How is this dystopian? Plastic is a really great material -- and way more eco-friendly than metal for building computers. It's only mass-produced single-use plastics like water bottles that are bad for the environment.
You want the stored carbon in plastics to escape??
The best outcome for plastics, would be to bury them very deep (like nuclear waste), where they could eventually become some new oil like substance. No carbon escape.
Yeah but no one is burying the plastic, it’s too expensive. So realistically I’d much rather have the plastic breakdown so it’s not everywhere for 10k years.
A lot of plastic actually gets buried. For example, in Washington’s King County non-recycled waste is buried. Perhaps this needs to be done world-wide.
There's no shortage of those (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1zDJ1qZTlg and https://youtu.be/F2zm87p8f7M?t=1857 that I just happened to have handy) what there is a shortage of is economical ones (or scalable, the other major obstacle) as compared to the current situation where the negative externalities are not priced into the sales leading to perverse incentives
That’s just biodegradable plastic. It will last a couple of days out in the open. I actually mean plastic that’s lasts for multiple lifetimes but still starts to break down only after ~200 years.