This assumes that:
(1) Plastic can actually be recycled. Unlike a lot of other materials, it degrades rather substantially every time you try, and plastic quality coming out of recycling isn't generally uniform enough to make anything more than the big, chunky "recycled plastic toys and benches" you'll occasionally see. More and more, it's evident that "plastic recycling" is a myth mostly funded by plastic producers and crew, who wish to have it be seen as "not the terror it actually is." Hard on profits, you know, if people don't like your product. The Guardian has done some great work on the truths behind plastic recycling, and they're not pretty. That's before you get into the biological impacts of microplastics on "literally everything on the planet that's alive."
And, (2) that "biodegradable materials" actually do that in realistic end of life conditions. They don't. People date landfill digs by reading the headlines on the newspapers that are "slightly yellowed compared to when they were buried."
Treating plastic as the life-toxic sludge it is would be a far better start. At least with metal recycling, we know it's actually being put back into a smelter for recycling, and that it uses far less energy than the original materials (though "pure circular" with most metals is still a problem as they just dilute the various alloys down with virgin metal enough to make the additives not a problem in current systems).
"Oh, it's fine, it's recycled!" leads to far more plastic use than "No, we literally can't do anything with it, the best we can do is go burn it to offset coal use" (which is what my local area does with plastic, as it seems to have the best impact for the least cost, and the burn temperature is probably hot enough to decompose all the nasties...).
On the other hand, making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture and burying the material in landfills permanently is actually a form of permanent carbon storage.
It's probably just best to reduce plastic use as much as possible.
It's unfortunate that the US still apparently used plastic straws in 2021. Here in the UK they have been phased out over the past few years, with an official ban since October 2020. It seems the same in other European countries from what I've seen.
Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?
Then, if you buried that plastic (made from atmospheric CO2) in a landfill after use, that would plausibly be removing CO2 from the atmosphere, not adding it. Assuming it doesn't break down in the landfill and leak out as methane or something.
That's the whole point: the one saving grace of plastics is that they maintain the sequestration of fossilized CO2. If you let them decompose all the way back to CO2 then you have eliminated that last remaining benefit.
That's the reality. Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet?
Because it's the most profitable step of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, [some people add other entries] chain, so it's in their interests to pretend the other steps don't exist.
If I buy a bottle of water packed in plastic and don't worry about it because I assume it's recyclable and therefore "of zero net impact" (also not true, but implied by most of the standard recycling glossy brochures), I've helped their profits.
If I bring my own water with me, or use a water fountain or something, I've not contributed to growing the profits of all the companies in the chain of extracting oil from the ground, processing it into various precursors, making it into a cheap, flimsy plastic, pumping water out of the ground to fill that bottle, trucking it across the roads built of oil with fuel built of oil, and selling it to someone, then also the profits of dealing with the waste plastic (trash, recycling, whatever)!
Reduce (don't buy stuff in the first place) and Reuse (finding ways to have things be not-single-use) just don't have nearly the profit chain.
Pay attention to just how much rhetoric about climate/trash/etc boils down to, "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." There are no shortage of companies happy to sell you "green" versions of whatever you might have otherwise bought - but very few people are willing to ask the question, "Should you have bought it in the first place?"
A lot of the messaging — paid for by the fossil fuels industry — is "we're all in this together." Image of countless families sorting their plastic bottles or whatever.
Don't look around the corner at industry generating a magnitude larger amount of waste. Are you doing your part?
They used messaging to make their problem our problem.
Because propaganda has more impact than the truth.
https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-Ener...
Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour).
I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).
Landfill space is not the issue at all. Landfills do not take up that much physical space, and we have plenty of empty space to use.
The issue is around the greenhouse gases released creating all of those disposable products and the resources going into their production.
If it was just landfill space, we would be totally fine.
> Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land.
Over that time scale the land automatically remediates itself. There's a hill in Rome made of a big pile of Roman garbage. The hill is more useful than the pots were.
From the article linked below:
If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.
That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That's ignoring all the advancements we'll make over the 100 years to harvest that garbage or further increase efficiency of landfills.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
> That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable.
That is NOT a big landfill. That volume could be easily hidden in all but a couple of US states.
Moreover, it is a concentrated supply of many useful materials. It might not be profitable to mine it today, but if the "earth is running out of resources" people are correct, it will be. (And, if they're not, generating trash isn't a problem.)
The trash pyramid is 100 cubic kilometers, that could fit in a few of the biggest open pit mines.
Make the export of detritus illegal, send the excess to dumps, and if Americans deem this offensive then they can legislate additional subsidies for domestic recycling (even potentially becoming a net importer of detritus!).
Plastics where not really a thing 100 years ago. At our current progression I think we should avoid the big catastrophes (Nuclear war), push for developpement of poor places(get more genius) and advance technology as fast as we can.
At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind.
> ...and advance technology as fast as we can.
It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path.
It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."
Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you. The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them.
Plastics in their current form won't exist as new products in 1000 years (though the current stuff probably won't have broken down entirely). Either something far less vile and toxic to "all life" will have been found, or, more likely, industrial civilization will have done the usual "overshoot and collapse" thing, so we won't have the technology to make them in their current form then.
None of that changes the fact that plastic are toxic to life now - and, so, we ought not be using nearly as much of them. I don't mind "durable plastics" quite as much, but the bulk of it is single use, and splitting out all our recycling, I'm regularly reminded of just how much plastic one cannot avoid, even when trying to minimize it.
If the reality (which it probably is...) is that people won't stop doing anything until the external reality we live in forces their hand, the outcomes are almost always far worse than if we decide to stop doing those things earlier.
Plastics are convenient, certainly. They're also a horrid biotoxin that has, quite literally, blanketed the planet in the form of microplastics. We have no idea what to do with the stuff, and burying it only works for so long (and if you're really careful to not let the bits and pieces leech into groundwater). But, I mean, at least you can get water without having to use a drinking fountain!
The mistake you are making is thinking the plastic system is a closed system. It is not. The plastic system is part of the universe, which is populated by people who constantly create new knowledge to solve problems. And we never know which new knowledge will be created which will affect this system.
For example, when nuclear power was invented one might have predicted that cheap, clean power would be available to all. But you probably wouldn’t have predicted the environmentalist backlash to it and resultant continued dependence on fossil fuels.
Or Malthus predicting worldwide food shortages and starvation as the population grew. He had no way of predicting the invention of fertilizer.
There are a million examples of this but the takeaway is: people solve problems and create new knowledge that is constantly redefining what is possible.
> The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them.
On the contrary, the history of civilization collapse is rife with people who insisted on thinking about things as closed systems and stifling open ended progress (e.g. ancient Sparta).
It is actually hard to think of an example of a civilization which couldn’t have been saved if only they had the right knowledge. Say the cure for a disease or a piece of military technology.
I believe that is the point the other person is trying to make. That humans continually solve problems, create new ones, and rapid progress means a higher likelihood of developing the new solutions needed.
I am especially wary of man made chemical molecules that have a long lifespan (BPC, fluorinated compound, etc)
With technology we make two step forward and one step back at the same time. We create new wonderful opportunities but we also create damage that we often overlook at first.
Of course it is practical. Here in Norway we recycle about 30% of all plastic from domestic and industrial waste already. We have some way to go though, glass and metal is over 80%.
Some plastic is especially well suited to re-use; for instance, we recycle 73% of PET used for drinks containers.
That 70% needs to go somewhere, and a landfill is the best place for it. Not an incinerator, a low income country, or the bottom of the ocean.
None of it goes to a low income country, and very little to the ocean.
And our plastic waste per person is less than half of that of the US. Reducing plastic waste isn't merely a question of recycling, one must decide which plastics to allow for which purposes so that recycling can be effective. But not using it in the first place is the most effective.
And lastly what does the population of the country have to do with the problem? I this mentioned over and over again in various contexts.
Reducing the amount of plastic used is certainly a good goal, but it's a non-solution to the current problem. Non-recyclable plastics and the recyclable plastics which are destined to be mismanaged on a truck tomorrow are all better off in modern landfills.
If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.
The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags.
Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.