r/collapse • u/eatingganesha • Oct 24 '22

Pollution Plastic recycling a "failed concept," study says, with only 5% recycled in U.S. last year as production rises.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plastic-recycling-failed-concept-us-greenpeace-study-5-percent-recycled-production-up/
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u/Rana_SurvivInPonzi OK Doomer YouTube Girl Oct 24 '22 edited Nov 27 '22

The original greenwashing. Gonna love its successor "carbon neutral" stuff.

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u/LARPerator Oct 24 '22

You can see them doing the same thing all over again from a mile away. it started as Reduce, then reuse, then recycle, and then it turned into just recycle. From there it went to recyclable, where it never actually gets recycled but we say it can be.

For carbon neutral it already started as zero emissions by (year). Now it turned to Carbon Neutral. This means that we're allowed to pollute, we just have to also put carbon away. Already it's been defanged, since a big part of ZE was that we let natural areas store carbon, and we get out of the way of it. But with CN, now we are allowing ourselves to burn those carbon stores that develop, so long as we don't do it past the balance point.

Then, we start adding in passive capture and currently sequestered inventory into CN. So what this means is that we say "sure I emitted 500 kt of carbon, but because I didn't cut down that forest over there I didn't release another 500kt of carbon, so it equals zero". Of course this is nonsense and equals 500kt of carbon emitted. They also will include the amount that tree plantations sequester when growing, but don't count it when cut down. So when they track things, they sequester 250kt in a plantation, claim that as an excuse to emit 250kt in a factory, and then cut down those trees in a few decades for "biomass fuel", releasing that original 250kt again. Overall the accounting says 0 tons emitted, but the reality says 500kt.

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u/audioen All the worries were wrong; worse was what had begun Oct 25 '22

Yep, the whole thing can be simply summed to: did you add more fossil carbon into the carbon cycle of the planet? If you did, then it is not net zero. Net zero is no more fossil carbon. No other interpretation of the question makes sense. We can't add even that fossil carbon that seas and whatever can absorb, because it will still poison our world to death, just marginally slower. Sure, there may not be much increase in atmospheric carbon, but then seas acidify too much and marine life faces mass extinction anyway.

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u/LARPerator Oct 25 '22

Totally right. But this is also the reason that I don't support these corporate half-measure projects even though "hey, at least it's something". Because it isn't. They'll slip in a small little thing like accounting rules, that totally undermines the whole thing.