Plastic composites still win until renewable energy is extremely abundant and transport costs go to zero.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Hmmm, no potential confounding factors there...
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.
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!
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)!
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.
Ah yes. Just put potentially contaminated water back into water supply.
https://obrc.com/results/how-bottle-bills-compare/
The recycling program operates with no ongoing expense to the taxpayer, through a cooperative
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.