And they knew all along - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
186 points (100.0% liked)
Environment
3920 readers
55 users here now
Environmental and ecological discussion, particularly of things like weather and other natural phenomena (especially if they're not breaking news).
See also our Nature and Gardening community for discussion centered around things like hiking, animals in their natural habitat, and gardening (urban or rural).
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think so. Plastic needs tons of processing to go from raw material to plastic. You're basically (in terms of glass) cutting out all the energy spent mining for sand and (in terms of plastic) cutting out all the energy spent searching for crude/natural gas/coal, extracting crude, taking it to be refined, taking it somewhere else to be turned into a polymer, having the plastic pellets moved to where they're melted into the product, and then having them melted from plastic pellets to whatever needs made.
In the cases where plastic is a byproduct of gasoline production (which I think exists?)... Maybe it's not worse in a sense (?) but we really shouldn't be producing gasoline at the rates we are now.
At the very least, glass is a much more renewable resource (at least pending advancements in polymer manufacturing). It also doesn't leech into things like plastic does WRT food contamination.
Not to mention pollution wise glass is far better (there's no great pacific garbage patch made of glass).