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Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#21

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

Flashtoo wrote: post #8
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #2

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based, although I would wager that the production of single use plant-based plastics still results in net positive carbon emissions. Nearly all plastic is not plant-based. Even then, plastic waste is not collected and stored in a responsible manner. It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest, usually finding its way into nature. The env…

>As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based

At the very top: "It’s usually made from petroleum, which is better in a landfill than in a tank of gasoline"

"It" being plastic. The common non-plant-based kind.

And later: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."

It's good if there is more demand for non-plant-based plastic, because then we burn less fossil fuel.

>It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest

The most common way plastic is disposed of is in a landfill. The carbon is being sequestered underground, in other words.

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#22

Post by 01100011 »

enchiridion wrote: post #12
sneak wrote: post #6

Why is single-use plastic a bad thing? It always seemed to me that the disdain for it was more from an emotional thing than an actual harm caused by it, but admittedly I am mostly ignorant of the situation. Like, that plastic garbage island in the Pacific: why is it bad? The argument against microplastics seems pretty clear. Is there a corresponding one for bottles and such?

Doesn't all single use plastic eventually turn into micro plastic?

Sure, but why is that bad if it is responsibly disposed of?

Sure, some landfills can leak, but that's a design flaw of landfills. Is it bad to responsibly dispose of single use plastic in a landfill where it may be reclaimed by future technology?

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#23

Post by _Microft »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #2

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

Storing plastic waste is better than burning it, carbondioxide-wise (not taking into account additives or whatelse can leak out of them). Not making plastics from fossil carbon sources at all is better. Making plastics from non-fossil sources even sequesters carbon but as far as I know, this amount is almost negligible at the moment.

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#24

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

technocratius wrote: post #11
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #2

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

Your paraphrasing of the source you reference is slightly incomplete/misleading, as the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only. Keep in mind that still significant portions of (fossil based) plastic waste are incinerated as well. And scale matters: in the country where I live roughly 30kg of plastic waste is per person per year. That's in the order of magnitude of a single tank of gas of a small vehicl…

>the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only.

That's most plastic though. Your average soda bottle is not biodegradable on any meaningful timescale.

As the article puts it: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#25

Post by waheoo »

layla5alive wrote: post #7
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #2

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

We emit >40 Gigatons of CO2 per year. This article is talking about sequestering 10 Gigatons over 30 years inside non-biodegradable plastic waste. That's like trying to plug a fist-sized leak with a toothpick. It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")

There is no silver bullet to solve the CO2 problem but there are many small initiatives that can, in aggregate, make progress.

So while this won't solve it on its own, neither will anything else. We need to start doing what we can and stop worrying about whether it will be enough in isolation.

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#27

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

layla5alive wrote: post #7
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #2

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

We emit >40 Gigatons of CO2 per year. This article is talking about sequestering 10 Gigatons over 30 years inside non-biodegradable plastic waste. That's like trying to plug a fist-sized leak with a toothpick. It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")

>It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")

Suppose I get upset about all the fossil fuel which is being burned and decide to do something about it. I buy up fossil fuel and instead of burning it, I sequester it underground in such a way that it can't be used by drilling companies. This seems clearly good for the environment, no?

"Wasting" plastic does exactly this. If you buy ordinary non-biodegradable plastic, and dispose of it in the garbage so it goes to the landfill, you are effectively buying up fossil fuel which could have been burned, paying someone to transform it into solid form so it can't easily be used as fuel, and sequestering it underground.

Of course it is not a complete solution to global warming. But it is something we should encourage people to do.

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#28

Post by lazyjones »

Single-use plastics aren't going away, even the "wokest" corporations use them for packaging. The problem is that in most countries and most households, they end up in residual waste where they're burned rather than recycled. Not even in modern, environmentally-conscious, high tax countries like Austria the garbage processing has been modernized to the point where plastics are separated and recycled from collected residual waste. This is what needs to be done (would be a good issue to regulate with EU law, as opposed to many others).

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#29

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #4
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #2

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

False dichotomy. No one is using less gas because we are using single-use plastics. It’s not like gasoline anywhere in the developed world is so expensive (taxes aside, as they are not a matter of supply-and-demand) that if there were less contention from single-use plastics it would be cheaper and people would be buying/burning more.

The entire field of economics is based on the idea that if you increase the price of something, people will buy less of it. If we increase the demand for plastic, that increases demand for fossil fuels (since fossil fuels are needed to make plastic), which makes the price go up, which means people will buy a bit less fossil fuel to burn in their vehicles etc.

Just search for "gas prices" on Google News and you'll see that people are very concerned about the price of gas. Much more than most commodities, actually.

Re: Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

#30

Post by Ekaros »

novaRom wrote: post #13

TOP 20 (copy from the article, with alignment): ExxonMobil, Dow, Sinopec, Indorama Ventures, Saudi Aramco, PetroChina, LyondellBasell, Reliance Industries, Braskem, Alpek SA de CV, Borealis, Lotte Chemical, INEOS, Total, Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical, Far Eastern New Century, Formosa Plastics Corporation, China Energy Investment Group, PTT and China Resources.

Not the list I was expecting. That is people making the plastics in factories. But yes, petrochemical products come from firms producing petrochemicals...
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