[ACAVJW4H]

Is properly burying waste plastic underground and ensuring it doesn’t pollute water streams or break down into micro plastic a good way of long term carbon storage?

Liquifying or turning it into syngas seems counter intuitive as we’re releasing a long chain carbon store back into atmospheric co2

[ZeroGravitas]

No, the evidence is very clear that recycling plastic into more plastic is the best option for minimizing carbon and energy use.

There's no benefit to storing carbon if you immediately turn round and extract fossil fuels to replace the carbon you just buried.

Even when we start making plastic at large scales from captured carbon, it's still not a good idea to bury that if you then need to go and make more of it.

Landfills are just generally not the best option and you'll probably find support for them traces back directly to fossil fuel interests since they very neatly line up with their incentive structure compared with the alternatives.

[kbelder]

>Even when we start making plastic at large scales from captured carbon, it's still not a good idea to bury that if you then need to go and make more of it.

I think that's exactly wrong, if it's really made from captured carbon. At that point, it would make sense to make plastic with the sole intent of burying it.

[xhkkffbf]

Hah! I've wondered the same thing. What if recycling was the problem?

And it's not just plastics. Imagine all of the newsprint that was put into landfills before the Internet and recycling came along. That's quite a few tons of carbon!

[NonContro]

One of the problems of recycling (glass, plastics, etc.) is that each container uses a different type of material, and shape.

We should mandate an international standard size container for food and beverages, so that eg. glass bottles can be reused by multiple brands, just with a different paper logo glued on.