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Jun 20, 2024
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i would take this article with a grain of salt -- quillette is a right-wing crank site and the author seems to only have two published articles, both in quillette
Jun 20, 2024
nat_archives Yeah, this guy seems to have an Agenda. But he linked to good sources: a real study and reports on said study. Plastic recycling facilities are a major contributor of microplastics to the environment and they were green washing by big oil to begin with.
I agree with royallmonarch that it's weird that the author just kind of throws up his hands and says, "we'll never stop the plastics industry, just burn it!"
Jun 20, 2024
lucius right it’s clearly a biased opinion piece but the underlying sources are sound! even if you don’t agree with the author’s conclusion it’s a great starting-off point for discussion
Jun 20, 2024
lucius i appreciate you doing the legwork to pull out the real takeaways! that study does seem pretty damning, hopefully it leads to some more research on the topic
Jun 21, 2024
reading into the document by the Center for Climate Integrity linked in this article, the authors kind of back up my point that the solution of incineration proposed by the author of this article wouldn't be a viable solution, especially if co-opted by the petrochemical industry as a solution to the problem they created when they propped up recycling as a solution to plastic waste in the first place:
"Despite their long-standing knowledge that recycling plastic is neither technically nor economically viable, petrochemical companies—independently and through their industry trade associations and front groups—have engaged in fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns designed to mislead the public about the viability of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste. These efforts have effectively protected and expanded plastic markets, while stalling legislative or regulatory action that would meaningfully address plastic waste and pollution. Fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have used the false promise of plastic recycling to exponentially increase virgin plastic production over the last six decades, creating and perpetuating the global plastic waste crisis and imposing significant costs on communities that are left to pay for the consequences"
so basically any kind of "green solution" to plastics that includes plastics in the equation will be turned into another cause for the petrochemical industry to champion and lobby to the government for support and public approval. then they can just make more plastics under the guise of improving the environmental impact it causes. i'm liking what the guy is saying until "just use it for energy!!" is his conclusion haha like bro that's just fossil fuels with more steps
Jun 21, 2024
yeah this author is a shill listen to this source that he linked thinking no one would actually read it:
Again facing immense public backlash and a genuine threat of regulation,52 the plastics industry responded with two “solutions.” The first, in response to concerns about litter, was landfilling. Throughout the 1970s, SPI officials argued that plastics were an ideal material for landfilling since “they don’t biodegrade,” they “just sit there.”53 But the industry favored waste-to-energy (WtE) incineration, which theoretically addressed both concerns by offering the potential to rid the environment of plastic pollution while enabling resource recovery. With landfilling, a Dow Chemical employee explained in 1969, “the problem is merely moved from one place to another.”54 WtE, by contrast, presented “the most practical solution” to the build-up of plastic waste,55 replacing one environmental consequence of plastic waste with a less visible one. Support for WtE was reinforced by individual companies and trade associations representing the industry throughout the decade.56 At the Packaging Institute’s annual forum in 1971,
Judd H. Alexander of the American Can Company spoke to the public’s concerns about plastic packaging, stating, “Recycle plastic packaging? An excellent idea. But let’s recycle it into energy.”57 He emphasized the inefficiencies of recycling: “I think it would be false economy to recycle plastics by separation, classification, cleaning, transportation, and reprocessing when they could have a valuable second use right at the disposal site as an energy source.”58 As SPI President Ralph Harding, Jr. explained, “we’d rather see plastics . . . go into a municipal power incinerator which was a power plant.
Jun 21, 2024
We might make fun of the girls with giant water bottles but turns out they’re RIGHT (always bring a water bottle)
Jun 20, 2024
damn idk how i feel about the waste to energy solution the author is suggesting, I feel like that would just lead to a kind of Jevons Paradox.
burning waste releases less greenhouse gas than landfill, so plastic produced in a system that would require that form of disposal could be labelled "green" as it has reduced per-unit greenhouse consequence than landfilled plastics, then manufacturers are incentivized to use this supposedly greener alternative (maybe due to tax incentives or market pressures making it cheaper) and end up producing twice the plastic to make the same levels of emissions but double the amounts of microplastics, and that's assuming they don't just make way more plastic than before and even exceed the emissions of landfilled plastic even with waste to energy solutions
Jun 20, 2024
royallmonarch or i guess more likely it would be that the energy that is produced with waste to energy is just used to produce more plastics, so just running the same filthy machine on a slightly less filthy engine in perpetuity
Jun 20, 2024
can't wait to tell my greenwashed-ass company that their one claim to environmentalism is bunk now and then hit them with some degrowth theory
Jun 20, 2024
