A 100% win would be not producing the plastics in the first place in order to not have this problem, and then producing heat via a renewable source.
Everything below that is less of a 100% win.
> Burning plastic does not release pollutants
That is strictly false. It depends on the plastic. "Dioxins are just one of the many harmful emissions from incinerators. They are highly toxic and can cause cancer and damage to the immune system"
From what I've researched, there dioxins, PFAS, heavy metals, and particulate matter result from burning plastic. I haven't seen anything that would suggest that only water and CO2 are the only byproducts of burning plastic.
Who's adding CO2? You substitute CO2 from oil, with CO2 from plastic. This actually reduces the total amount of CO2, because you don't need to pump extra oil out of the ground, which costs extra energy.
> What exactly is a pollutant by your estimation?
Something that doesn't belong there in any amount. If there's simply too much of it, but some amount is ok, that might be a problem, but that's not a pollutant. Otherwise a flood from a hurricane would be called "Water pollution", which I hope you can see is a pretty silly definition.
> Something that doesn't belong there in any amount.
I have never heard this definition before! How do you in particular decide which compounds shouldn’t be in the atmosphere in any amount?
It kind of seems like such a narrow definition of “pollutant” enables the justification of burning darn near anything short of man-made nuclear isotopes that don’t otherwise exist in nature. How does this definition serve a practical purpose?
edit:
To address your hurricane analogy, I am not a fan of hurricanes or their damage. I have had friends die in hurricanes.
I agree that trying to argue an arbitrary definition of “pollution” to serve one’s pre-existing ideas or pedantic need to be Dictionary Emperor is silly and likely pointless at best, though.
From dictionary.com:
any substance, as certain chemicals or waste products, that renders the air, soil, water, or other natural resource harmful or unsuitable for a specific purpose.
Can you link me to where you’ve found that “pollutant” is defined as a nearly infinite group of compounds but explicitly excludes CO2? This is the first time I’ve heard this.
Where in the world are you getting this "nearly infinite" business? I never said anything like that, in fact I gave you a short list. Go back and read what I wrote, I feel like you skimmed it or something.
And your dictionary definition is problematic because it doesn't define "unsuitable for a specific purpose". It's basically a circular definition. I will then ask you please define "unsuitable for a specific purpose" and we are back where we started.
You said that only nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and “some noble gases” should be in the atmosphere. Everything else (such as salt) is a pollutant.
How many compounds are there that are not nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and “some noble gases”? In my estimation that is uncountable but maybe you have some hard numbers?
edit:
“Suitable purpose“ for me would be creating or maintaining an environment that sustains human life.
Is your “checkmate” position something like “Hah! In my dictionary, ‘suitable purpose’ only relates to underwater welding, root beer production, and synthetic diamond formation!”
I personally find moving goalposts to avoid talking about concrete things in concrete terms to be problematic, but I understand that if a person is quite jaded about the future of life on earth that it might seem that the only thing worth debating is semantics. Maybe avoiding boredom matters more than attempting to avert catastrophe.
And? There are uncountable pollutants - why is that an issue? None of those other things belong in the air, in any amount.
> would be creating or maintaining an environment that sustains human life.
So my small campfire where I burn plastic is perfectly fine then? After all the toxins released are minor and rapidly dissipate, so the environment still sustains human life. Your definition doesn't even acknowledge that you can sustain life, but everyone has asthma because of all the particulate matter in the air.
By your definition there are no pollutants. Or at best you can only talk about them in bulk once they reach levels sufficient to kill, but never about individual releases.
By my definition each individual release of something that doesn't belong in the air is pollution. I find my definition much more usable and useful.
> By my definition each individual release of something that doesn't belong in the air is pollution.
Does your classification of CO2 have a real upper limit of ppm wherein it becomes considered a pollutant? Or is it just “all plastic supply burned + 1”
Can you provide a link to where you got your definition of atmospheric pollution? I have tried Google and DDG and I haven’t found anyone claiming that “pollution is everything but this small handful of gases” in anything scientific. I keep finding it as being relative to outcomes and not a function of what is or isn’t in an Excel column.
Sure: "A pollutant or novel entity is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource." From Wikipedia.
A "novel entity" i.e. anything that doesn't belong in the air. Wikipedia adds that it must in some way harm things to be a pollutant, which is a reasonable addition.
I am glad that we agree that “pollutant” is relative to outcomes. I appreciate you amending your previous statement that “pollutant” is just a word referring to anything but the high school textbook reference list of expected atmospheric gases. It is an indeed silly view that no dictionary, encyclopedia or academic paper states. It’s so silly that to hold such a position consistently would essentially mean that “daytime” is meaningfully “a period marked by light pollution” since the normal state of the universe is darkness. Imagine having such a useless and meaningless definition of “pollution”!
I have a couple more questions!
If you hosted an indoor buffet and you needed to keep the chafing dishes warm, would you opt to burn ethanol or (if it were cheaper) the shredded remains of takeout containers?
and
Why does burning plastic have black smoke and ethanol not?
You personally don't have a qualified dumping site or a trash-fueled generator with exhaust scrubbers, so you should send your garbage off to collection.
> This is the first I’ve heard of exhaust scrubbers! I thought we were talking about the literal impact of burning plastic?
We were never talking about just burning plastic. We were talking about burning plastic inside a heat/power plant.
And power plants, especially trash-fueled ones, have exhaust scrubbers. I only mentioned it now for emphasis, not because I was changing anything.
The first comment you replied to specified "industrial incinerator" for a reason.
> How does burning plastic impact things for people that don’t own exhaust scrubbers?
I don't care how it affects those people, because they're burning it outside a power plant, and they're not part of this conversation. If they burn it it's worse than if they bury it, but they shouldn't be doing either one. They should be handing the trash over to people that are equipped to handle it properly.
Those cannot replace all oil and natural gas burning, so you may as well get rid of the plastic first before burning those fossil fuels. If you think about it, it's still recycling, because you are reusing the waste plastic for energy.
There's very very little nitrogen in plastic. Among commonly used plastics just nylon has it (and not very much - 2 out of 38 atoms are nitrogen), and there's not a large amount of nylon in trash.
There's probably some contamination, but ideally it's just plastic and paper. And yah, scrubbers would handle everything else. Vinyl has chlorine which also needs to be removed.
These types of scrubbers are in use all over, it's not a new technology.
The main thing is to remove food and other organic waste, remove metals because they are useful. Glass is harmless, but also clutters up the ash, so best to remove it as well.
If it were up to me recycling would work like this:
Metal, plastic, and paper would be recycled, single stream. The metal is easily removed, the rest is burned.
Glass and organics (and everything else) would be thrown out, with some people opting to compost, I would encourage, but not require, composting. There is really no reason to recycle glass, and trying to do so causes more harm than good since it smashes and the shards get in everything and just makes it harder to make a pure product.
If you absolutely must recycle glass, it has to be in its own bin, do not single stream it.
In terms of CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas (and much much worse than any zero carbon source). Energy is fungible, there's no reason to encourage producing CO2 when it's possible not to.
> CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas
That is simply not true. Polyethylene (the most common plastic) is C2H4, while natural gas is a mix ranging from CH4 to C3H8. i.e. almost identical in terms of CO2.
Plastic is actually better in some ways since you don't need to spend energy a second time to extract even more oil from the ground, you can just burn what you already have.
Plus the world does not burn exclusively natural gas, not even close.
> when it's possible not to.
As should be pretty obvious the idea is you don't burn some other oil, and instead burn plastic. When we are 100% off of oil/coal/etc we can stop burning plastic, but right now, today, burning plastic is the best option.
Burning plastic is not going to magically cause extra CO2 emissions, it would simply substitute one for another, with total amount unchanged.
Yes, correct. My method was just a shortcut which yields basically the same number because it all atoms of hydrogen, carbon, etc that are burned release the same amount of energy (but you do need to account for the binding energy of the molecule, which my method does not do).
I used it because I didn't immediately find data on the enthalpy of burning plastic in combination with CO2 released.
Plastic is also a hydrocarbon, so the binding energy will be quite similar to natural gas, so my method is sufficiently accurate.
The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants.
Not just a US problem.
[0] in Swedish: https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...