plastic

“What we actually do is we mix the plastic in with organic waste and put that in the landfill, and because there's all this plastic mixed in with the organic waste doesn't have any access to oxygen, and so it decomposes anaerobically and emits all of its carbon…”

“If you look at just the production phase of plastics around the world, we are talking about, you know, something in the neighborhood of Nine hundred million tons of CO₂ that's getting emitted, but if you look at the whole life cycle, estimates are more like 1.…”

“Demand for plastics alone has already doubled since the beginning of this century, and shows no signs of slowing down.”

“We're only burning about 40% of it for energy. The other 60% of it, we're actually converting into the products themselves. So plastics are carbon-based chemicals. Where do we get all those carbon atoms? We get them from the fossil fuel inputs. And so this is …”

“So we think that, like, over the whole history of the world, we've made about six and a half billion tons of plastic. About five billion of those tons are still around. And they are either in landfills or just, like, dispersed in the environment. They are plas…”

“Depending on exactly how you count it, fertilizer and plastic usually comes out to be like between 75 and 80% of all the GHGs from the whole sector.”

“If you think about plastics, we're still mostly using things that we discovered 70 years ago, 80 years ago, and we've gotten so good at, you know, manufacturing them, optimizing them, so now For someone to come up and say, oh, I discovered a completely differe…”

“To my understanding, the majority of the reason that plastic is, has a lot of embedded emissions is largely in the, is largely the energy consumption of the production of the precursors.”

“And I don't worry personally about the fact that plastics use petroleum inherently because that petroleum is locked up inside the plastic. It's not being emitted as CO two into the atmosphere generally. So I think that plastic is a climate Challenge, but I thi…”