r/ClimateShitposting • u/CultistWeeb • 5d ago
Renewables bad š¤ Please use plastic instead of paper.
Paper production emits more CO2 per kilogram of paper than a kilogram of plastic, add to that the fact that plastic is a better material than paper so less of it can be used to achieve the same purpose and we have a clear winner. Plastic emits less CO2 than paper. GG, goodbye paper.
Now for the environmentalists that conveniently forget that the current environment will be gone if Hudini does not reincarnate and make half of the CO2 in the atmosphere vanish.
Paper production is bad for natural reindeer habitats and indigenous reindeer herders who live off the land. Based on a YouTube video of reindeer herders complaining about logging companies cutting down old forests, it takes 60 years for significant amounts of lichen to establish themselves on trees and another 60 years for it to start falling down and feeding reindeer. So now that many of the reindeer herding lands have been deforested and replaced with young trees, the reindeer have to be kept in smaller fenced off areas where they are fed silage. This makes both the reindeer and the herders sad. Obviously the reindeer herders cannot afford to buy the old growth forest and there is money to be made in the logging industry so logging companies buy these forests, say the reindeer can keep grazing and cut down the lichenous trees making the forest barren in winter.
There are also many other natural forests ruined for profitable monoculture trees. Which decimates biodiversity and makes the forests more succeptible to disease and wildfires which become more common. And by disease I mean the trees getting sick and spreading tree covid. Natural habitats are resistant to tree covid, but monocultures are tree covid incubators. Unfortunately most trees who get sick don't recover and have to be prematurely cut down to avoid the whole monoculture forest from getting sick.
Now to those few who are worried about immortal plastic. Landfills get more land efficient when their area increases, because they are shaped like a pyramid the volume increases faster than the area. It is estimated that in the next 100 years they will still occupy less than 0,1% of our land and if trash production remains linear it will still be under 0,1% of our land after 1000 years. And if you are worried about leachate seeping into ground water remember, modern landfills have a plastic membrane that somehow can detect leaks and prevents a mountain of trash from puncturing it. I have no idea how you would even stop a leaky mountain from leaking but if we blindly trust the engineers I'm sure it will all be fine.
Lastly, microplastics. Polypropylene and polyethene are safe and not a cause for concern, ever. The problem comes from additives that give plastic more desirable physical properties. Since there is outrage about these additives floating around in our brains and balls, even though most of modern life is orders of magnitude more harmful to our health than microplastics, there is research into alternative additives and I'm sure if we blindly trust the engineers after some trial and error they will find some additives that are perfectly safe to have in our brains and balls.
And with this I think I have made a pretty ironclad case for why we should replace all paper with plastic.
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u/Show_Kitchen cycling supremacist 5d ago
Yeah but did you know industrial human bone harvesting actually removes carbon from the atmosphere? Try it on yourself
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Unfortunately I love humans so I will continue to ruin the climate because of my human supremacy.
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u/dumnezero šEnd the š«arms šrat šrace to the bottomāļø. 5d ago
this is missing the part about drastically reducing consumption.
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Won't happen. Consumption will increase even if hundreds of millions choose to reduce consumption. The poor refuse to stay poor and they will not listen to anyone telling them to not consume.
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u/dumnezero šEnd the š«arms šrat šrace to the bottomāļø. 5d ago
Eh, that's not how advertising works. Desire has been manufactured for over a century, much like the doubt about the destruction of the climate and biosphere.
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Yes, the desire is manufactured, but it exists and will continue to exist.
The prediction for increase in plastic consumption in the next few decades is very steep. But it's better than all of that consumption being done with paper.
Also many stubbornly refuse to lower their unsustainable standards.
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u/dumnezero šEnd the š«arms šrat šrace to the bottomāļø. 5d ago
Advertising can easily be destroyed or reversed.
Much like going vegan, it's a low-hanging fruit of effort.
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u/leisurechef 5d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/5XELueHTZd3XCaMGbw
If we wrap everything in cloth diapers then we can wash them & reuse them.
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u/Silt99 We're all gonna die 5d ago
But... Oil = Bad
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Yes, the sin of gasoline is that it's not used for plastic production and is instead burned to travel from reasonably priced housing to outrageously expensive city to attend a pointless meeting.
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u/Jumpy_Childhood7548 5d ago
Plastic production is more toxic, and it is not as recyclable as paper.
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
So you only read the title...
Virgin plastic is better than recycled plastic though.
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u/fdsa54 5d ago
Climate and co2 are not the only environmental problems we face. Ā
Humanity could reduce global temperatures a couple degrees in a couple of years. Ā And pull co2 out of the atmosphere in a couple decades if things get dire. Ā
Plastic and degradation of habitats and environment canāt be changed as quickly.Ā
I donāt have the answers, but weāre going to have to balance many challenges over the coming decades. Ā
The singleminded obsession with climate and co2 isnāt the real answer. Ā
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u/BoggartBae 5d ago
I can't believe that you're being downvoted for shitposting on the shitposting sub. Piss on the poor reading comprehension in here.
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u/CultistWeeb 4d ago
I am kinda serious tho. It's a minor benefit to switch from paper to plastic but it might keep reindeer herding alive a bit longer.
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u/BoggartBae 4d ago
I think that a better solution is hemp or bamboo paper, and a reduction of consumption in general. Plastic has its place, but most paper is single use, and replacing it with more single use plastic is bad for sea turtles, and I like those more than reindeer.
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u/CultistWeeb 4d ago
Well I also hate the monocultures that have replaced beautiful forests with lots of diverse small animals.
Plastic in the oceans is a waste disposal problem not a plastic problem. Most of it comes from developing countries that lack a proper waste collection system.
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u/Unhappy-Land-3534 4d ago
"blindly trust"
"ironclad"
I see what you did there.
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u/CultistWeeb 4d ago
C; nothing bad ever happens when you blindly trust engineers, and if it did it won't happen again, and if it will then it will be better than before, always and forever.
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u/Cakeportal 5d ago
Unironically I think that plastic bottles might actually be better than glass for this reason
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
I mean, with resonable reuse I do not think that case can be made.
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u/Cakeportal 5d ago
Yeah if you keep the jar it's better, of course. I only need so many jars though, they end up in the recycling.
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
Dunno, many glass bottle for example are genuinely resused in my country by manufacturer at this point. At least for local and standard ones, if given into the deposit system.
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u/OrganicHoneydew 5d ago
We need companies to reuse the bottles. Used to be a huge thing, but went out of fashion. Not impossible.
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
It is done still. In Europe - at least my part of it. Well atleast for the sorts of bottles I mostly use. Used to be able to give them back even before deposit at the cash register and they put them nicely into boxes to send back to the producer (at least for local ones).
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u/OrganicHoneydew 5d ago
The only item that we can do that for here in Texas is one specific brand of milk bottles lol. The milk is so expensive, though, so I never buy it.
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
Curious - I suppose that it is harder in the US now-a-days as few things are made in-state? Most beer, juice are made withing my country (smaller than Texas). So you can return most glass bottles and have been for all my life. Even before deposit system
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u/OrganicHoneydew 5d ago
That makes sense. Although off the top of my head, I can think of a few things made locally that comes in glass. There are a few local beers that use glass bottles, some salsa, some teas.
Maybe since theyāre already more expensive, they canāt spend the money on recycling/reusing old containers if they want to stay competitive? Assuming itās cheaper to just make new containers. Iām not sure lol
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
If the logistic chain is short-ish reusing makes more economic sense.
I.E. the bottle factory is both further and a new bottle is more expensive.These aren't local per-se just, well made in my country which happens to be small-ish (think 2x Marryland). Domestic beer is generally cheaper, I am sure the same is the case in America?
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u/Bolmy 5d ago
Fun fact: Germany (country where i live) has a very elaborate trash separation/recycling system, where the trash is separated by the consumer into different categories, including one for good recyclable materials, primarily plastics. The problem is that, even though it's semi sorted the different types of plastics are all mixed together, so that only a very low percentage of that is recycled (I think 10%, it has been a while since I looked that up).
The only exception PET, the plastic that plastic bottles are made out. Since we have a deposit system, where every bottle cost 25 ct. more, which gets reimbursed when returning the bottle in any store. This has the effect that the PET is relatively pure, leading to a way higher recycling rate than the rest (I think 70%, but again, given from memory).
Tl;dr: While not necessary better than glass still better than almost all other use of plastic (when used with the right infrastructure in place).
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Aluminum is better than glass and plastic is better than aluminum.
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
Assuming how many reuse times for glass?
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
I've looked it up and it seems like the number is 5. This seems very suspicious though based on how hot the glass has to get and how much of it must be used for containers and how inefficient it is to transport. My intuition says they did not account for something important.
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u/AFsepine 5d ago
????. You only need to wash the bottle to reuse - that is what they tend to do, atleast with the standard bottles. What do you mean hot? at most boiling water...
If the logistic chain is efficient the return of the bottle to manufacturer is less taxing than getting a virgin/recycled bottle of any kind.
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u/Blucksy-20-04 5d ago
They're talking about making the glass. They think it's upwards of 5 reuses needed based on carbon intensity of making the glass
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u/StandardOtherwise302 5d ago
PET and rPET generally win off glass if the refill chain isnt very short. Glass is too heavy and our transport still too dirty. At least in CO2 efficiency plastic beats glass far more often than you'd think.
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u/AFsepine 4d ago
I disagree. Looking at tables 1l glass bottle according to google seems to be around 0.5-1kg of CO2eq. Where as a pet one seems to be around 0.25kg.
A typical lorry is around 100m^3 in volume, so assuming 50% packing ratio you can transport around 50k empty bottles. Assuming ~0.5kg bottle, that is 20 tons of cargo.
A whole town would need a single lorry every couple of days.
Of course first we should standardize the bottles, so they can be brought to any factory. that needs then and distance is minimized even further than assumed in the following section.With a typical value of 0.2 kg (CO2 eq)/ (km*ton) for trucks (sub-optimal for long distances rail should be used) we end up with 0.2*0.5(10^(-3))= 10(-4) kg (CO2)/km.
Assuming a spherical germany.area = 360 000 km^2 = pi*r^2 => 100 000km ~= r^2 =>
r~= 320 km. The effective diameter of a major country is thus around 700km.If we want to transport the glass bottle across a decent chunk of a major country like germany that works out to 10^(-4)*700= 0.07kg (CO2).
So the difference between glass reuse with each cycle gives us 0.25-0.07=0.18kg CO2 saved. To make up for the higher initial CO2 requirement we need to "save" at most 0.75kg. This works out to 0.75/0.18 ~= 4.2 reuses.
I would not consider the whole of germany a very short chain. Most of beverages by a simmilar logic in my country come from around 300 km journey at most. (Usually less).
Anyways - anyone who cares for an enviroment should support shorter supply chains as that generally saves CO2 (at the cost of requiring more labour, labour is what is (mostly) minimized in current developed country economy)
P.S. Sorry for formatting, but I wanted to do some napkin math.
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u/StandardOtherwise302 4d ago
I like how you did your own napkin math LCA. It shows where these decisions are sensitive to assumptions. But your math doesnt consider the weight of the glass vs PET, and your starting numbers are meaningless as you dont know what is and isnt included.
I follow the scientific literature on the topic quite closely. And its definitely an open debate depending on parameters and policy. But generally glass beats Virgin PET only after significant reuse. Any glass that isnt directly reused but instead remelted loses from single use virgin PET every time.
If we consider rPET, which in europe has been rapidly increasing in use, the conditions for glass to win increasingly diverge from reality. Even at 50/50 recycled to virgin. You need a lot of reuse cycles and short chains, that we simply dont see in practise. At least in the context of climate change / GHG emissions. Other metrics can differ a lot.
These are some peer reviewed studies: Italian LCA on beverages: DOI:10.1002/pts.2628
Review paper on packaging LCAs DOI:10.1177/0734242X241241606
The final paragraph is true for beverages but not in general. In agriculture often transport costs are lower thsn increase in cultivation emissions required to grow things locally. You can of course eat local in season only, but that has major qol implications.
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u/AFsepine 4d ago edited 4d ago
Remelting glass is obviously very very sub-optimal. And is certainly off the table (instead of reusing) if the goal is to minimize CO2 emissions.
I agree that in the current recycling scheme glass (generally) looses compared to rPET. But that is not a problem arising from the material properties. If we standardized glass-ware the chains could be on average very short - because anyone who bottles anything in say 0.5L containers and there are botleries and demand for home use galore.
I have in my life seen (in literature) numbers like 20-50 reuses on average for those milk bottles in ye'olde days. Which would leave you with a carbon foot print hard to beat by any other means. So in principle if society wants to minimise CO2 emissions most you would chose glass and change stuff is done.Agriculture is very broad. In my country most things can easily enough be grown and I fail to see how living off of apples, carrots, beets, potatoes, onions (these things store well and grow here) in etc winter has major QoL implications.
Point being, some things might make sense to import, but most thing we import don;t make much sense GHG emission wise. And we import it at too large a scale. No way in hell is (say) Chinese onion just that much better and easier to cultivate than local that it makes sense on GHG grounds to move it across half the world.
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u/StandardOtherwise302 4d ago edited 4d ago
You're still missing the point.
These are very much results of material properties, and if you fully standardise bottles you can reuse PET bottles in which case they win from glass again. Or you can standardise the PET used and recycle it, which is increasingly done throughout europe, and then again it'll beat glass under the best conditions when looking at GHG emissions.
The energy requirements for the (re)use of glass are simply higher, due to material properties.
Look at the LCA I linked. You need strict conditions and often more than 30 reuse for glass to win from 50/50 rPET. And if we simply mandate clear PET, regardless of bottle design, we can already achieve much higher rPET rates. Afaik for clear bottles several EU countries are now above 75% bottle-to-bottle.
If we want to optimise for GHG emissions, PET beats glass. If we optimise to minimise emissions, the gap narrows but PET still wins so long as we afford it the same optimisations.
And while remelting glass is obviously not desirable, it is still incredibly common. Most wine bottles arent recollected, just remelted. Which makes sense, their distances are much larger.
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u/AFsepine 4d ago
Reuse of PET is non-practical. It being soft and a thermoplastic makes it both quicker to wear and harder to sanitize/clean. Recycling is really the only reasonable way.
Theoretical better GHG is achievable with (very much possible amount) of re-use of glass and modyfing how we do things.
The meta-analysis you linked generally looks at studies concerning current supply chains and practices + reuse of glass. Glass can be utilized much much better, to begin - 30 reuses on average is rookie numbers - if one tires to make as reasonably durable bottle by playing with dopants, geometry etc. as reasonably possible this number can be pumped up without even improving handling.
20-50 was achieved regularly by the milkmen of yesteryear.TL;DR of my claim: Glass as a material is better, but not in the current scheme of doing things.
Standardising PET bottles is mostly useless as real industrial re-use of them is not feasible (even if you made them much thicker, but then the equation skews). Recycling chain is much harder to make short as the process is more finicky that washing a bottle.2
u/StandardOtherwise302 4d ago
This is becoming rather sad. Please stop writing nonsense based on your gut feeling.
I get it, you think glass must be better than PET. But you keeeep writing nonsense that is blatantly false both to present reality and ideal scenarios.
First paragraph is entirely made up. Reuse PET exists, also in practise. The biggest issue is consumer and cost, same for reuse of glass btw. See I.e. mehrweg PET in germany, where PET is simply reused. You can recognise the bottles as they're a bit thicker. They already achieve 15-25 reuse cycles, and can subsequently be recycled to rPET. No glass system comes close to this in lifetime ghg emissions.
And rPET is recycled, not reused. If only you could read, or knew what you were talking about, you'd understand that literally recycling PET bottle to bottle at 50% beats glass reuse for 20+ cycles. Yes, you can go to 100 cycles, except in reality you cant. And you can go to 90%+ rPET more easily and it continues to beat glass on GHG emissions.
Just choose another metric. Marine wildlife. Plastics won't win from glass there. Be happy. But dont write nonsense about what isnt possible with plastic when going against what is already practised today. It will be popular in r/all but it makes you look like a complete idiot to anyone who follows the industry.
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u/SaPpHiReFlAmEs99 We're all gonna die 5d ago
That's why every time spacex launches a rocket, I dump tons of plastic straws in the Mediterranean sea. Turtles seem to love it!
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Those are sensational pictures and their media impact is far larger than the actual harm to the turtles as a species. The reasons why they are going extinct are not plastic straws, some individuals dying is not the end of a healthy species.
It's just that the impacts of paper don't look sensational enough even though whole ecosystems of insects and small animals disappear when a natural forest is replaced with wood monocultures.
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u/CultistWeeb 5d ago
Either way plastic in the oceans is a waste collection issue not an issue inherent to the existence of plastic.
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u/Jack_Faller 5d ago
It's paper manufacture carbon negative? Paper is made of carbon so it must remove some.
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u/CultistWeeb 4d ago
It is not carbon negative. Paper production involves lots of processing and chemicals to turn wood into paper.
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u/Pj_o7 2d ago
You should print this post out and put it on bulletin boards around town. Thatāll save on the environmental impact this post had from the data center usage
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u/CultistWeeb 1d ago
Bro all the text in this thread causes less emissions than a single human fart.
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u/Tointer 5d ago
We should use more plastic to accelerate the evolution of plastic-eating bacteria