Anyway, if you are going to tax anything, an actual carbon tax is guaranteed not to backfire on your face. A tax specific for plastic will almost certainly make everything worse.
Maybe a polymer of some sort.
Oh wait that’s just “never burnt plastic”.
Sorry for the snark. I just am always amazed at how badly otherwise smart people want to burn trash when we have the space to just bury it. Like the phrase “garbage in garbage out” applies to fire too…
I guess I had imagined the captured carbon would be used to make something else, like fuel, and remove the need for extracting more oil.
For some reason, people equate plastic waste with the other problem that literally changes the weather (maybe as a coping mechanism?). Under that framework, it makes sense to burn carbon.
But realistically, dead oceans filled with plastic in an atmosphere under 400ppm is a dream outcome compared to what’s actually ahead.
Are you implying that it’s less intensive to collect used plastics from consumers and ship that to burning stations to generate energy vs. pumping natural gas and shipping it in pipelines?
The problem with any plastic recycling/burning plan is always the energy needed to collect, sort and divert it.
We should focus on the lowest-energy way to keep it out of the ocean, which for the most part (outside of island nations) is burying it somewhere in modern well maintained landfills.
We have to collect it whatever we do, whether it's driven to a waste incineration plant or a landfill site makes little difference.