Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic.

PE burns much cleaner than coal, and probably paper too.

Burning plastic releases a slew of toxins into the air, including dioxins, furans, mercury and other emissions that threaten the health of people, animals and vegetation, according to multiple studies.

Unless they're somehow burning lots of chlorinated/fluorinated stuff (which is almost certainly not being used for much in the way of packaging, simply because those plastics are so much more expensive), that's just fearmongering. ...and mercury? WTF. That's where I stopped reading the article because it stopped making sense. Combustion certainly can't transmute elements, and mercury wouldn't be present unless they're burning something else...

...like coal, which does contain mercury as a significant impurity.

Good point! It seems like part of the article was incompletely plagiarized from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere. Further, burning of Poly Vinyl Chloride liberates hazardous halogens and pollutes air, the impact of which is climate change. The toxic substances thus released are posing a threat to vegetation, human and animal health and environment as a whole.

So if the study is on municipal solid waste overall, being burned in a pit, it's probably not very relevant to burning plastics by themselves. Municipal waste contains all sorts of things you wouldn't want to burn, like phones, batteries, fluorescent light bulbs etc.

Is that really saying burning chlorinated plastics --- in particular --- causes climate change? That whole quote reads so oddly it's like it was written by a bot.

Thank you both for this note. It helps me remember to practice skepticism in all things.

I believe I still identify strongly with the article and I believe that it is easy for consumers like me to forget that my purchasing actions have many consequences like children and people getting sick because of the plastic waste burning as a result of a recycling program that is largely bs.

But that doesn’t mean I am right, and I feel that it is quite important for me to realize that my sources of information are largely imperfect, often with huge biases present in them.

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