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).
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...).