Plastic Planet - I for One Welcome our New Plastic Overlords

Hexmage-PA

Plastic Planet Trailer

Is plastic dangerous? Can the modern world do without plastic? How do we clean up plastic pollution (if it is even possible)?

Tach

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBRquiS1pis

Buttcleft

I knew that video would be the first reply.

As for the topic at hand, no we can not live without plastics. Medicine, as the biggest example, would collapse without plastics.

Hexmage-PA

Buttcleft wrote: »

I knew that video would be the first reply.

As for the topic at hand, no we can not live without plastics. Medicine, as the biggest example would collapse without plastics.

Are there really no other materials we could use instead? Alternatively, is there a way to make plastic both safer for ourselves and the environment?

dlinfiniti

north pacific gyre: huge issue
BPA: not so much

ie the problem isnt plastic, its us and what we do with things when we're done with them, that we have a substance that doesnt biodegrade easily and is ubiquitous just makes things somewhat worse

EWom

It's like, hemp could totally replace plastic, but it's a big conspiracy between the plastic companies and the government to keep hemp illegal, because the government is totally in the plastic companies pockets man, but like, if hemp was just legal, it could totally put plastic companies out of business.

redx

yeaaaaaah... Plastics from plants actually are kind of a decent possibility. Those from corn for instance take less energy to create than those from petroleum and can break down slightly quicker and into more friendly things.

We'll probably be switching to them slowly as oil prices rise and the technologies get better. We used some corn based plastics at the printing company I used to work for.

They don't fix the huge mess we have now, and I'm not sure how easily they could be applied to medicine(where even a little biodegradability might be highly undesirable).

enc0re

Buying plastic and throwing it into landfills saves the planet. As it stands, oil can be dug out of the ground in Saudi Arabia and other places for about $2 per barrel. Since planetwide human cooperation is currently impossible, that means it will be brought out of the ground if anyone is willing to pay more than $2 a barrel. So it will be dug out.

At that point we have two choices. Use it for some type of combustion or fertilization, which means the carbon is released into the atmosphere producing global warming and killing the planet. Or we can employ carbon sequestration. Namely, convert the hydrocarbons into plastics and bury them in the ground. Wonderfully for the planet, plastics don't decompose for hundreds of years and are not water dissolvable, safely trapping the carbon for centuries. We won't run out of landfill space for millennia.

Clearly, spending as much of your consumption on oil based plastics and throwing them away instead of recycling is the only moral choice. A moral imperative.

Igort

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0OVD0_YJnU

I really liked the concept behind Gorillaz "Plastic Beach", and I bring it up semi-seriously in this discussion.

The first time Albarn went to Mali, he was taken to a landfill where he saw people "taking every little bit, a little bit of fabric to the fabric regenerators, or the metal and the cans to the ironsmiths and the aluminium recyclers, and it goes on and by the time you get to the road, they're selling stuff." When Albarn went to a landfill outside of London to record the sound of seagulls for the album, he noticed a juxtaposition between the way the two countries dealt with rubbish. "They've got more snakes... like adders, grass snakes, slow worms, toads, frogs, newts, all kinds of rodents, all kinds of squirrels, a massive amount of squirrels, a massive amount of foxes, and obviously, seagulls. [...] This is part of the new ecology. And for the first time I saw the world in a new way. I've always felt, I'm trying to get across on this new record, the idea that plastic, we see it as being against nature but it's come out of nature. We didn't create plastic, nature created plastic. And just seeing the snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags. They like it. It was a strange kind of optimism that I felt... but trying to get that into pop music is a challenge, anyway. But important."

It almost seems like the whole vibe of that record is the opposite of that "Plastic Planet" trailer.

Thoughts?

Tiger Burning

Move to change thread title to Exploding Plastic Inevitable.