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A comment on Mushrooms Can Eat Plastic, Petroleum and CO2 (2018). Parent comment

Re:Mushrooms Can Eat Plastic, Petroleum and CO2 (2018) by speleding on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:20AM (#25289638)
Counterintuitively, because food that's not wrapped in plastic spoils faster it's actually better for the environment to use plastic, owing to reduced waste elsewhere.
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Re:Mushrooms Can Eat Plastic, Petroleum and CO2 (2018) by Dirlewanger on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:25AM (#25289693)
But it's not. Spoiled produce is biodegradable. Plastic is not.
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Re:Mushrooms Can Eat Plastic, Petroleum and CO2 (2018) by speleding on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:33AM (#25289786)
Food takes energy to produce, transport and store, that releases (much) more CO2 for now than plastic packaging. Plastic is rather efficient, you only need a tiny drop of oil to create a lot of packaging.

If food production at some point becomes CO2 neutral you still have a lot of other detrimental effects to the environment from food production to account for. Plastic is a net positive for the environment when it comes to food packaging.

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Re:Mushrooms Can Eat Plastic, Petroleum and CO2 (2018) by panzagl on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:34AM (#25289806)
But if you need to ship twice as much unpackaged as packaged you're harming the environment in other ways.
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