I see a lot of discussion about recycling and burying/burning, but I think more effort should be made to reduce usage of plastics and re-use where necessary.<p>I have gone plastic-free this January and it has been far more challenging than I thought. Despite having some very ethical shops on my doorstep in Bristol (UK), it takes a lot more time to do my shopping now and there are still many foods which I just cannot find without plastic packaging, most of which really do not need it.<p>It has been a great eye opener to just how bad the supermarkets are and I think change needs to come through regulation, as a simple small tax for them may be enough to tip the scales and move things in a better direction.
<i>High-income countries...have very effective waste management infrastructure and systems; this means discarded plastic waste is stored in secure, closed landfills.</i><p>How does this match up to the estimates that "Roughly two-thirds of plastic waste in the UK is sent overseas to be recycled."[1]? Especially if some of that 'recycled' waste ends up in uncontrolled landfills.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49827945" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49827945</a>
As a german I am a bit shocked to see, that Germany is often in the top 5 of most produced plastic at all and per capita. Still - I don't see much of it in the streets or elsewhere.<p>Thanks for the link. Great article.
I though we didn't Incinerated plastic because of health reasons(toxic chemicals releases) and we burn more plastic than recycled.<p>Recycling: 19.5%
Burning: 25.5%
Discard: 50%<p>Revealing metric
Looking at <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#how-does-plastic-impact-wildlife-and-human-health" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#how-does-plasti...</a> I see a lot of reasons to believe plastic can be harmful, but nothing about the scale of the harm. Is plastic pollution about as bad greenhouse gas pollution? 10x as bad? 0.1x as bad? Decent estimates here would be really important for figuring out what we should focus on.<p>(My completely uninformed guess is that it's ~0.01x as bad, but if anyone has something more informed that would be very helpful!)
Co-op food stores often encourage customers to bring their own re-usable containers and bags for food, or failing that, to bring used paper/plastic bags. This should be done at greater scale imo.
I have no understanding of the relevant science, but would it be possible to make plastic actively absorb carbon (and perhaps change colour). So if you bought a bottle of coke, it would slowly turn from transparent to green as it absorbed carbon. Then as we use copious amounts of plastic, which we will and do, we would bring down carbon by a little bit.<p>Thoughts?