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Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950

theguardian.com

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Re: Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950

#41

Post by soulofmischief »

ryanmercer wrote: post #40
soulofmischief wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ExxonMobil sits at the epicenter of one of the top 3 purest water tables in the nation, squat on the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. [0] The insane amount of water they use for oil refinement is causing the entire surrounding area to leech hard water. What was once the softest table in the region is now becoming infested with salt water. I have seen the water table schematics, I used to live a couple of miles from…

That water isn't being used to make plastic though. It's being used to refine crude oil into: gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, gas oil, naphtha, reduced crude etc. That stuff is going to be refined with or without the plastic end use purely for the various other things that get manufactured from crude oil. Something like 10% is what gets used to as raw chemicals for further manufacture of goods. Overall about 5% of the…

Yes; my post specifically mentioned biodiesel.

Re: Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950

#42

Post by mehrdadn »

FlyingAvatar wrote: post #23
mehrdadn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me until thermodynamics. We're obviously not getting every substance in our bloodstream like we are with plastics so I don't think thermodynamics is the issue here.

I think he was referring specifically to entropy in his reference to thermodynamics. Once we extract the source materials from the earth, turn them into plastics and distribute them, there is no cheap way to undo it.

The following sentence was about dispersion in the world and not about the chemical reactions in creating plastic, so I don't think that's what was meant.

Re: Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950

#43

Post by spodek »

mehrdadn wrote: post #42
FlyingAvatar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he was referring specifically to entropy in his reference to thermodynamics. Once we extract the source materials from the earth, turn them into plastics and distribute them, there is no cheap way to undo it.

The following sentence was about dispersion in the world and not about the chemical reactions in creating plastic, so I don't think that's what was meant.

I meant what FlyingAvatar suggested.

Quoting Wikipedia: In statistical mechanics, entropy is an extensive property of a thermodynamic system. It is closely related to the number Ω of microscopic configurations (known as microstates) that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system.

and

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time.

Applied here, when plastic breaks into pieces, the number of microstates -- ie, the entropy -- increases.

It's not the same as the ideal gas law, but similar.

Re: Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950

#44

Post by ianai »

soulofmischief wrote: post #21
ianai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool! Just another reason I love plants.

“Well, what would you say if there was such a plant that could substitute for all wood pulp paper, all fossil fuels, would make most of our fibers naturally, make everything from dynamite to plastic, grows in all 50 states and that one acre of it would replace 4.1 acres of trees, and that if you used about 6% of the U.S. land to raise it as an energy crop, even on our marginal lands, this plant would produce all 75 q…

In the US, all I can say is write your senators, house representative, and donate to campaigns with sensible policies. It does seem closer to reality now than ever before now.
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