this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
Should've made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that's on them to innovate better processes.
I hope that one day drilling oil has been banned, and CCS becomes mandatory. If you want hydrocarbons in order to manufacture chemicals and plastics, you can pull them from the air. There’s enough for everyone.
Carbon capture (more specifically direct air capture) is not a viable option due to the energy requirements and the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is largely promoted by fossil fuel companies for the same reason that recycling is: “let us keep doing what we’re doing because there’s some magical way to undo the damage, we just need a few more years of research”.
However, plants do the same thing and already exist. Trees in particular have shown some promise for being able to be a precursor for many polymers. This would at least mean that any plant matter used for this did pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the last few years (so relatively neutral compared to the other options), whereas fossil fuels are releasing carbon that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.
EDIT: TLDR, oil drilling should be banned or severely limited, but DAC is not a viable option and is only relevant because oil companies keep pumping money into it. Biomass is potentially an ok feedstock for plastics (but not for fuel).
Well, what if we used renewable energy to run a DAC process? That would require lots of solar and wind power, but we’re going to need a lot of that anyway to get permanently rid of fossil fuels.
As you pointed out, the low concentratiions are a serious issue for any process, but maybe plants will do a better job our current machines can. Either way, once you have that carbon, we would really need put it back where it came from. The way I see it, slowing down global warming is a step in the right direction and becoming carbon neutral is another step. However, what we really need is a complete ban on all fossil fuels and an efficient way to reduce the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Also, I have fairly negative view on CCU, since it doesn’t really solve the problem. CCS on the other hand seems like a better option. If you do it with plants and store the carbon as biochar, I’m all for it. If you want to do it with electricity and chemistry, I’m ok with that too, as long as it gets the job done.