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Comment by throwaway09223 | Hacker News Reader

These articles always strike me as a red herring. Sure, these won't break down in compost or a landfill, but why are you composting plastics to begin with?

The proper way to dispose of plastic is in an incinerator, as is commonly done in the EU. Regular old polyethylene burns cleanly and easily.

Do you know what's actually dangerous to the environment? These new "paper" alternatives which are often coated in PFAS chemicals -- which cannot be safely mulched or incinerated because they are "forever" chemicals.

Just use regular plastics please, and burn them. It's by far the most environmentally friendly solution.

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Because these plastics are marketed as compostable (and therefore eco-friendly). However, they know and deliberately leave out the fact that most municipal composting facilities can't actually compost them.

It's completely deceptive. The same way some plastics get marketed as "recycleable" plastic, but in reality few recycling facilities are actually recycling them. Companies are claiming they have made these "eco-friendly" recycleable products, but they know they will just end up in landfills.

Ok, but people don't burn plastics. Source: look around.

Better ban both plastics and paper coated with PFAS chemicals

Most every European country has bins for collecting plastic. People shouldn't be burning it themselves, just collect it in the appropriate bin and send it to the incinerator.

If every bit of plastic was burned in Europe, then we'd still only be talking about 10% of the problem. The US for example is high effective at burying their plastic problem in sanitary landfills, something tiny, like less than 1% of plastic waste escapes this flow.

Once you get out of US and EU these numbers can vary wildly up and to the point of everything getting thrown in the nearest ditch and flowing down the river to the closest ocean. Dealing with worldwide problem with a EU/US mindset is a great way to propagate a worldwide disaster.

Waste to energy is something that can easily be implemented worldwide because the resulting infrastructure has income to pay for itself. There are world wide infrastructure programs that build less useful things. It's much harder to get high quality landfills made and maintained because they don't have a source of profit.

>> Most every European country has bins for collecting plastic.

Yeah they do but how much is recycled? 10 - 20% ? Banning plastic fixes the both the environment issue and the oil dependance issue.

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