Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Fracking creates an ingredient for plastic, and fracking companies can’t release that into the air because it is bad for the environment, so plastic companies get the ingredient to plastic super cheap from fracking companies, making new plastic cheaper than recycled plastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325HdQe4WM4
“Democrat Biden had announced a target to eliminate single-use plastic utensils like drinking straws by 2035 across government agencies.”
Note: This is about future policies affecting federal agencies. There was no federal plastic straw ban.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-slams-paper-straws-vows-160410883.html
“only about 4 percent of plastic wastes are currently mismanaged in the United States. That figure rises to an average of 6 percent for developed countries.
Poorer countries are doing much worse: The figures for mismanaged wastes in China, India, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa are 27, 46, 42, and 64 percent, respectively. These same regions are responsible for the bulk of the plastic wastes flowing down their rivers into the oceans”
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“There are two strategies for tackling such environmental open access tragedies: privatization or regulation. In the rich countries like the United States, most wastes, including plastics, are picked up and disposed by public or commercial garbage haulers in the $91 billion waste management industry. Most Americans take responsibility for their wastes by paying local taxes or fees to bury them in landfills, burn them, or recycle them. As a result, relatively little plastic from the U.S. ends up in the oceans. Bans on plastic bags and water bottles in this country are largely instances of symbolic moral preening.”
https://reason.com/2024/12/06/u-n-plastics-treaty-talks-collapse/
“Producing plastics from fossil fuels emits a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which contributes to warming the planet. An April study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that in 2019 “global production of primary plastics generated about 2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent,” which represents 5.3 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. So switching to plastic alternatives would help slow man-made global warming, right?
Not so fast, says a new study in Environmental Science & Technology, which finds that “replacing plastics with alternatives is worse for greenhouse gas emissions in most cases.” The European researchers report that in “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.”
The researchers considered emissions from production, transportation, use, and end-of-life disposal, including landfilling, incineration, recycling, and reuse. Calculating the product life cycles, plastic products release 10 percent to 90 percent fewer emissions than do plausible alternatives—often because it takes less energy to make and transport them.
Take the perennial plastic vs. paper conundrum about grocery bags. In the U.S., more than 500 cities and 12 states have banned plastic grocery bags. However, the researchers find that plastic grocery bags emit 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases than paper bags. Producing paper bags emits three times the greenhouse gases of plastic ones, and transportation emissions are higher because paper bags weigh six times more than plastic bags. Additionally, paper bags emit globe-warming methane as they rot in landfills.
Alternatives to plastic bottles are aluminum cans and glass bottles. Even though aluminum cans are often recycled, the researchers find that over their life cycle, they emit twice as many greenhouse gases as plastic bottles. Glass bottles emit three times more.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/27/plastics-are-better-for-the-climate/
“the PNAS paper didn’t just convert microplastic units to nanoplastic units. The techniques did allow for the detection of a greater amount of plastic in the water, but the implications of that were played up in the media in the most dire way possible. The Washington Post headline referenced “100 to 1000 times more plastics.” The subhead of that article proclaims: “A new study finds that ‘nanoplastics’ are even more common than microplastics in bottled water.” In that article we are told, “People are swallowing hundreds of thousands of microscopic pieces of plastic each time they drink a liter of bottled water, scientists have shown—a revelation that could have profound implications for human health.”
Emphasis on “could.” There are no good studies on what the effects of these particles are. Most of the media outlets that covered the nanoplastic discovery disclose that there’s never been a documented effect on health from the particles, but they still can’t resist framing the discovery with maximum alarm.”
https://reason.com/2024/04/18/a-big-panic-over-tiny-plastics/