Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc).
Humans have a remarkable capacity to use all that’s available to them if unconstrained. Why would we not burn the plastic _and_ the other fuel? Are you proposing we somehow regulate the ‘swap’ here?
I could easily make the opposite argument that “putting plastic in landfill sequesters carbon we’d otherwise burn”. That argument seems more intuitively correct to me.
Why would we? When you turn on the light, or drive in your car, are you thinking "hmm, they burned some plastic, let me drive extra"? No, the only signal you use is the cost of the product.
> Are you proposing we somehow regulate the ‘swap’ here?
It's automatically regulated by the fact that you have to pay for it. Plastic for fuel is similar in price to other fuels. You're not going to have extra consumption.
> “putting plastic in landfill sequesters carbon we’d otherwise burn”. That argument seems more intuitively correct to me.
As a technique to advance the argument sure we can talk about that, but "intuitive"????? I feel like you're missing something major if that feels intuitive to you.
We should find out what that is, or we'll be talking across each other, without understanding.
Are you theorizing we automatically burn every bit of fuel available to us? That's not how it works - people have a need for energy, they check the price of the energy and see if it's worth spending that much to accomplish their need.
Plastic for fuel is very valuable because someone already paid (in energy) to extract it from the ground. So now, you don't have to pay for that energy a second time. This is very good for the environment.
If burning plastic for electricity becomes even remotely common, it will impact the price of gas, and the price of gas is historically correlated to miles driven.
Is the price of gas there significantly different from their neighbors?
Generally on a long timescale people seem to do additional things with additional/cheaper power, versus scaling back their use of previous fuel sources. Look at for example the relationship between biomass and coal, or oil and gas and coal.[1]
Middle class groups in groups in developing countries are increasing their burn rate, and increasing their per capita energy use as they do.[2] Eventually if everyone's needs are met and population remains steady we might reach the point where additional supply and a lower price doesn't cause additional usage.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-consumption...
I’m _almost_ theorizing that; not every bit, but every economical bit (barring regulation otherwise). Your second sentence actually almost suggests what I’m thinking: if burning plastic is economical, it will drive down the cost of energy overall, and we’ll in turn use more of it because more of those needs will be worth the amount that would need to be spent to accomplish them.
Admittedly, perhaps having cheap plastic as a source of fuel might make some oil extraction uneconomical, so perhaps we’ll extract a little less overall because clean tech will become cheaper while we burn the plastic - but I have a lot of faith in humanity’s ability to think up things to do with more fuel.
If we’re having to put R&D into energy extraction working on zero-carbon-output options seems better than developing plastic as a source, because they will at least not add to the carbon burned - and we will, yes, get to sequester the carbon in the plastic in landfills.
One of our local grocery store finally switched back to paper bags this past week. Paper bags used to be the default back in the 1980s.
Dropping a full plastic gallon of milk on a childs toe will still break it. Should we ban gallon sized plastic jugs then, too?
And in any case there are way better way to solve that: A bottle return credit removes basically all bottle litter.
The pacific garbage patch isn't filled with glass bottles. It is, however, filled with plastic of all shapes, sizes and forms.
Micro particles of plastic are impacting our health. Glass is pretty inert when it comes to health.
Glass bottles don't need BPA and other additives.
I'm not convinced that plastic bottles are truly better when all externalities are factored in.
The liquid has the same weight regardless. The issue is the marginal increase in container mass. This isn't some conspiratorial point, green groups agree.
> The pacific garbage patch isn't filled with glass bottles. It is, however, filled with plastic of all shapes, sizes and forms.
It mostly isn't filled with drink containers either. The plurality is fishing gear, and the next categories by volume are crates and household containers. Besides, it's trivial to just crush and bury the plastic bottles in a landfill, still coming out ahead of glass on the CO2 front.
> Glass bottles don't need BPA and other additives.
Maybe not, but you're probably consuming sugar or alcohol out of them anyway, so I'm hardly getting worked up about BPA.
> I'm not convinced that plastic bottles are truly better when all externalities are factored in.
Shipping glass to be cleaned, then cleaning it, and shipping it again to be refilled spews a ton of CO2. It's obviously worse by miles if you care about climate change. The rest is classic gish gallop.
I am not advocating an "open field". Incinerate it for energy, in a properly designed incinerator (which is existing technology in wide use). That article is talking about waste disposal, I'm talking about using it as fuel.
If you have questions about toxins, or how it's environmentally superior in every way vs recycling, here is a thread I participated in that covers that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322845