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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

Ok but, could we not use green electricity to capture carbon out of the air and make plastic that way? Might be more expensive, sure, but seems possible?

We can also probably reduce our use of plastic in packaging by quite a bit. Drinks used to be packaged in glass bottles. We could go back to that.

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We could do a lot of things to save the earth. Action is much harder than hand waiving though. How do "we" go back to glass? Who is we? Who makes this order? How is it enforced? We can say OK we need to shut down all the gas plants and convert to nuclear starting this Wednesday, but that doesn't mean anything because good ideas don't just happen in this world. Business cases happen, and if the idea is a good one its a happy accident. We need to develop a framework where it is more profitable to turn to green choices than alternatives before we can expect the world to wake up and change overnight. And setting up such a system is impossible when indirect action and chaos theory has created the system we currently have today, one too big for anyone to fully understand or shift with a few lever pulls to no other consequence.

If you do the right kind of searches you'll see people are working on using cellulose as a chemical feedstock and for plastics. That sort of research was dead since after WWII until recently.

You would emit more CO2 switching to glass than you would save. It's not worth it.

Glass is heavy, breakable, and not worth recycling (the planet's crust is made of glass so there's no real reason to recycle it, the glass shards harm the recycling of everything else, and the weight consumes extra energy in transport.)

And yes, you could make plastic directly out of air. And you can recycle the plastic back into air by burning it. It's a very clean process.

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