355
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
355 points (99.7% liked)
Green - An environmentalist community
5234 readers
7 users here now
This is the place to discuss environmentalism, preservation, direct action and anything related to it!
RULES:
1- Remember the human
2- Link posts should come from a reputable source
3- All opinions are allowed but discussion must be in good faith
Related communities:
- /c/collapse
- /c/antreefa
- /c/gardening
- /c/eco_socialism@lemmygrad.ml
- /c/biology
- /c/criseciv
- /c/eco
- /c/environment@beehaw.org
- SLRPNK
Unofficial Chat rooms:
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
This is true with most plastic. Even bringing recyclable plastic to a recycling center doesn't mean it will be recycled.
Fact is, it's more expensive to recycle than to make new plastic.
The sad fact is the best use of used plastic is probably burning it to create electricity.
It likely won't be recycled or reused and even if it is, it's likely that will only happen once (as recycled plastic is low quality).
So the option is bury it so it can outlast humanity underground or burn it to free up the carbon for hopefully regular consumption in the carbon cycle.
The only way plastic makes sense, then, is if we start using Carbon extracted from CO2 to create plastic.
Down cycling to lower quality plastics seems like another good use, but yeah, plastic is fucked lol
.... the best option is not to create more co2 and other toxins, as well as aerosolize the microplastics. Burying it is 1000000% better.
The vast majority of plastic is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen chains. You can burn those completely such that the only thing released is CO2 and water vapor (just need a hot enough temperature). A scrubber can easily catch anything that breaks that assumption.
If you do an incinerator and don't harvest the power, you can even turn it into just a carbon block by filling the chamber with nitrogen and pumping the temp up to 500C. That'll leave you with carbon blocks and water vapor.
Plastic decomposes in weird ways that leaving it in the environment is worse than taking it out all together. The reason microplastic is everywhere isn't because we have been burning plastics, it's because we've been (improperly) burying it. I worry a lot more about a leaky landfill letting it's pollutants seep into local water systems.
Further, part of plastic degradation is into those more toxic carbon chains and methane. It's frankly better to just bite the bullet and turn it into CO2.
1, there's no burning plastic completely. We can't even burn real fuel completely.
2,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961630158X
Your first point is not a complete thought; disregarding the extreme vagueness of the statement unto non-relevance (seriously, share what you're smoking).
Your second point is about open field incineration, something the other poster never advocated for.
If you're being disingenuous it's done poorly. If not, you read like a loon talking to himself and quoting about clouds when folks are discussing gaseous containment.
If you don't understand my first point, you'll have to explain what you don't understand for me to help you out instead of being snarky
My second point is not "about open field incineration", the first sentence of the abstract of the paper includes that phrase, but it's a whole damn paper. It's about how the plastics are not just simple bonds of carbon and oxygen and have a lot of really quite bad chemicals you don't want to throw out into the atmosphere, which op wad claiming was fine.
The Swiss burn what cannot be easily recycled. ¯\(°_o)/¯