Hacker News Reader

Comment by maria2 | Hacker News Reader

Why? Plastic is made from oil. Oil exists deep in the earth, more or less permanently. If we extract oil, convert it to plastic, and then sequester the plastic permanently, e.g. via a landfill, then that seems net neutral.

Yes plastic ends up in the ocean. But most plastic waste in the ocean comes from recyclables shipped from first world to third world countries with poor refuse control.

View on HN

Extracting oil is an expensive process that has environmental consequences, and storing plastic after the fact requires land and can result in plastic leaching into the environment. There are also other petroleum byproducts between extraction and having usable plastics.

With that in mind being able to recycle plastic cheaper than creating it from oil would be an economic and environmental win.

As a small factual change I can not find any evidence for the statement that most plastic waste comes from shipped recyclables. I'd love a source for that.

90% of river-borne ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

Almost all plastic recyclables in the US is shipped to Asia and Africa. It’s simply not profitable to process here.

From the article:

> Recently, however, China has made efforts to curb waste.

> For years the country had imported millions of tons of recyclable waste from overseas, but a growing recycling burden at home prompted the government to shift its policy.

>Almost all plastic recyclables in the US is shipped to Asia and Africa. It’s simply not profitable to process here.

>90% of river-borne ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa

Sounds like it isn't profitable there either, so why are we shipping it

It is profitable to recycle plastic if you can pay people a few dollars a day to sort through it all to find the valuable pieces.

China’s change in recycling policy was caused by, among other reasons, a documentary on the workers who sift through the countless volumes of plastic waste. It’s quite sad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6qZwo6U5YFY

The packed that waste on fishing ships who dumped it on the way out and brought back fish. So basically, we dumped our plastic into the ocean, but with a clean consciousness after a convuluted process..

Can we stop pretending that whatever bejing decrees becomes reality in the country it claims to rule over? Its a nice play-pretend facade and the socialist inspired reality below is usually quite dystopian..

We pretend to recycle and they pretend to care..

>But most plastic waste in the ocean comes from recyclables shipped from first world to third world countries with poor refuse control.

I'd like to see a source for this because I don't believe anything of it. I only found an article saying it's not true https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

The source you provided says that exports from North America are around 751,000 tons annually, with only 300,000 tons exported outside of North America. This NYT article says exports from the U.S. alone is 48 million tons, 25 million of which go to poorer countries [0].

> Data for January showed that exports of scrap plastic from the United States edged upward, to 48 million tons from 45 million tons the previous January. Exports to poorer nations were virtually unchanged from a year ago, totaling 25 million tons.

If these larger export numbers are correct, then the estimates in the article you provided should be multiplied by a factor of 10 at least.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-ex...

Plastic stuffs become microplastics. Which are now everywhere, from mountain tops to breast milk. We are only just starting to glimpse the impact on ecologies, public health, reproduction rates, ad nauseum.

The principle of harm reduction dictates that society should take a few steps back and figure out what's going on.

A great deal of plastic is made from natural gas, not oil.

True but I think the broader point still stands. Natural gas would either stay sequestered, leak into the atmosphere as an even more potent greenhouse gas, or breakdown into CO2.

Multiples of the carbon in plastic is released in it's production.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com