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Riley S. Faelan

@pixx But throwing away aluminium cans after a single use would wreak way less havoc than throwing away plastic baubles after a single use.

@angelastella @eniko @gabrielesvelto @cederbs

16 October at 13:59 | Wall-to-wall | Open on toot.cat
3 comments
pixx

@riley @angelastella @eniko @gabrielesvelto @cederbs Maybe, but if we did it at the same scale as plastic?

Aluminium mining is _horrible_, environmentally. Whether or not it's worse than oil drilling / plastic production per bauble, I don't know and am not asserting; rather, there is _no_ material that, if used the way we use plastic, would not be an unstoppable _crisis_.

16 October at 14:24 | Open on merveilles.town
Riley S. Faelan

@pixx The damage from bauxite mining is far shorter-term than the damage from throwing plastic around. The biosphere has experience with these things, and can remediate the wasteland within a couple of centuries even if humans don't really do anything to clean up after themselves.

Also, aluminium is recyclable. The cans that don't get thrown out can be pretty much endlessly recycled, with only new energy needing to be put in. Plastic could eventually get there, but right now, it can, at best, pass through a few re-plasticisations until it will become better to burn it than to try to convert it. Carbon chains can be hairy that way.
@angelastella @eniko @gabrielesvelto @cederbs

@pixx The damage from bauxite mining is far shorter-term than the damage from throwing plastic around. The biosphere has experience with these things, and can remediate the wasteland within a couple of centuries even if humans don't really do anything to clean up after themselves.

Also, aluminium is recyclable. The cans that don't get thrown out can be pretty much endlessly recycled, with only new energy needing to be put in. Plastic could eventually get there, but right now, it can, at best, pass...

17 October at 11:00 | Open on toot.cat
pixx

@riley @angelastella @eniko @gabrielesvelto @cederbs That's a very important point, yeah: plastic can be recycled, a few times.

Metal can be recycled _forever_. The result of recycling metal is still high-quality metal. The result of recycling plastic is degraded plastic, which typically needs at least a bit of fresh plastic for quality purposes anyways :/

17 October at 12:53 | Open on merveilles.town
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