41–50 of 56 posts
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.
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?
Where do you think microplastics come from, exactly?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 ca…
"It's better dumped in a landfill" is miles away from "sequesters carbon". Pumping oil into a landfill wouldn't be sequestering carbon, so I'm not sure why pumping oil, processing it into plastics, shipping it all over, and then dumping it in a landfill would be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
To put numbers on on this, in 2012 (I know, it was the latest I could find) concentration ratios in manufacturing were that the top 20 companies averaged 65% of market share for each NAICS manufacturing category (I am averaging along NAICS classifications in sections 31-33, not market share).
So the idea that in manufacturing you have economies of scale and so concentration is something that used to be part of a general reporter's education, so they could understand how uninteresting it is that half of all plastic packaging is made by 20 companies. But it's strange how unaware even the BBC seems to be of these topics.
Next up, they will publish a stunning reveal that lower priced products tend to outsell more expensive products. After that, a ground breaking story that firms which produce more goods tend to have lower average costs per unit produced.
I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle. One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer. Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevit…
You probably learned the three R's, reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. On the whole we've mostly forgotten about the first two and with plastics they're the only 2 that really apply. Before they were banned by the holier than though types I would at least re-use plastic shopping bags as rubbish bags, that was way less environmentally destructive than pretending to recycle the plastic packaging they were filled with.
There's more to recycling than plastic though, glass and cans can be recycled indefinitely.
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 re…
only a few plastics can really be recycled. plastic recycling is hard and not worth the money as long as pumping out new stuff is way cheaper. Thus the need of taxing the production of single use stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's better dumped in a landfill" is miles away from "sequesters carbon". Pumping oil into a landfill wouldn't be sequestering carbon, so I'm not sure why pumping oil, processing it into plastics, shipping it all over, and then dumping it in a landfill would be.
Global warming is an emergency. Ultimately what matters is minimizing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You could do that by pumping oil into a landfill in a way that it can't be burned (note that it could be burned in its original state, that's why it was extracted for fuel!), or you could do it by taking CO2 out. CO2 is CO2. You should do whichever will reduce atmospheric CO2 most effectively.
If that were the only thing that matters then the deepwater horizon oil spill would have been great, but there's much more to protecting the environment than CO2.
> You could do that by pumping oil into a landfill in a way that it can't be burned
It was, it's been their for hundreds of millions of years.
I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle. One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer. Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevit…
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or…
The local trash company gives the plastic to another company who pretends to handle recycling, they send it off to a company in Indonesia who then dumps it in the ocean.