Fossil fuels are fine unless you use them for anything.
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Fossil fuels are fine unless you use them for anything.
Stop burning #fossilfuels. Stop turning them into plastics.
Leave them in the ground. -
Fossil fuels are fine unless you use them for anything.
Stop burning #fossilfuels. Stop turning them into plastics.
Leave them in the ground.@petergleick - Make plastic recycling real; make plastic a closed cycle.
Yes, I know the problems with that. If we can do it, though, that's OK. And I wish we were seriously attempting it. Plastic is nice stuff in a lot of ways.
The price of recycling should part of the cost of plastic. And if it turns out that we really can't, in an economically viable sense, recycle plastic, then it gets expensive and we mostly stop using it.
And, well, that's a market decision, now innit?
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@petergleick - Make plastic recycling real; make plastic a closed cycle.
Yes, I know the problems with that. If we can do it, though, that's OK. And I wish we were seriously attempting it. Plastic is nice stuff in a lot of ways.
The price of recycling should part of the cost of plastic. And if it turns out that we really can't, in an economically viable sense, recycle plastic, then it gets expensive and we mostly stop using it.
And, well, that's a market decision, now innit?
@jmax @petergleick Plastic isn't just nice - at this point, the way the world works, if we stop using plastics millions of people will literally die because we don't remotely have replacement materials for a lot of the things we use it for (hospital equipment alone is like 3/4 plastic across the board).
- so yes, I very much agree; we should be working seriously on making plastic production a fully closed circle. It's definitely possible to do, we just have to prioritize it over virgin oil.
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@jmax @petergleick Plastic isn't just nice - at this point, the way the world works, if we stop using plastics millions of people will literally die because we don't remotely have replacement materials for a lot of the things we use it for (hospital equipment alone is like 3/4 plastic across the board).
- so yes, I very much agree; we should be working seriously on making plastic production a fully closed circle. It's definitely possible to do, we just have to prioritize it over virgin oil.
Agreed, there are some very important humanitarian uses of plastics. I really don't want people reusing syringes, and I don't want them single use glass or aluminum or something. There is a perfectly reasonable methodology to recycle plastic that needs to be used for these humanitarian purposes... shred it into small pieces, and feed it into a thermal power plant designed to burn it cleanly. Eliminates bio-waste, and produces energy.
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Agreed, there are some very important humanitarian uses of plastics. I really don't want people reusing syringes, and I don't want them single use glass or aluminum or something. There is a perfectly reasonable methodology to recycle plastic that needs to be used for these humanitarian purposes... shred it into small pieces, and feed it into a thermal power plant designed to burn it cleanly. Eliminates bio-waste, and produces energy.
@dlakelan @jmax @petergleick - or a pyrolysis plant, turning it back into oil which can be turned back into plastic, with surprisingly little waste product in the form of intert slag that can be used for e.g. road surfacing. This is a known technology but it doesn't get near enough priority & thus funding for making it scaleable, mostly because of pushback from the oil industry...
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Agreed, there are some very important humanitarian uses of plastics. I really don't want people reusing syringes, and I don't want them single use glass or aluminum or something. There is a perfectly reasonable methodology to recycle plastic that needs to be used for these humanitarian purposes... shred it into small pieces, and feed it into a thermal power plant designed to burn it cleanly. Eliminates bio-waste, and produces energy.
@dlakelan @jwcph @jmax @petergleick reusing syringes could be fine. Glass and metal can be sterilized over and over again, otherwise surgeons would be using plastic scalpels. If we built up infrastructure to collect reusable things that need to be sterile, sterilize them, and redistribute them, a *lot* of things that "need" to be disposable plastic could easily not be.
Recycling plastic into disposables can only be done a limited number of times before it degrades too much to work -
@dlakelan @jwcph @jmax @petergleick reusing syringes could be fine. Glass and metal can be sterilized over and over again, otherwise surgeons would be using plastic scalpels. If we built up infrastructure to collect reusable things that need to be sterile, sterilize them, and redistribute them, a *lot* of things that "need" to be disposable plastic could easily not be.
Recycling plastic into disposables can only be done a limited number of times before it degrades too much to work@raphaelmorgan @dlakelan @jmax @petergleick Plastic recycling by pyrolysis can be done indefinitely - it's molecular recycling; there's no degradation.
