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Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

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Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#91

Post by pixl97 »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #46
hannob wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for reducing plastics, but some of your ideas are quite naive. Like replacing plastics with glas - I mean, you can do that, but glas isn't exactly an environmentally friendly material. Glas making uses a lot of fossil gas, the technology to make glas with renewable electricity does not exist at scale (it's been tried more than a decade ago and was a big failure), and it has emissions that cannot be easily avo…

Glass bottles and jars are pretty much infinitely reusable. Recycled glass saves about 40% of the original energy.

And increases the hospital bills (and more plastic waste) dramatically.

If you didn't come from a generation that had glass bottles everywhere you just don't know how bad it was. Even to this day there are still issues with beer bottles broken on beaches and stuff, but typically drinking alcohol is much more highly regulated then drinking soda from a glass bottle.

Say no to glass.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#92

Post by jamiek88 »

tokai wrote: post #45
sdenton4 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trash burning is still pretty common in some parts of the world. It's incredibly bad when plastics and disposable batteries start getting burnt, as is inevitable when burning is the primary trash disposal strategy.

Thank God it is. Burning trash is much better than landfills. Modern incineration plants are not very dirty and they don't poison ground water and wreck nearby ecosystems.

Tell that to the methed out assholes burning their trash in our neighborhood.

Burning trash is bad. Incinerating properly is crucial.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#93

Post by pixl97 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #28
mort96 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, what would the the environmental impact of stopping plastic use? I have to assume that producing a plastic bottle requires a minuscule fraction of the energy (and has a fraction of the greenhouse emissions) of creating a glass bottle? Not that single use plastic items isn't an issue; it clearly is. But I'm guessing that the solution isn't generally to replace the single use plastic item with a sing…

> creating a glass bottle? Not to mention transporting it. I wonder where the breakeven point is on energy costs. Soda did come in glass bottles when I was young. I don't know precisely why we stopped, but my guess is because people didn't like getting new drinks in beat up old glass.

To prevent glass breakage requires far more padding/thicker glass all of which increases transport weight even more.

Not only is glass breakage direct loss, its a health hazard. Always pissed me off when dumbasses did crap like break glass bottles in parking lots.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#94

Post by vkou »

corbulo wrote: post #70
mort96 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that? Do you often see a trend of environmentalists championing releasing a bunch of toxic chemicals into the environment? Aren't they usually the group most strongly opposed to releasing harmful chemicals into the environment?

They're usually more about strongly opposing the appearance of releasing harmful chemicals. See Nuclear Energy NIMBYism, lithium/ cobalt mining, emissions and supply chain required to make solar panels, and wind turbine blade disposal. To call any of it "clean" energy is quite a stretch.

> wind turbine blade disposal

How do the problems of that that stack up compared to disposal of any other industrial infrastructure?

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#95

Post by gadders »

myshpa wrote: post #21

Change my mind: 90%+ of plastic is not necessary. Not necessary: - plastic bottles (good only for coca-cola's profits etc., 90% of bottled drinks contain microplastics, use glass) - food wrappers (use paper & natural wax, not pfoas) - plastic shopping bags (use textile bags like our grandma's did) - eshop packages (ever received goods in plastic bags wrapped in insane amounts of additional plastic?) - tea bags made w…

Glass is a lot heavier than plastic. Would using glass require more fuel to transport heavier loads?

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#96

Post by zdragnar »

rootusrootus wrote: post #28
mort96 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, what would the the environmental impact of stopping plastic use? I have to assume that producing a plastic bottle requires a minuscule fraction of the energy (and has a fraction of the greenhouse emissions) of creating a glass bottle? Not that single use plastic items isn't an issue; it clearly is. But I'm guessing that the solution isn't generally to replace the single use plastic item with a sing…

> creating a glass bottle? Not to mention transporting it. I wonder where the breakeven point is on energy costs. Soda did come in glass bottles when I was young. I don't know precisely why we stopped, but my guess is because people didn't like getting new drinks in beat up old glass.

You still can around me- there's a company that specializes in making flavored sodas and encouraged returning empty bottles so they could be reused.

It's a fun novelty, but I think one of the first bottles that I had tasted like soap- probably didn't get fully washed or something. That also ended up being the last one I had. If I'm going to drink soda, aluminum cans are hard to beat.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#97

Post by dweinus »

rcme wrote: post #38
myshpa wrote: post #21

Change my mind: 90%+ of plastic is not necessary. Not necessary: - plastic bottles (good only for coca-cola's profits etc., 90% of bottled drinks contain microplastics, use glass) - food wrappers (use paper & natural wax, not pfoas) - plastic shopping bags (use textile bags like our grandma's did) - eshop packages (ever received goods in plastic bags wrapped in insane amounts of additional plastic?) - tea bags made w…

You're ignoring pretty much all industrial use of plastic, which is a huge contributor to plastic use. All your other points are essentially "If you paid way more, then plastic wouldn't be necessary." However, if you paid more, then you'd have less money for other stuff. So clearly plastic is necessary for our current levels of consumption.

I think you're both right: the current global level of consumption not sustainable, or necessary. Everybody wants a healthy planet, almost nobody wants to volunteer to consume less. Regulation is needed, and it will mean we have to consume less. I realize that's not what anyone wants to hear. On top of that, I think we need social safety nets that prevent the burden from simply crushing the poor while the rich continue to over-consume. In the climate crisis we are trying to pay off generations worth of CO2 debt and we haven't even stopped digging the hole deeper yet.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#98

Post by VLM »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #31
myshpa wrote: post #21

Change my mind: 90%+ of plastic is not necessary. Not necessary: - plastic bottles (good only for coca-cola's profits etc., 90% of bottled drinks contain microplastics, use glass) - food wrappers (use paper & natural wax, not pfoas) - plastic shopping bags (use textile bags like our grandma's did) - eshop packages (ever received goods in plastic bags wrapped in insane amounts of additional plastic?) - tea bags made w…

One use that comes to my mind are trash bags. I'm almost embarrassed to ask this, but what did people use for trash bags before plastic was invented? I've tried Googling this a few times with unsatisfying results. Trash bags by definition need to be disposable.

I'm an old enough gen-Xer to remember using paper grocery bags as a kid. There is a "standard" rectangular kitchen trash can size that used to fit grocery paper bags perfectly. Toss the bag in the galvanized steel trash can and the can is dumped out once a week.

Its a little more labor intensive, you can't dump liquids in a paper bag at least without paper towels, etc.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#99

Post by VLM »

myshpa wrote: post #21

Change my mind: 90%+ of plastic is not necessary. Not necessary: - plastic bottles (good only for coca-cola's profits etc., 90% of bottled drinks contain microplastics, use glass) - food wrappers (use paper & natural wax, not pfoas) - plastic shopping bags (use textile bags like our grandma's did) - eshop packages (ever received goods in plastic bags wrapped in insane amounts of additional plastic?) - tea bags made w…

Cars are mostly plastic by weight. Remember every extra pound means burning an extra Y gallons of fuel over the life of the car. Replacing plastic with steel would likely be a net loss environmentally speaking.

Re: Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

#100

Post by FlyingAvatar »

myshpa wrote: post #87
FlyingAvatar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases, I would bet the CO2 impact of the alternatives you list is on the order of 2x - 10x. So long as plastics are not being burned, at least their carbon is not going into the atmosphere.

They touted the plastic as a way to protect the trees. It didn't stop the deforestation. They told us they're inert. Then we've learned about bpa, pfas and microplastics. They told us they're recyclable. Now we now that's not really the truth. They tell us it's for saving CO2. Now we have the stuff in our seas, on beaches, microplastics in rain and wind, there is no place on earth free of it (not even the most remote…

I mean, I understand the sentiment. At the same time, most of the consumers of said plastics are living longer than previous generations. I don't think it's as bad as you make it out.

Granted, at some point the human race will need to act more holistically about their resource usage, but I think that will take a very long time and probably not until it has become a much more painful problem.

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