Let's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use sledgehammer methods like a “plastic tax” - which you’ll find very difficult to pass outside of more developed jurisdictions like the EU
For CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You can burn trash to generate electricity too.
At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of the emissions.
One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the environmentally impact of things we personally touch. People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups, while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of sight.
In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.
Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting.
If it's used to generate electricity or usable heat and not only to get rid of it, plastic would substitute for another fuel, so it's not as simple as looking at co2 from burning plastic vs co2 from dumping it in landfill.
I don't have numbers, but if burning plastic replaces some coal or fracked natural gas, that could be a win, all things considered.
Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
And evwn if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
> Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
My argument is not that burning plastic is more efficient than burning whatever fuel. My argument is that extracting, transporting and burning waste plastic may be more efficient than extracting, transporting, and burning whatever fuel. Waste to energy might need a lot less transportation if the plants are near where the waste is generated and/or where it is already collected.
> Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
There's already sorting and education for recycling, so the question becomes what's the incremental input needed to get a usable waste to useful energy pipeline.
> And even if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
Yes, but I don't know how that relates? My argument is that the emissions of burning plastic for usable energy might not be as bad as it looks because it would reduce lifecycle emissions from (direct) fossil fuels. That's not an argument for or against burning plastic, it's an argument that we need to get marginal emissions numbers for the alternatives, and if emissions is the only criteria, then it would make sense to burn plastic in cases where the marginal emissions are in favor of burning it; but even that wouldn't be universal. It might make more (or less) sense to setup trash for energy plants in isolated locations where transport of other fuel is difficult; it almost certainly makes less sense to setup trash for energy plants in places where natgas is a waste product, natgas is a clear choice there.
I don't doubt your numbers, but we are (or at least I am) talking about plastic bags.
I would guess they are less than 1 of those 150kg/year.
> Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
Grok says total US CO2 emissions are "approximately 13.83 metric tons per person". I agree that 750kg (0.75 ton) is significant, but I don't thing plastic bags even affect the last decimal of that number.
Why would we discuss plastic bags exclusively? Singling out one item like this makes little sense - the problem is the aggregate of all plastic we use, not specifically one item. If we only used plastic for our shopping bags, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The oxygen is not contained in the 150kg of plastic, it’s pulled out of the atmosphere. You’re actually “burning” substantially more than 150kg if you include all the reactants.
Burning takes oxygen from the air so it makes sense that the released mass would be higher. Every 12g of C is tied to 32g of O to get CO2. However I would expect the number to be around 500kg (quick calculation) max.
Polyethylene is roughly CH2, and burns into CO2 and H20. So 1.5 moles of oxygen (O2) for each mole of polyethylene. The molar mass of CH2 is 14 and oxygen is 32, so 1 kg of CH2 will result in ~4.5kg of CO2.
How do you figure that? 14g of CH2 results in 44g of CO2 (water we can ignore), so 150kg of CH2 becomes ~470kg of CO2. 1kg of CH2 would give ~3.1kg CO2. Or am I missing something?
I don't disagree with anything on this chain but I think things like hypothetical miles deep landfill can't be worse than burning, it'll stay there for million years and the next iteration of life to do the same discussion as being done here.
To me a "miles deep" landfill sounds like a wonderful way to contaminate groundwater.
I think it's facile to imagine that the Earth is large, thus that burying something can "make it go away".
But the Earth is also an incredibly dynamic place over long enough time scales (which for the purposes of this discussion can simply mean decades or centuries) so much of the lightweight matter you bury deep in dense rock can find a way to buoy back top the surface far sooner than in millions of years.
We know for sure that CO2 is a huge problem in the next century, and even earlier. We are already seeing massive impact from global warming today.
Any theoretical other concern from possible impacts of plastic in a landfill (which already will contain many other unknown pollutants) is at best secondary, unless we have some solid evidence otherwise.
Consider also that some significant amount of plastic in landfills is inevitable regardless of any sepatate collection policies. Especially with current recycling practices, you are encouraged to only separately collect certain kinds of fairly clean plastics. If you have a dirty styrofoam container that you just ate out of, you're not even supposed to throw that in the plastic recycling - so it will go to a landfill anyway. This means that landfills have to be mindful of potential plastic pollution even if we burn a lot of the plastic we use.
Plus, if we're truly worried about the health impact of plastic use, the only solution is to massively reduce plastic use. The fact that we "cleanly burn it" instead of letting it seap into groundwater is not going to help one iota when we store and transport and sometimes cook much of our food directly in it.
We also vastly overestimate the amount of trash created by the human race. Last time i did the math, a 1km cube could contain basically all the trash currently in every landfill a few times over. The plastic pollution problem is containable, literally. We just need to stop certain countries from dumping it into rivers.
Yes but humans have an innate need for apocalyptic thinking. If the world isn’t ending because of something we did, we will invent reasons to believe so
Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But burning in facility design for that is really clean.
Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that they will eventually diversify.
Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull, without plastic millions of peoples would die every year from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death of everything is better than preventing a billion death.
And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is clear.
I didn't say destroy life, I said destroy our civilization. With current global warmig trends, countries like Bangladesh will be rendered virtually uninhabitable by the end of century, leading to gigantic mass migrations that will likely lead to wars and other issues.
> Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does.
I also wanted to answer this. This is non-scientific BS based on literally nothing. Risks don't work like this: unless you can quantify them, you can't act on them. Any activity has some potential risk of unknown catastrophic effects. Maybe there is some chance that after a threshold, flushing our toilets will cause tidal effects that rip our planet apart - it's unlikely but it's possible. So let's all stop flushing our toilets. And stop using 5G if we're there, some people think that has a high risk of causing cancer or whatever.
Burn it with plasma gasification to reduce it to the simple molecules to eliminate all the pollutants. CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
> CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
By what possible measure? Despite clear, well documented science, including very clear dire economical impact, and all within an extremely clear and short term time frame, with escalating effects already visible literally everywhere in the world, we have had almost 0 progress in combating global warming. The best we've done is slowing the rate of acceleration - as in CO2 release is still accelerating, just not as much.
Plastic waste has environmental impact, especially in the oceans, but nowhere near to the level that 2-3-4 degrees warming will have. And that is what we are currently on track for by the end of this century.
Came here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
I think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization costs with near-zero impact on the environment.
That consists to a great extent of maritime generated garbage - plastic fishing nets and plastic thrown off of vessels, and of course lots of "recycled" plastic that was being shipped to China and ended up dumped in the middle of the ocean.
"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be limited to just developed nations — I visited Nairobi a decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".
However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p, increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because it's just so easy to just not care enough about free things to make sure they end up in landfill (or recycling): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...
Most plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming amounts. They get into the human body through food and water.
You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics" does not ring any bells?
>[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with anything in nature
Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics bioaccumulate.
Nothing made of atoms is truly chemically inert, not even noble gases. It's just more or less reactive, and when/how.
But even if it was literally un-reactive, sometimes it's enough to just be in the way. Imagine folding a protein, or assembling a structure of RNA origami*, but some big lump of un-reactive molecule is in the middle — the ultimate shape is different, leading to different biochemical results. Grit in the gears.
Or even just heavy: deuterium is chemically identical to hydrogen, but still has a lethal concentration** because it is twice the mass.
** Replacing 50% of the hydrogen in a multicellular organism with deuterium is generally lethal, unless this is a widely believed myth that's about to get a bunch of debunking
Not all harmful effects are caused by direct chemical reactions. For instance, asbestos causes health problems through the physical process of friction and piercing. Small particles that aren't removed by the body can do a lot of harm.
Two scenarios here:
1) They don't react with anything, meaning the billions of tons we produce keep increasing. Forever.
2) They do react, break down, get into the soil, water, blood, people, and have studied detrimental effects, and many more yet unstudied.
Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.
That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing.
If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.
Note that burning plastic is one of the worse things you could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where it does far more damage then if you just bury it.
In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.
The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.
The goal is get every last drop of unwanted water out of the Titanic. We can at least theoretically spread heavy canvas over some the huge gash in the bow, so you are focusing on a leaky water cooler in the stern.
No, I'm just saying that we shouldn't start taking buckets and pouring more water in. The default behavior is to store garbage in landfills. Let's leave it like that, rather than burning it to produce even more CO2.
