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missedthecue

Plastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking.

- It's a carbon sink,

- it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions)

- it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces

- and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint.

The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper disposal place. This isn't Coke's fault, people can just as easily dump a paper carton in the street. I think you'd get more dividends by ensuring the public has the motive (stick or carrot) to not dump their garbage into waterways, and in very poor countries, funding sanitation infrastructure.

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Calling plastics a carbon sink is dubious because you have to spend energy to get the oil out in the first place. How about calling it an oil sink?

Still good. Way better than burning it.

Not making it is way better

Depends on what you do with dug out oil instead of making plastic. If you do almost anything else it's worse than making plastic and landfilling it neatly at the end of useful life.

That’s leaning into a false dichotomy. Not extracting it in the first is clearly the best option

Of course. However if not making plastic means extracting more to burn to haul around heavier glass then it better to make and landfill plastic.

We are in terrible situation and nothing is simple and even simple stuff is hard to implement and can turn out negative when we implemented.

Things backfire. People are buying plug-in hybrids but then they almost never charge them so material is wasted and de facto ice cars are unnecessarily heavier.

You have to burn much more energy to get sand out of the ground (glass), bauxite out of the mine (aluminum), or trees out of the forest (paper).

It doesn't take much energy to get a ton of petroleum out, compared to a ton of sand, aluminum ore, or lumber.

sure, I said nothing about that though. It’s still wrong to call it a carbon sink

What do you mean it is a carbon sink? Extracting oil from underground then turning it into plastic above ground? Or do you mean something different?

Basically yes. Petroleum burned produces CO2. Petroleum plasticized does not. The more market share that plastic packaging eats up, the lower emissions are.

I’d call that being more neutral than a sink unless I’m misunderstanding you.

I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.

Standing trees will aways be more of a carbon sink than dead flat trees.

A tree captures CO2 so, of course, but tangental.

Older trees fix less carbon than newer trees. Paper products are essentially made of carbon extracted from the air, and you just plant new trees in the farm afterwards.

Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint.

All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.

  trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing

My god. I may have to leave this website for good.

Just cut down all the forests they said! It'll be better for the environment!

You're twisting my words. Trees can't be the solution to our carbon problem, because they have no way to compete with humanity burning millions of years of carbon storage as fuel.

That doesn't mean trees aren't extremely important in countless different ways.

Which also doesn't mean that we shouldn't use wood as a material, if it's produced with principles.

  if it's produced with principles.

Timber industries have shown for centuries they aren't concerned with carbon capture of forests and actively try to monoculture "regenerating" forests with herbicides which drastically reduces carbon capture.

This documentary gives a good idea into my reasoning on why believing timber propaganda that "trees are better when cut down and regrowing" is false:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDgzOcsNm9g

The amount of utter dismissal of forest ecology and timber industry propaganda is sickening.

Care to elaborate?

The original comment was about plastic. Paper or wood are used as alternatives in many applications.

Well it's certainly an unusual take

Times are unusual. Plastic is to humanity what coal was to carboniferous plants.

It's not a take, it's strictly true.

Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.

> orders of magnitude more manageable

Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute

It's more manageable because the impact on the climate is very small. Oil that is burned is far more harmful to the climate than oil that is turned to plastic.

Plastic pollution is the pollution that is causing climate change. The process of producing plastic emits huge amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that's nearly 300x more potent than CO2.

"Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. "

- https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-...

You can't evaluate plastic production in a vacuum because it's numbers are enormous and will scare anyone. There is a reason though why that article makes no comparisons though.

For reference, the two plastic plants mentioned in the article you linked can emit 3.65 million tons of CO2 per year (about 30% of the nations plastic production annual total). This is a little less than what the average natural gas power plant produces in a year.

And there are about 1000 gas plants in the US. And gas is the least emissive of the power fossil fuels.

So while strictly speaking plastic production does create greenhouse gases, you can basically offset an entire years worth of plastic production emissions with only a handful of wind and solar farms displacing fossil fuel power plants.

Also I don't count burning plastic in lifecycle assessments. That is trivial to outlaw and dramatically pumps emissions figures.

I agree with that. The weird part is suggesting that producing plastic is good because it drives up the cost of oil.

An Iran Israel war would have the same effect.

No, the more plastic we produce, the more oil we'll dig up. In addition to the part we burn.

Only if plastic packaging ends up in a landfill, if we burn it we still release the carbon into the atmosphere. "Bioplastics" (ie made from atmospheric carbon captured by plants) are a better example, and if we landfill those they're a true carbon sink.

But what happens to that carbon when the plastic decomposes, biodegrades, burns, is digested, or meets any other end? That once-below-ground carbon is now in the atmosphere, whether it takes a year or a decade to break down.

If the plastic is properly desposed of, this doesn't happen. When it gets into rivers and oceans is when this happens.

Even Orient disposed of plastic decomposes and biodegrades, and is often burned.

And recycling most common types of plastics actually releases more CO2 than creating new plastic products. There is no panacea one the carbon has been pumped out of the ground.

Not true. Plastic has a huge carbon footprint because huge amounts of greenhouse gases, in particular nitrous oxide, are emitted by the process of manufacturing it.

(Source: Saul Griffith's excellent book Electrify, which cites this report: https://www.ciel.org/plasticandclimate/)

> This isn't Coke's fault

Maybe we can make it Coke's problem. For example by requiring them to collect and properly landfill weight in plastic of every bottle they intend to sell to customers?

Plastics erode and degrade into microplastics, that get into the food chain... A carbon sink of sorts, but I would do without it.

Rather than focusing on recycling plastic, we should be focusing on properly sequestering it.

Dig tunnels deep in the earth were it can sit for millions of years before breaking back down into whatever simpler hydrocarbons.

The drive for profit created plastics, where's the profit in your suggestion

There is none, it would have to be tax payer funded.

The costs and carbon emissions of digging deep tunnels vast enough to contain our plastic waste might make it negative value.

Is it the fault of Purdue that people have zero self control towards Oxycoton?

Irony off

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