Whether we recycle, landfill or incinerate, I'm not sure what difference that makes to plastic pollution. To deal with plastic pollution, we need to reduce overall plastic usage and improve collection and waste management.
> If you're still using the plastic, then it's not currently degrading in the ocean.
I'm curious why the ocean appears to be the terminal destination for plastics. After I throw it in the rubbish bin, which mechanism transports it to the pacific?
Because people try to recycle it, it gets shipped to a port, put on a barge, and lots falls off? Or it just gets dumped, when being sent overseas for "recycling"?
I've said for decades, that each bit of plastic made, is less plastic used as fuel. Create the plastic, then after, bury it deep in a plastic landfill. It came from deep in the Earth, back it can go.
Meanwhile, people have wild schemes to put CO2 deep in the Earth, and that's OK? When not used plastic?
I'm not against burying plastic but the amount of carbon that's going to contain isn't going to make a big impact in terms of CO2 vs burying timber or other stuff that's much easier to collect in significant mass.
Ocean microplastic is overwhelmingly caused by countries that actually just throw their plastic in rivers. The US contributes a very small percentage of all environmental microplastic (like somewhere under 2%, maybe much under that).
If one of those strategies can be done locally and another requires long distance transport and multiple on/off-loads, I can see how the local one will have less lost to leakage. That might be even more true in communities that assign high priority to less leakage and/or where the process produces energy or other economic benefit for every ton.
Moving and handling waste plastic less is a form of improving waste management.
Counterintuitively, recycling plastic tends to involve shipping plastic waste long distances and trading in the waste. Incinerating or burying it is simpler and more reliable.
From the wiki article: "The trade in plastic waste has been identified as "a main culprit" of marine litter."
> Counterintuitively, recycling plastic tends to involve shipping plastic waste long distances and trading in the waste
That's just because the clown world we developed only cares about money, as long as the numbers fit in the excel tables we'll do all kind of dumb shit like sending trash to Africa to have it burned in open dumps
There is a very easy solution which seemingly isn't even conceived, recycle it locally... really mind blowing I know...
>Counterintuitively, recycling plastic tends to involve shipping plastic waste long distances and trading in the waste.
Only 2% of plastic waste is traded between countries. Further, most of that is traded within the same region, so the amount of waste that's shipped across "long distances" is probably under 1%.
Whether we recycle, landfill or incinerate, I'm not sure what difference that makes to plastic pollution. To deal with plastic pollution, we need to reduce overall plastic usage and improve collection and waste management.