2. What's wrong about plastic packaging, exactly? The alternative use for oil is to burn it. Having it do something useful and then get buried doesn't sound so horrible.
Plastic packaging doesn’t always get buried either. Landfills aren’t exactly a solution because of toxins they leech into the surrounding soil. It could end up in bodies of water. It could end up burned in an incinerator which releases the CO2 + volatile organic compounds stored inside it (and volatile organic compounds are quite bad for human health)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/science/earth/13trash.htm...
1. how much "toxins" are we talking about here? You'd think that if they were toxic enough to cause problems with the surrounding soil when buried along with tons of other stuff, that they'll make the food they're in direct contact with absolutely inedible.
2. Landfills are lined to prevent this specific issue.
2. Good point! Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.
You also have an issue of land usage. We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise. I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms, parks, (I’ve heard of landfills being turned into parks but we still have the concerns of low to moderate containments in the surrounding soil) nuclear/solar/wind farms (although luckily you can still use landfills for these since contact with the public would be minimal), and wildlife habitats. Any ban on plastics, even if it reduces the waste going to landfills by a tiny or fractional amount. Sounds like a win to me
What about the plastic wrapped foods that last for years? Are those just low in toxin and the plastic clamshell packaging for fruits/vegetables loaded with toxins?
>Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.
Without getting more specific about what what "toxins" consistns of, it's hard to know assess the actual risk of them. eg. for BPA wikipedia says:
>Despite a rapid soil and water half-life of 4.5 days, and an air half-life of less than one day, BPA's ubiquity makes it an important pollutant.
It's probably fine even if it leeches out into a landfill, and there's some cracks? By the time it leaks out it would have degraded already.
>We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise.
America is definitely not running out of landfill space anytime soon. For asia/europe incineration is an alternative
>I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms
That sounds like a non-issue given that we have a functioning market for land?
I appreciate a good whataboutism as the next guy, but please keep in mind that fruit already has short shelf life, and plastic packaging is not used for longevity or higiene but to protect the product from mechanical actions and to prebundle items.
> It's probably fine even if it leeches out into a landfill (...)
The whole point of using paper-based packaging is that this problem simply does not exist at all, it's recyclable, and the timespan it takes to biodegrade is not measured in geological time.
I fail to see how that's whataboutism. I'm not trying to justify one form of plastic packaging with another. I'm merely questioning how much stuff actually leeches out and how it compares to how much leeches out during normal consumption.
>plastic packaging is not used for longevity or higiene but to protect the product from mechanical actions and to prebundle items. The whole point of using paper-based packaging [...]
I'm not sure about you, but buying pre-packaged fruits from opaque bags does not sound very appealing to me.
It's textbook whataboutism, in the letter and in the spirit. The proposal consists of replacing plastic-based packaging with paper-based packaging for fruits and vegetables, which have a notoriously short shelf life. You, on the other hand, tried to divert attentions to "plastic wrapped foods that last for years", as if it was relevant or meaningful. That's a totally unrelated usecase, which has zero to do with the discussion.
One should keep in mind that degradation and half-life are technical terms with specific meaning - while the original substance is no more, in no way does it mean the products are less or more toxic. Often they are less toxic or even degrade fully (into CO₂, H₂O etc), for the most part, but not always and all of it.
Landfills are one of those places where numerous funny reaction take place, creating wondrous chemicals, that people haven't even dreamed of.
That being said, I don't worry much about chemical composition of fruit packaging and their degradation products in non-smoldering landfills.
In the chain of raw resources -> refined resources -> partial assemblies -> assembled products -> used products -> waste all steps are finite, and it's just a matter of which limit we hit first. Instead of waiting and "hoping for the best" it would make much more sense to plan ahead and start limiting the growth and acceleration towards that finite limit so we have a chance at mitigation.
What timespan are we talking about here? Literally the next generation? Or a few hundred years from now? With the available space in the US I'm leaning towards the latter. With that in mind and recognizing the net present value of landfill space a few hundred years from now is close to zero, I can definitely get behind "lets push the problem forward and have the next generation deal with it".
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/09/toxic-fo...
Nuclear energy produces some of the most dangerous, long-lasting byproducts imaginable, but appropriately handled it's preferable to almost every traditional form of energy production.
While reducing our meat intake is vogue, the impact it will have on climate change is depressingly incremental. Dishonest ideological documentaries like Cow/Sea-spiracy frustrate scientists dedicating their lives to fix these problems. 92% of the carbon impact reduction of going vegan can be achieved by switching from beef to pork/chicken/fish, before considering that plants are grown in animal waste and vast parts of manufacturing rely on animal products. http://environmath.org/2018/06/17/paper-of-the-day-poore-nem...
We need to examine our assumptions here. Are we short on land? Can we build adequate containment facilities? Is the carbon impact of properly transporting/containing these long-lasting products greater or lower than fast-decomposing paper products that can immediately release carbon into the environment?
Unfortunately there are huge financial/personal interests here and it's hard to get past the misinformation. Recycling was one of the biggest lies sold by corporate interests. It's rarely a moral or environmental good, in spite of all the propaganda for it. (Aluminium and paper are exceptions).
The answer depends on having the right facilities to handle the waste products, whether hydrocarbon or paper-based.
I mean, I totally get why we wouldn't want to burn oil. We breath that air and it increases CO2. But why exactly shouldn't we extract it? After all, you can do a lot of useful things with it. Like, for example, food packaging :) Also half the device you're reading this on, most likely.
That said, the same can be said for a lot of other thing like natural resources we drain faster than we replace them. Perhaps those can be classified similarly.
Beyond the limited availability of resources in the forms what we can make use of them, there is processing of those resources which has its own set of problems, as well as normal use of processed resources and waste management of used resources.
Example: Aluminium as we know it takes a lot of energy to get to a state where we have a use for it (parts of machines, or foil for example) but once it is in that state and we treat it properly it can be used and re-used and recycled almost infinitely with comparatively minute amounts of energy. Imagine such a process for other resources where we won't have to constantly input new raw materials and energy to get more of the stuff we want.
This is really hard for oil after we have changed it to whatever form we wanted to use it for; turning it back into oil or turning used oil into usable oil isn't exactly a viable process.
Properly disposed of, minimal plastic packaging can prevent damage and therefore waste, resulting in a smaller environmental footprint than alternatives, including no packaging and reusable materials.
The problem is that packaging is not always disposed of properly, and is not always minimal or justified by reasons other than marketing.
Also, not all plastics are the same, some are more environmentally friendly than others and you may need more or less of it.
But people arguing about landfills are just idiots. Put it in a secure landfill in some geologically stable desert and stop worrying if that's really a problem.