The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
634 points (99.4% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
6487 readers
946 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.
But we still have microplastics in our brains, which does warrant some concern I think.
Hey, maybe all the plastic will lead to such significant fertility issues, populations will crater, and ARGH won't even matter anymore!
I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...
How to get politicians to change views:
Plastic causes ed and shrinkage
They'll blame woman for being too slutty and fucking everyone BUT THEM.
Unfortunately they'll just claim not praying to god enough and the existence of trans people causes ED and shrinkage...
Thats crazy we all know trans people do the opposite for that lot.
And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.
It ain't capitalism, it's the stupid fucking consumers. If a product, already plastic wrapped 3 times before they touch it, has a tiny hole, "Oh no, that one has a hole. I want another one." Hell, anything imperfect gets tossed. My dumpster at work is packed full of plastic because assholes won't take anything even slightly unperfect.
It's the idiots buying single, shrink wrapped potatoes. It's the idiots who think a Keurig cup is an ecological disaster, while every other drink they buy wastes 4-5x as much. How about the idiots buying kitchen containers while they toss the, often better, container their food came in?
When I was young, it was the idiot hippies whining about paper bags, like we were chopping down old-growth forests instead of making them from lumber waste (which is sustainable). Congrats assholes, you won, now we're buried in plastic bags and choking turtles to death.
Until people stop buying so much new shit, reject plastic containers (as much as feasible) and start paying a premium for biodegradable packaging, we're sunk. Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation.
I just wanted to buy some kiwis at the store yesterday. The only option they had was 4 packs inside of a plastic shell container. They have their own natural container- fucking skin. What the fuck?
Japan can be really weird about this as well. They have fish markets with fish sitting in the open on ice, where they sometimes put a label directly on the fish. And then you sometimes see stores with single bananas in a plastic bag
Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation
it's amazing you recognise the better solution is legislation yet endlessly rant for consumers (dupped by the industry in this very post) to fix the problem
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
That's still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can't find it now
unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
Sounds like this "mainstream media" is not doing its job. This might have some kinds of implications for the current state of affairs in the USA. Can't put my finger on exactly what though.
Sad that NPR is not considered "mainstream" these days. Maybe Joe Rogan will post something to Facebook about it?
NPR is definitely mainstream
I think the word you're looking for is "corporate" or "for-profit". Thats what they're not.
fwiw I agree, but it doesn't appear to be considered mainstream by the guy I was replying to.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I really can't wrap my head around this... (https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/project-earth-frugalpac-sustainable-wine-bottles-recycled-cardboard-central-california/)
The idea has absolutely no foresight. They want to "lower the carbon footprint" by putting less carbon in the atmosphere and polluting the future's soil and water even more.
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don't have it.
Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.
Yes... plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)
Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.
We have bottle deposit in some states in the u.s. Some do it better than others though, grew up in Michigan and there any place that sold bottles had to be able to return them and a lot of the grocery stores had the machines. Moved to California and it seems like none of the stores are set up for it and the cashier will often turn you to a recycling center.
Oregon was the same way. You had to go to certain stores that had a deposit and it was slow going.
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.
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.
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.
Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
They also both have the advantage of being things that will naturally degrade over time if left outside instead of just sticking around forever
Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.
Aluminum is the poster child for recycling, really. It takes more energy to extract it from the ore than it is to recycle it.
Former aluminum process engineer: This^
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they're single material items, so the process is:
- clean
- break down / melt
- rebuild
"Plastic" is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.
It's not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.
I wrote a school report on the plastic garbage patches (pacific, indian, north atlantic, south pacific) when I was still in my twenties. Maybe it was a coincident, but I had a real big depression around that time, so maybe ignorance would've been preferable.
load more comments
(2 replies)
The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn't require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it's overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.
The more I see plastic being integrated into construction, the more I worry we're just postponing the inevitable. Concrete, stone and steel and basically reusable or recyclable and low impact on the environment when dumped. Plastic on the other hand slowly degrades into microplastics and seeps into waterways. Sometimes we forget that buildings don't last forever.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›