People hate this idea, but that just makes me think it has merit. Stop trying to reduce/recycle plastic use. We need to increase it. We need carbon sinks, and so lets produce more plastic, use it, then bury it in a way that prevents it from getting out. Switch production to use atmospheric carbon (or maybe just use trees) to create the plastic, switch back to never-degrade plastic formulas, and then just pull carbon out of the atmosphere, use it for plastic products, and then bury those plastic products forever.
Plastics are awesome, it is us trying to recycle them and not bury them that is the actual problem.
The point of carbon sinks is to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The process you're suggesting is:
- Pull a bunch of oil out of the ground
- Crack it into smaller hydrocarbons (using energy from burning other oil derived hydrocarbons)
- Polymerize those smaller components into plastics (using more energy from burning hydrocarbons)
- Bury the plastic
That doesn't take CO2 out of the atmosphere, every single part of the process is adding more.
For a carbon sink to be useful you need to be taking carbon that is already part of the carbon cycle and sequestering it, not pulling up carbon that has been buried for millions of years and then sending half of that into the air and the other half into a landfill.
That's not the right analysis. If the hydrocarbons in the ground don't get used for making plastic, they are very likely to be burned for energy. So waste plastic reduces the CO2 emitted by that process.
If we can't limit GHGs from burning fossil fuels for energy, we aren't going to magic our way out of this situation by producing more junk.
How are we going to get it out of the ground, transport it to petroleum processing facilities to convert it into useful forms, transfer it to manufacturing facilities (usually halfway across the world) for product creation, transport it (back across the world) to regional and then local distribution hubs, transport it from store to consumer's home, and then collect it all in order to transport it and process it further still to get it buried like you suggest?
By burning fossil fuels for energy at every link in that chain, and probably half a dozen more I couldn't think of off the top of my head.
There is also a notion that in a measly 1,500 years, humanity would probably have incredible uses for plastics and other petroleum materials beyond our wildest dreams, and have the technology and institutional wisdom to make use of them without bludgeoning our atmosphere and various biomes to death in the process. But if we are too far gone on our path of burning our planet to a crisp, and we've already pulled all the oil out the ground in the process, well, that's going to really kind of suck. I get it, from a highly idealized and abstract perspective your proposal makes some sense.
But the practical reality is that ramping up wasteful activities, even if we do so very cleverly and strategically, is not going to get us anywhere but where we already are.
I'm not arguing in favor of the GP's specific proposals, just pointing out that we should consider the displacement of fuel burning when we consider the carbon cost of plastics.
I assumed that his suggestion was not meant to be taken literally - that we should construct plastics for no use - but rather that we should think differently about the value and cost of plastics which are produced anyway.
I'm no chemical engineer, but I think the problem with that plan is cost and feasibility.
Extracting carbon from the air and converting it to hydrocarbons and plastics is neither practical nor cheap with current technology. It will also require a lot of energy even if a practical process is found.
Maybe someday, but not anything that is immediately useful.
Reducing plastic use is also not without side-effects. Other containers such as glass bottles or metal cans are heavier, which increases fuel burned in transporting goods.
For stuff like shopping bags, single-use food containers and utensils, where there are easy alternatives such as reusable bags, bans probably are most effective, but even bans are not without side effects. Remember that plastic shopping bags were the "solution" to environmentalist protests over paper bags back in the 1970s/80s.
Doesn't work because humans litter despite efforts to mitigate, and all of this plastic ends up uncollected. Paper bags break down eventually. We need less plastics in our daily lives, full stop.
Ignoring your implication that other countries are "bad people" and your country of choice is "good people", western nations ship garbage to other countries
offloading ethical/moral violations to poorer countries by paying them does not free you of responsibility, no.
It's like how child labor ends up in supply chains - at the very least once you know it's happening you bear responsibility for making sure it no longer does, or if you can't do that, you stop doing business with the wrongdoer
There is nuance. Recycling exports have declined from the US [1], and a significant amount of the recycling stream of little value (non metals) is landfilled instead now [2] [3] (a quick google search will confirm, although some of my info comes from a family friend in a mid level management position at Waste Management). With that said, waste management (the practice) is atrocious or non existent outside of the developed world [4]. And even in the developed world, people still litter [5]. So! We can't use plastic, because we are collectively irresponsible. Maybe we hope it'll end of landfilled after its useful service life, but hope is not a strategy.
Oh if solving climate change was so easy! No, that idea doesn't work at all.
For any of these ideas you need to look at the total CO2 spent vs CO2 removed. It doesn't matter that you're creating a sink (dumping plastic in a big hole) if while creating that sink you're emitting even more!
Plastic comes from oil. Oil extraction already releases a lot of CO2 to begin with. Making the hole and dumping things into it takes CO2. Not recycling means using even more oil.
Not all carbon is the same. You cannot make plastic out of a pile of carbon efficiently. If you could, we could just reduce the plastic to carbon and make new plastic.
This means that you cannot make plastic out of atmospheric carbon efficiently. You need your carbon to already make small chains (like ethylene and propylene). These small chains are then linked up to make plastics (polymers technically).
As for doing it from trees, it's not so simple! You cannot use much of the three. You need to spend CO2 to plant the trees, take care of them, water them, harvest them, process them.
This idea doesn't work at all. The best way to save CO2 is to reuse, not to use more.
If government was serious about plastic pollution reduction, they would force the bottled beverage industry to go back to glass. Otherwise, it's just political window dressing.
Coca Cola pollutes the environment with every product they make. Go after them, not the human just trying to carry groceries home.
But fossil fuel production is also hideously polluting, and ends us with the carbon from the oil in the atmosphere. Producing plastic from oil means that those molecules won't (typically) end up as greenhouse gases.
I came to this conclusion as well but I don’t see it come up in discussion. We pull carbon out of the ground as oil, make plastic bags, and then bury them in a landfill for 10,000 years. I do not care about recycling plastic bags unless it is economically viable. If we bury plastic in a safe place, that is a very good thing.
Now the real problem the article talks about is the leaky transportation and disposal process. We chose to cut usage through policy and that reduced the amount of escaped waste. Plugging the leaks is a really hard problem, lots of design and engineering work to keep loose bags in bins, trucks, and barges.
Plastics are awesome, it is us trying to recycle them and not bury them that is the actual problem.