[gregable]

I've sort of wondered if recycling plastics is actually maybe bad from a CO2 angle.

It seems that using mined virgin oil for plastics that gets tossed in a landfill means that at least a little more of the oil we are mining ends up not getting burned and emitted as CO2. In this way, we're creating non-global warming demand for oil which competes with the energy demand in the market. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of thinking about it.

Of course, the energy required to haul a bottle of water hundreds of miles is huge, so I'm not arguing for buying more plastic waste, just not sure how recycling existing plastic waste affects global warming in particular.

[esotericn]

The amount of oil in the ground is effectively infinite with regard to any sane carbon budget, so this could only really make sense in the short term.

Ultimately in time I suppose you could consider plastics recycling as a way to extract less oil. If, for example, you could recycle 80%, then you only need to extract 20% of the oil, which is likely to be far better for the environment (less fracking etc).

On geological timescales a lot of the stuff we are doing is bonkers. It looks sort of OK now because we've 'only' had 100 years of it.

[gregable]

That's a good point. It's not as though adding a little demand is likely to do anything other than increase supply in this case.