[llamaimperative]

Uhhh that's not moving the goal posts except if you're starting from your own strawman. Burying gigantic amounts of plastic isn't suboptimal because humans bad/nature good/plastic ugly/etc., it's bad because of the actual effects that we're seeing in nature.

Tell me: how frequently do you think entirely new tannins are introduced to an ecosystem? How global are these new tannins introduced? Are plants suddenly producing a new tannin and spreading it across the entire globe within 50 years? Because we're producing totally new molecules in gigantic amounts and spreading them across the entire globe at a rate that is far too fast for us to even understand what the long term effects are, never mind for organisms to evolve to a new equilibrium in their presence

The lack of co-evolution is the issue. The tendency to invent, mass produce, and disseminate new molecules across the entire globe year after year at a rate much faster than evolution is the problem.

I don't know why you're harping on this "things die in nature" point. No one is disputing that.

[scotty79]

We are still in the first million years of plastics on Earth, give it time. You'll see that after mere million years of producing plastics there won't be a new molecule introduced every decade or even every century.

[lazide]

And what effects are we seeing in nature because we bury plastics?

Because all the effects you are talking about near as I can tell is because we aren’t burying all the plastics. We dispose of them in other ways, or don’t at all.

Because when they’re buried, they don’t interact with anything anymore.

Literally.

So seriously, WTF?