Nature will process that plastic in unimaginable ways, which will lead to unforseen consequences. Consequences we see today, hence why people want to move away from single use plastic.

Again, we test nukes underground (because we live in the atmosphere not the crust). I agree that 'nature' decomposes plastic, but most 'nature' is in the atmosphere! The thing that we are ruining the fastest and need to protect the most (even though its invisible and humans hate invisible things)!

> put forth even minimal effort to contain our plastic waste!

Partially agree, that minimal effort is to educate billions of people and governments around the world. And thus, I'll use your own words:

> but good luck getting there

---

> burn fuel and put carbon into our atmospheric well to move shit around, and we do that the least when we use plastic

"we do that the least when we use plastic" - How so?

> You may disagree, but putting more carbon into our atmospheric and oceanic wells is the #1 problem facing humanity right now by a mile and more plastic is a means to slow the rate at which we are doing that.

1st I do not disagree that reducing pollution is a priority.

2nd I don't see how "more plastic" leads to "slow the rate" of carbon production emissions.

> research on why this is so dangerous.

Interesting, can't give you the research because I don't have it. But I'll go with my gut feeling that this is very similar to the "forever chemicals" that increased general cancerinogenic risks chances world wide, but again, can't give any research, there might be some papers out there but I never searched for them.

> plastic doesn't emit gamma radiation

It does not, but it breaks down to unimaginable micro pieces of plastic that get scattered around naturally if not properly isolated.

> most 'nature' is in the atmosphere

Nature is everywhere and we should make an effort to solve this on all fronts. Not fix things on one side and make things worse on the other.

The fact that Coca-Cola sponsors a climate conference is crazy to me. That a UN climate conference NEEDS a corporate sponsor is also ridiculous.

> The fact that Coca-Cola sponsors a climate conference is crazy to me.

It's not that crazy: Scenario: the product you make needs plastic packaging. You want to do as best you can with the constraint that you will keep shipping product. So you sponsor a climate conference to get ideas on what you can improve.

The option of "don't ship product" is not an option. Given that, what can you do instead?

Or, you sponsor a conference that you can say you're doing something, while actually pushing your influence to make sure the most profitable actions are taken in the end.

It makes perfect sense from coca cola's perspective to sponsor a climate conference, what makes no sense at all and what I think GP is getting at is that it's completely insane from the climate conference's perspective to be sponsored by coca cola.

(And please spare me the cynical explanation of why it does make sense from a cynical climate conference's perspective.)

Is it wrong for a climate conference to take money from big corporations at all?

Conflict of interest when corporations like Coca Cola engage in massive green-washing campaigns

What if they're an average company environmentally, with no green-washing?

Less concerning, though corporations are by nature usually self-interested and motivated solely by profit.

> So you sponsor a climate conference to get ideas on what you can improve.

What kind of ideas does sponsoring give you access to that you wouldn't get otherwise?

Assuming the conference is still as big without sponsorship, maybe nothing.

But if the conference is smaller or doesn't exist because it can't afford to...

Corporations are sociopathic entities dedicated to extraction of wealth.

As such they end up accumulating most of the wealth, at the expense of everyone and everything else - including our biosphere.

Wealth is power. It is literally a contract to make people do as one says.

Corporations use this power to encode their advantages in laws - laws that all of us are bound to follow, despite having no consent in creating them.

Sociopathic entities will do anything without perception of morals. Sponsoring an environmental conference must be good for perception and that must be good for business.

We humans have magnified and empowered and deitified some of the scariest tendencies of our minds and turned them into unstoppable entities of epic proportions. Now we walk amongst these demons of our own creation, somehow hypnotized in accepting the global destruction they cause as completely normal.

This is nothing new for anyone here - and we all go about our days.

Not as crazy as the number of people who'll be flying in on private jets for the conference.

A tiny number compared to the number of people flying daily.

There are ~100,000 flights per day. Who cares?

How many plastic bottles of water are carbon-equivalent to taking a single international flight?

It's about the image. There's no attempt to lead by example. Get some good PR photos of the rich+powerful travelling economy-class then cycling from the hotel to the event, maybe?

They're making it so obvious that the 'ruling class' are going to place the entire burden of climate change reduction on the less well-off parts of society, people for whom the loss of their car will be devastating, people who can barely afford to heat their homes already, people who can only dream of the hugely expensive green tech (EVs, solar, heat pumps, etc) being sold to the middle-class and up as some sort of solution.

COP summits are where the world get's together to pretend it cares or will do something about emissions while secretly following the opposite policy. Coke's actions are exactly in line with this mission. They're to be congratualted.

A few decades ago there was a convention to solve world hunger. The delegates were very well fed.

I can only imagine the amount of private jet miles used to attend this summit, as well as the amount of carbon use to cart in the delicacies that the attendees need to soothe themselves

To me, this type of argument is so hard to understand that I'm not sure if you're serious or not.

Private jets are bad and wasteful & the people attending that are pricks anyway etc. etc. Everybody agrees.

But I actually see no issue with the attendees flying in on private jets in and of itself. The impact of all that travel is basically just a drop in the ocean and could easily be made up for with a stroke of a pen if those people would actually convene to do some good. Do you really want your PM/president wasting 2 days getting there? I personally wouldn't.

It would be worth it if they achieved anything. Even the smallest international action would more than offset those flights etc. But they have taken no actual action. They know before they board the plane that nothing will come of the meeting. And most go with the specific intent of stopping anything being done if it somehow did start to occur.

Your hypercynical attitude is dangerous and wholly disconnected from reality.

It’s true that the 1.5°C goal is seeming to get more and more unrealistic. That’s endlessly frustrating, as is the slow progress overall. However, it’s also completely untrue to act as though nothing was done. That’s just hypercynical bullshit that doesn’t have anything to do with reality.

Just like talk about private jets is just not at all constructive because it doesn’t matter at all. It’s incredibly irrelevant.

You can call it hyper cynical, I don't necessarily disagree. But my attitude is completely rooted in reality. It's people who think we're making progress that aren't living in reality. That's sort of my whole point.

Do you really, honestly, think that cop27 will make progress where the previous 26 completely failed? Or all the accords before Paris?

We've known there was a massive issue for 40 years. We've spent that time making it worse. Those are not attitudes, they're just facts... I know I'm a downer, but that doesn't make me wrong and we really need LESS hope because 40 years of hope has actually made everything worse.

I agree with your pessimistic outlook in the sense that I expect very little.

However, we are making (too slow) progress, so not meeting is not an alternative.

Well, I try to reuse my grocery bags even though I know that most of the plastic in the ocean is from China.

I find it hard to have faith in hypocrites who believe that their damage is somehow less damaging then other people's damage.

As for your direct question, I would prefer they do a zoom call. They may not be able to do as much backroom dealing over wine and scotch, but I'm okay with that as well.

I generally believe anyone participating in such activities should live by setting example. That is fulfil those goals to absolute extreme. Anything else is just pure hypocrisy that invalidates their whole existence.

And yes, PM, president should spend all their waking time traveling there as they are not hourly paid. So their time is free for constituents.

Well-fed means they ate a days worth of food a day. A return flight on a private jet emits years worth of CO2.

Of course they are sponsoring it. Those who have the most to lose want to be in a position to control the narrative. Any org that takes money has to understand the alignment of incentives.

https://archive.ph/FuflV

Um, why are we recycling plastic? We already know that burning plastic for energy is the superior option environmentally.

If you have questions about toxins, or how it's environmentally superior in every way vs recycling, here is a thread I participated in that covers that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322845

Citation? You didn't respond to mrinterweb in that thread, who cited this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

I mean read the first line: "Incineration of plastic waste in an open field"

I am not advocating an "open field". Incinerate it for energy, in a properly designed incinerator (which is existing technology in wide use). That article is talking about waste disposal, I'm talking about using it as fuel.

Also proper incineration can only be done in an incinerator, which burn much hotter and more completely than any pile of trash lit on fire. This is particularly important with plastics, where you really want to reach temperatures high enough to crack the dioxins apart.

A large and, to me, counterintuitive assumption is backing your argument there:

Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc).

Humans have a remarkable capacity to use all that’s available to them if unconstrained. Why would we not burn the plastic _and_ the other fuel? Are you proposing we somehow regulate the ‘swap’ here?

I could easily make the opposite argument that “putting plastic in landfill sequesters carbon we’d otherwise burn”. That argument seems more intuitively correct to me.

> Why would we not burn the plastic _and_ the other fuel?

Why would we? When you turn on the light, or drive in your car, are you thinking "hmm, they burned some plastic, let me drive extra"? No, the only signal you use is the cost of the product.

> Are you proposing we somehow regulate the ‘swap’ here?

It's automatically regulated by the fact that you have to pay for it. Plastic for fuel is similar in price to other fuels. You're not going to have extra consumption.

> “putting plastic in landfill sequesters carbon we’d otherwise burn”. That argument seems more intuitively correct to me.

As a technique to advance the argument sure we can talk about that, but "intuitive"????? I feel like you're missing something major if that feels intuitive to you.

We should find out what that is, or we'll be talking across each other, without understanding.

Are you theorizing we automatically burn every bit of fuel available to us? That's not how it works - people have a need for energy, they check the price of the energy and see if it's worth spending that much to accomplish their need.

Plastic for fuel is very valuable because someone already paid (in energy) to extract it from the ground. So now, you don't have to pay for that energy a second time. This is very good for the environment.

> Why would we? When you turn on the light, or drive in your car, are you thinking "hmm, they burned some plastic, let me drive extra"? No, the only signal you use is the cost of the product.

If burning plastic for electricity becomes even remotely common, it will impact the price of gas, and the price of gas is historically correlated to miles driven.

It is common in Sweden - they burn all their plastic, and actually buy more plastic from their neighbors to burn.

Is the price of gas there significantly different from their neighbors?

Presumably it is reducing the demand for other fuel sources and making them cheaper on a global level. So gas isn’t cheaper in Sweden, it’s cheaper everywhere.

>Are you theorizing we automatically burn every bit of fuel available to us? That's not how it works - people have a need for energy, they check the price of the energy and see if it's worth spending that much to accomplish their need.

Generally on a long timescale people seem to do additional things with additional/cheaper power, versus scaling back their use of previous fuel sources. Look at for example the relationship between biomass and coal, or oil and gas and coal.[1]

Middle class groups in groups in developing countries are increasing their burn rate, and increasing their per capita energy use as they do.[2] Eventually if everyone's needs are met and population remains steady we might reach the point where additional supply and a lower price doesn't cause additional usage.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-consumption...

[2]https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/howmuchenergy/

I’m _almost_ theorizing that; not every bit, but every economical bit (barring regulation otherwise). Your second sentence actually almost suggests what I’m thinking: if burning plastic is economical, it will drive down the cost of energy overall, and we’ll in turn use more of it because more of those needs will be worth the amount that would need to be spent to accomplish them.

Admittedly, perhaps having cheap plastic as a source of fuel might make some oil extraction uneconomical, so perhaps we’ll extract a little less overall because clean tech will become cheaper while we burn the plastic - but I have a lot of faith in humanity’s ability to think up things to do with more fuel.

If we’re having to put R&D into energy extraction working on zero-carbon-output options seems better than developing plastic as a source, because they will at least not add to the carbon burned - and we will, yes, get to sequester the carbon in the plastic in landfills.

Glass bottles were reused then recycled for many decades. Why exactly are we using plastic? Plastic is not "cheaper" if the total cost of all externalities resulting from its use are included.

One of our local grocery store finally switched back to paper bags this past week. Paper bags used to be the default back in the 1980s.

Glass is heavier and breaks into dangerous shards if you drop it. Paper bags get soggy and tear when it's raining. Plastic is used because it's better.

That's a pretty lame straw man argument as I'm pretty sure that virtually every human on the planet learns how to deal with broken glass at some point in their life.

Dropping a full plastic gallon of milk on a childs toe will still break it. Should we ban gallon sized plastic jugs then, too?

More CO2 is released moving that glass around than the whole lifecycle of the plastic by an order of magnitude. A glass bottle on average weighs 40x what a PET bottle of similar volume weighs.

Yes, but isn't the likehood of a reusable bottle polluting our environment (ocean, etc.) lower?

What matters more, CO2 or litter?

And in any case there are way better way to solve that: A bottle return credit removes basically all bottle litter.

Littering is a totally solvable problem, and by no means existential. Climate change is clearly the bigger issue.

Maybe if you ignore the weight of contents of the liquid in the bottle.

The pacific garbage patch isn't filled with glass bottles. It is, however, filled with plastic of all shapes, sizes and forms.

Micro particles of plastic are impacting our health. Glass is pretty inert when it comes to health.

Glass bottles don't need BPA and other additives.

I'm not convinced that plastic bottles are truly better when all externalities are factored in.

> Maybe if you ignore the weight of contents of the liquid in the bottle.

The liquid has the same weight regardless. The issue is the marginal increase in container mass. This isn't some conspiratorial point, green groups agree.

> The pacific garbage patch isn't filled with glass bottles. It is, however, filled with plastic of all shapes, sizes and forms.

It mostly isn't filled with drink containers either. The plurality is fishing gear, and the next categories by volume are crates and household containers. Besides, it's trivial to just crush and bury the plastic bottles in a landfill, still coming out ahead of glass on the CO2 front.

> Glass bottles don't need BPA and other additives.

Maybe not, but you're probably consuming sugar or alcohol out of them anyway, so I'm hardly getting worked up about BPA.

> I'm not convinced that plastic bottles are truly better when all externalities are factored in.

Shipping glass to be cleaned, then cleaning it, and shipping it again to be refilled spews a ton of CO2. It's obviously worse by miles if you care about climate change. The rest is classic gish gallop.

Look at the website - https://cop27.eg/#/ - look at the Sponsors and supporters with an exception of Siemens energy not a single energy company of heft.

I would have taken COP27 seriously if they at least had Glencore et al. or ABCD of food industry.

It is always the dog that did not bark.

at least one can see there very clearly that Coca-Cola is only a third tier supporter, so it's not like they are THE sponsor of this summit (which was my first reading of the headline).

Coca-Cola in plastic bottles taste terrible. That's the irony.

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