- It's a carbon sink,
- it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions)
- it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces
- and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint.
The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper disposal place. This isn't Coke's fault, people can just as easily dump a paper carton in the street. I think you'd get more dividends by ensuring the public has the motive (stick or carrot) to not dump their garbage into waterways, and in very poor countries, funding sanitation infrastructure.
I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.
Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint.
All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.
trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing
Just cut down all the forests they said! It'll be better for the environment!
That doesn't mean trees aren't extremely important in countless different ways.
Which also doesn't mean that we shouldn't use wood as a material, if it's produced with principles.
if it's produced with principles.
This documentary gives a good idea into my reasoning on why believing timber propaganda that "trees are better when cut down and regrowing" is false:
Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.
"Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. "
- https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-...
For reference, the two plastic plants mentioned in the article you linked can emit 3.65 million tons of CO2 per year (about 30% of the nations plastic production annual total). This is a little less than what the average natural gas power plant produces in a year.
And there are about 1000 gas plants in the US. And gas is the least emissive of the power fossil fuels.
So while strictly speaking plastic production does create greenhouse gases, you can basically offset an entire years worth of plastic production emissions with only a handful of wind and solar farms displacing fossil fuel power plants.
Also I don't count burning plastic in lifecycle assessments. That is trivial to outlaw and dramatically pumps emissions figures.
Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute
And recycling most common types of plastics actually releases more CO2 than creating new plastic products. There is no panacea one the carbon has been pumped out of the ground.
(Source: Saul Griffith's excellent book Electrify, which cites this report: https://www.ciel.org/plasticandclimate/)
We are in terrible situation and nothing is simple and even simple stuff is hard to implement and can turn out negative when we implemented.
Things backfire. People are buying plug-in hybrids but then they almost never charge them so material is wasted and de facto ice cars are unnecessarily heavier.
It doesn't take much energy to get a ton of petroleum out, compared to a ton of sand, aluminum ore, or lumber.
Maybe we can make it Coke's problem. For example by requiring them to collect and properly landfill weight in plastic of every bottle they intend to sell to customers?
Irony off
Dig tunnels deep in the earth were it can sit for millions of years before breaking back down into whatever simpler hydrocarbons.
Isn't that the point?
I'm not arguing (or not arguing) for this solution, but charging people the cost of cleanup and allowing them to "ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage" seems like an improvement on the status quo? Because the local government collecting the tax would now have funds to put toward the solution. This is classic internalizing of what were externalities.
If the companies are making recyclable products then the problem is disposal. There are lots of glass bottles products solid in Latin America like coke that’s put directly into a bag and the store keeps the glass for a refund. It’s easier to put an incentive on the collection of the bottle.
A bunch of 3rd world countries on the other hand?