[electricslpnsld]

> The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.

The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.

[Scoundreller]

Plastics takes fossil fuels and sequesters them for a while so we can't/don't release their carbon.

If we made less plastic, would the decrease in gas/oil consumption just be increased in other processes?

[jdnenej]

Oil supply is effectively infinite. By that I mean there is so much available that we will have destroyed the planet before we remove it all. We extract as much as there is a demand for. If you lower the demand then you lower the amount being extracted

[electricslpnsld]

Shell’s new US-based plant [1] is expected to pump half a million cars worth of CO2 exhaust into the air a year. I haven’t seen any data suggesting that plastics production reduces the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/energy-environme...