Biodegradability is bad and plastic bags are good

[Larv]

What about this argument? Biodegradability is bad and plastic bags are good.

 

1. Biodegradation releases copious amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which serves exacerbate global warming.

 

2. Plastic bags trap carbon and prevent it from entering the atmosphere, which serves to mitigate global warming.

 

Yes, I know that the manufacturing of plastic bags releases greenhouse gases. But, unlike gasoline and other petroleum products, plastic bags amount to a product that, in the end, withholds CO2 from the atmosphere, in addition to serving a practical purpose. We get a two-fer out of plastic bags.

 

What’s an even better solution to manufacturing grocery bags? Grow hemp and build a cottage industry in low-tech grocery bag production. That would be a good way to trap carbon and put a lot of people to work, so long as the industrial workers didn’t burn any of the hemp in the process.

[freeztar]

Interesting arguments...

 

I'd say biodegradability is a *great* thing. Could you imagine if nothing biodegraded? This place would be a right mess by now.

 

And for plastic bags, I wish they would biodegrade (some do).

The fact that they lock up carbon is offset, imho, by the environmental damage they do as pollutants. Consider all of the wildlife killed by plastic bags. Many animals will die over the years and they will biodegrade and release carbon. :)

 

Also consider the "plastic sea" and its effects.

 

About 1,000 miles west of San Francisco and 1,000 miles north of Hawaii, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, lies a massive body of floating garbage. It weighs 3 million tons, covers an area twice the size of Texas, and is comprised of fine plastic chips and other floatables. It may be impossible to skim it out of the ocean.

The trash collects in one area, known as the North Pacific Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that circulates along the Pacific Rim. According to the SF Chronicle, a two-liter plastic bottle that begins its voyage from a storm drain in San Francisco will get pulled into the gyre and take weeks to reach its place among the other debris in the Garbage Patch. Plastic bottles exposed to the sun’s UV rays become brittle and the bottles break into small pieces and particles of plastic dust. The debris floats as a soupy mass, interspersed with other marine debris such as fishing nets and tires. The mess has been growing by 10-fold every year since the 1950s.

NOSE CONE: "Sea of Plastic" twice the size of U.S. and growing

[Zythryn]

It is an interesting position I haven't heard before.

To make it a convincing argument, it should include:

How MUCH CO2 is produced in the production of both plastic and biodegradable bags of the same size.

How much CO2 is stored in the plastic bags.

How much CO2 is released when the biodegradable bag degrades.

 

Now, as an complicating factor, and as already mentioned by Freeztar, you also have the consideration of what the billions of non-degrading plastic bags and what they are doing to the environment.

[Larv]

It is an interesting position I haven't heard before.

To make it a convincing argument, it should include:

How MUCH CO2 is produced in the production of both plastic and biodegradable bags of the same size.

How much CO2 is stored in the plastic bags.

How much CO2 is released when the biodegradable bag degrades.

Yes, a good account of the entire issue is necessary for my argument to fly.

 

Now, as an complicating factor, and as already mentioned by Freeztar, you also have the consideration of what the billions of non-degrading plastic bags and what they are doing to the environment.

Of course. We would need a very tight disposal system. We need it anyway.

 

Actually, this argument is not mine originally; it’s James Lovelock’s (Gaia). I heard him on a Seattle talk show. So, I’m just kicking it forward for discussion. I rather like his audacity. His opinion of the pending environmental crisis is short and sweet: we’re screwed. There’s nothing we can do now to avert total disaster.

 

But we could make grocery bags out of hemp instead of plastic and tie up lot up the carbon that way. We fought and won World War II with hemp rope. Now we have to mine petroleum, refine it, and chemically process it to make plastic rope. There must be a huge difference between hemp and plastic in terms of their carbon footprints. Hemp could save the world.

 

Sorry, I went OT on my own thread.

[CraigD]

What about this argument? Biodegradability is bad and plastic bags are good. ...

While I think these argument have a lot of merit, I think they’re incomplete, failing to account for the role of recycling in waste stream management.

 

Whether it’s readily bio-degradable – is edible by something, in essence – and whether it actually does bio-degrade (even very bio-degradable materials, buried in a typical landfill, may fail to do so), and whether is sequesters carbon, as a high per-person waste producing civilization, we face a simple real-estate problem: we’re running out of places to throw our trash. As best I can tell, there are a few main, non-mutually-exclusive strategies toward this problem:

• Find previously under-exploited places to throw our trash.
  
• Find really good places to throw our trash. For example, if you can somehow sink trash into a subduction crack, it’ll literally get absorbed (on a geological time scale) into the Earth.
  
• Get better at turning former trash heaps into useful real-estate. This is a pretty daunting challenge, as old trash heaps are notoriously shifty, toxic, hazardous, hard-to-contain man-made mountains.
  
• Throw out less.
  
• Recycle more of what we throw out.
  

Shopping and trash bags that better biodegrade not fail to work along any of these strategies, but in the cases of some kinds (eg: old-fashioned paper bags as an alternative for the commonplace plastic kind) actually worsen the problem, because they use a greater mass and volume of material per unit of carrying capacity, and don’t bio-degrade much better than the very non-biodegradable they replace. Their biodegradability may also make them unsuitable for recycling into “downstream products” – which I’m about to talk about.

 

I’m enthusiastic about the last two strategies, in large part because I or anyone can immediately implement them, rather than having to change careers to manufacturing or waste management. My household doesn’t use more than one typical plastic shopping sack per week, but rather reusable bags. Mostly of our bags are pretty, though somewhat fragile http://Elizabeth Haub Foundation polypropylene/nylon bags, which are made of 100% recycled material. The others are truly permanent (I’ve had them for over 15 years, with no sign of wearing out) strong all nylon mesh bags. I keep two of these in the shoulder-strapped briefcase/kit bag I carry most of the time, so am almost never without a bag in the event of an unplanned store visit. (I’ve got other cool and useful stuff in my bag, too – kinda like Batman’s utility belt :))

 

I’m fortunate to live in an area (the greater Washington, DC) that has good municipal recycling services – aluminum, steel, and glass in one bin, clean paper in another – so our household (usually 2 humans and 3 housecats, though for the past and likely next couple months, one extra human) rarely throws out more than 1 kitchen-size (30 gal/50 L) bag of non-recyclables each week.

 

I expect to do a bit of porch-building this summer, and plan on using decking made of 90%+ recycled plastic – the stuff’s a bit harder to cut and drill than wood lumber, but assuming its UV protectants work as advertised, should last centuries, outlasting the rest of the house.

[Theory5]

What about this argument? Biodegradability is bad and plastic bags are good.

 

1. Biodegradation releases copious amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which serves exacerbate global warming.

 

2. Plastic bags trap carbon and prevent it from entering the atmosphere, which serves to mitigate global warming.

 

Yes, I know that the manufacturing of plastic bags releases greenhouse gases. But, unlike gasoline and other petroleum products, plastic bags amount to a product that, in the end, withholds CO2 from the atmosphere, in addition to serving a practical purpose. We get a two-fer out of plastic bags.

 

What’s an even better solution to manufacturing grocery bags? Grow hemp and build a cottage industry in low-tech grocery bag production. That would be a good way to trap carbon and put a lot of people to work,

 

Why do you think plastic withholds CO2 from the atmosphere? If these plastic bags were never created at all, there would be less CO2 than if you made plastic bags, and the materials would never produce CO2, whereas a plastic bag has the potential to create CO2.

so long as the industrial workers didn’t burn any of the hemp in the process.

 

I will argue that that will raise job satisfaction in your cottage industry. And might even be worth it in the long run (not to the atmosphere) but to your factory workers and their moral :-P

It sure would raise my job moral...