Wouldn’t it be better to bury as much of it deep underground as possible and seal it off?
edit – I should add that I do reuse and recycle, and I use as little plastic as I can afford to in the first place. I am just curious about this aspect
In: Earth Science
Carbon is in lots and lots of things. It’s in heavy solid things like rocks, plants, trees. It’s in lots of liquids like petroleum, bitumen and so forth. It’s also floating around in the atmosphere as CO2, methane, ethane and a variety of other gases.
Mostly the earth is fairly well adapted to having a certain amount of carbon floating around as CO2 and other gases. Climate change happens when we take the carbon that is in solid or liquid things, convert it into one of the gases and vent that gas into the air. Suddenly the earth has more carbon gas than it is used to and it gets upset.
The solution to climate change is to take a bunch of the excess carbon gases from the atmosphere and convert them back into solid or liquid things. This will happen naturally over time if we can stop creating new carbon gases, but we might be able to do this actively with technology. This is what we mean when we talk about reducing carbon.
In any case, plastics. Plastics are made by converting a solid or liquid that contains carbon into a different solid that contains carbon. So, even if you could magically eliminate all the CO2 that incidentally leaks into the atmosphere during plastic manufacture, you are still just taking a relatively climate safe form if carbon and converting it to a different, relatively climate safe form of carbon. You haven’t actually done anything to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The best you can say is that you’ve kinda done nothing.
Except that you haven’t . Making new plastic causes A LOT of carbon gases to be incidentally produced. And most of these gases leak into the atmosphere. Then once you dump the plastic, it keeps on leaking carbon gases into the atmosphere. Recycling also leaks carbon gases into the atmosphere. It’s possible that it’s not even that much better than dumping the old and making new.
Tl:dr
Plastics do precisely nothing to remove carbon from the atmosphere. However, making, recycling and dumping plastics all add carbon to the atmosphere. Therefore, if we care about climate change, we should remember that plastic use is never “climate safe” and let that fact shape our decisions about when and how to use it.
–edit–
Before anyone says anything, most plastic alternatives (wood, metal, paper, glass) are in a similar situation regarding the climate. They all do very little or nothing to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and actually result in some amount of carbon being added to the atmosphere. The best you can do is to buy less, consume less and throw less away.
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