Environment
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.
I'm fully on board with the idea of reducing plastic use, but I have some questions regarding use of and recycling of paper products. By my understanding, the vast majority of paper products are made out wood from fairly young-growth tree farms, where the trees are all cut down and then replanted so that they can be harvested again several years down the road. The paper products which are created from this process are primarily atmospheric CO2 which has been captured by the trees. Basically every proposed solution to the problem of greenhouse gases is some form of reducing emissions, or capturing greenhouse gases and sequestering them so that they can't reenter the atmosphere. Landfills are largely anaerobic environments where materials are not able to break down for a very long time. Most of the trash in the US goes into landfills. If all of that's true, then one of the more effective ways to sequester carbon should be to produce and use large amounts of paper products and then throw them into landfills. Paper recycling on the other hand to my knowledge at least requires a similar amount of energy to produce, but involves no new carbon capture. So wouldn't it be worse to recycle paper than to throw paper waste in the trash?