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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

If my calculations are correct and assuming an average plastic density of 1.15g/cm³[1] that's 7.2 billion cubic meters of plastic. If you pressed all of that into a solid cube it'd be 1.9km along each side. More than twice as tall as Burj Khalifa.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/595434/plastic-materials...

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That just...doesn't seem like that much? There are individual disused mines where more earth than that has been removed. Put all that plastic back into one of those mines, and solve 70 years worth of your landfill problem.

The problem isn't the volume. It's the distribution.

Some of it is in your bloodstream. And your children's, messing with your and their endocrine systems, among other problems. Some of it is in the bellies animals around the world. How do you plan to get it?

We can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. The stuff is out there and dispersing more.

You had me until thermodynamics. We're obviously not getting every substance in our bloodstream like we are with plastics so I don't think thermodynamics is the issue here.

I think he was referring specifically to entropy in his reference to thermodynamics. Once we extract the source materials from the earth, turn them into plastics and distribute them, there is no cheap way to undo it.

The following sentence was about dispersion in the world and not about the chemical reactions in creating plastic, so I don't think that's what was meant.

I meant what FlyingAvatar suggested.

Quoting Wikipedia: In statistical mechanics, entropy is an extensive property of a thermodynamic system. It is closely related to the number Ω of microscopic configurations (known as microstates) that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system.

and

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time.

Applied here, when plastic breaks into pieces, the number of microstates -- ie, the entropy -- increases.

It's not the same as the ideal gas law, but similar.

Another way of visualizing it based on ginko’s 7.2B M^3 estimate is that it’s enough to wrap the surface of the earth in a 15um thick layer, which is coincidentally about the thickness of common plastic cling wrap.

It's one or two cubic meters per person.

Sounds low. I’m sure it’s at least an order of magnitude higher for me.

I thought this at first and then realised I'm one of <1Bn consumers at Western-levels of plastic consumption, so my usage will be an order of magnitude higher than that of those >3Bn people at the poorer end of the spectrum.

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