Plastics in the soil reduce its biological productivity by various understudied mechanisms, and so reduce amount of carbon captured by vegetation and other soil live.

Japan is quite famously a fairly small mountainous island nation and therefore does not have much land where it is easy to pile up garbage.

We are in a climate crisis. It literally never is.

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.

If we are burning something to create energy anyway then perhaps it makes more sense to burn waste rather than fuel we dig out of the ground.

Why?

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.

>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?

We have to collect it whatever we do, whether it's driven to a waste incineration plant or a landfill site makes little difference.