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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

I really do think the Japan approach is the only practical one: just burn it all up. Maybe we just need to impose a plastic tax and use that to offset the carbon release. In the end this might be more inefficient but sometimes simplicity is far more important.

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Well, just wait a decade or two until we decarbonize most of our chemical industry until you burn it, ok? Right now all that plastic is much better down in a hole. We can always dig it up and bur it later.

Anyway, if you are going to tax anything, an actual carbon tax is guaranteed not to backfire on your face. A tax specific for plastic will almost certainly make everything worse.

It could work if one directly captures all the released carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere?

If only we already had a solid material that contained that carbon in a way the kept it out of the atmosphere.

Maybe a polymer of some sort.

Oh wait that’s just “never burnt plastic”.

Sorry for the snark. I just am always amazed at how badly otherwise smart people want to burn trash when we have the space to just bury it. Like the phrase “garbage in garbage out” applies to fire too…

Thanks for this reply! I never thought of it this way before.

I guess I had imagined the captured carbon would be used to make something else, like fuel, and remove the need for extracting more oil.

Why is burning it better than putting it in a landfill?

We are in a climate crisis. It literally never is.

For some reason, people equate plastic waste with the other problem that literally changes the weather (maybe as a coping mechanism?). Under that framework, it makes sense to burn carbon.

But realistically, dead oceans filled with plastic in an atmosphere under 400ppm is a dream outcome compared to what’s actually ahead.

If we are burning something to create energy anyway then perhaps it makes more sense to burn waste rather than fuel we dig out of the ground.

Why?

Are you implying that it’s less intensive to collect used plastics from consumers and ship that to burning stations to generate energy vs. pumping natural gas and shipping it in pipelines?

The problem with any plastic recycling/burning plan is always the energy needed to collect, sort and divert it.

We should focus on the lowest-energy way to keep it out of the ocean, which for the most part (outside of island nations) is burying it somewhere in modern well maintained landfills.

>Are you implying that it’s less intensive to collect used plastics from consumers and ship that to burning stations to generate energy vs. pumping natural gas and shipping it in pipelines?

We have to collect it whatever we do, whether it's driven to a waste incineration plant or a landfill site makes little difference.

Plastics in the soil reduce its biological productivity by various understudied mechanisms, and so reduce amount of carbon captured by vegetation and other soil live.

Japan is quite famously a fairly small mountainous island nation and therefore does not have much land where it is easy to pile up garbage.

Japan recycles PET at a > 90% rate. Everything else gets burned though.

https://www.petbottle-rec.gr.jp/english/actual.html

If you’re growing the bamboo used in production, you’re starting by capturing the carbon that is eventually released on burning at end of life. So it’s likely carbon neutral already (though may produce other harmful pollutants).

The fumes are incredibly toxic though and it’s not just carbon.

Yay for scrubbers with catalysts.

that depends on the temperature.. Burn it hot enough and the result is water + co2, perfectly clean energy

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