"Polyethylene is the most widely used type of synthetic polymer. Due to its high demand, it's automatically the most produced and consequently, the most discarded plastic over the entire planet. Coincidentally, Polyethylene was found to be the plastic that emits the highest amount of the greenhouse gases methane and ethylene. " ...I read this and thought, "because of course it is!" Humans live by Murphy's Law way too often.
I think as far as plastics go, we need to make a shift to keeping them around for really necessary applications (medical stuff, for example), and work to phase them out for unnecessary applications (lots of single-use plastics for things like to go cups and plastic cutlery). I know "peak oil" has been bandied about for decades and was pushed back with fracking, but it will still happen eventually. The pollution combined with the fact that one day we might not have cheap and easy base material to make those really necessary medical devices, I think is a big case for treating it like the precious resource it is. We should also be working to recover and recycle as much as possible. I know recycling plastic means downcycling, but we should really use what's already here up as much as we can. It's rather how I feel about animal products: if you're going to kill an animal, you should use all the parts (say, the meat for food, the bones for gelatin, the hide for leather, whatever) instead of this wasteful industrial ag system so often in force where you just know the factory farmed cows (not to speak of the cruel and inhumane conditions inherent in that), which are slaughtered at absurd speeds (which is also unsafe for the workers), they aren't saving those hides for leather too, they're frikkin' mutilating them for speed in processing. NTM instead of getting useful fertilizer from all those animals, they are creating toxic waste pools because it's too much concentrated in one place. It's slower to use up all the useful things, but so much better for the environment.
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That's a very good contribution, thanks for stopping by