okay, i'm convinced (and always was) that hummers have a greater impact than hybrids.

but if one really believes that excess carbon in the atmosphere will wipe us out, shouldn't we outlaw biodegradable packaging?

here's how it works. if i throw a plastic bag into the trash, i'm actually "sequestering" carbon, since plastic is made from (ta-da) . .. . oil.

so every time we use a NON-plastic item (wood, cloth, cotton, paper) which is biodegradeable, those items simply spew C02 into the atmosphere as microbes decompose them.

plastic bags and bottles will persist for "thousands of years" according to one branch of the environmental church and are a sin.

but plastic packaging, especially if recycled, but even if sequestered (put in landfills) reduces C02 emissions.

whats this have to do with cars? let's start making them out of plastic - especially recycled plastic. GM actually took a step backwards, when they ended the plastic "saturn" cars, and went back to metal.

faux wood trim on your toyota is saving the planet. the woody your grandfather went surfing in is destroying it.

insist that your next "wood" deck be made of plastic, too.

baltimore aureole:

okay, i'm convinced (and always was) that hummers have a greater impact than hybrids.

but if one really believes that excess carbon in the atmosphere will wipe us out, shouldn't we outlaw biodegradable packaging?

here's how it works. if i throw a plastic bag into the trash, i'm actually "sequestering" carbon, since plastic is made from (ta-da) . .. . oil.

so every time we use a NON-plastic item (wood, cloth, cotton, paper) which is biodegradeable, those items simply spew C02 into the atmosphere as microbes decompose them.

plastic bags and bottles will persist for "thousands of years" according to one branch of the environmental church and are a sin.

but plastic packaging, especially if recycled, but even if sequestered (put in landfills) reduces C02 emissions.

whats this have to do with cars? let's start making them out of plastic - especially recycled plastic. GM actually took a step backwards, when they ended the plastic "saturn" cars, and went back to metal.

faux wood trim on your toyota is saving the planet. the woody your grandfather went surfing in is destroying it.

insist that your next "wood" deck be made of plastic, too.

interesting thought....

but, as one oil company guy said at a talk i went to once, 'everything made out of petroleum that's not gasoline or fuel oil is essentially a free waste product"

what we need is a process to make plastic out of carbon dioxide, without the messy burying dead plants under rocks for millions of years part.

"Perhaps people are just nature's way of turning petroleum into plastic?" -George Carlin.

Producing wood, cotton and paper takes carbon out of the atmosphere, and when they decompose, the carbon goes back, so no net increase in carbon in the atmosphere (except, of course what ever energy was required to make them)

Using oil is taking carbon out of the ground. So even if it takes thousands of years to decompose, it's adding carbon to the atmosphere that had been locked underground.

TroyM:

Producing wood, cotton and paper takes carbon out of the atmosphere, and when they decompose, the carbon goes back, so no net increase in carbon in the atmosphere (except, of course what ever energy was required to make them)

Using oil is taking carbon out of the ground. So even if it takes thousands of years to decompose, it's adding carbon to the atmosphere that had been locked underground.

not that i'm in disagreement, but at this point, adding carbon to the atmosphere over thousands of years would be considered a huge success vs. adding it every damn second.

gzuckier:

what we need is a process to make plastic out of carbon dioxide, without the messy burying dead plants under rocks for millions of years part.

We do, it's called syngas. Only it requires carbon monoxide. So what we really need is a more efficient way of making CO2 from CO, but more importantly, we need a way of purifying CO2 from the atmosphere. Because traces of nitrogen interfere with the reaction, and there's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere. That's the major part of any sort of carbon sequestering project. Once you've released the CO2, it's gone. Before you can really think about how to get rid of it, you have got to develop a trapping mechanism.

It would work if we got some or most of the plastic from old stuff that was headed to the waste stream. Metal is good because it can be easily recycled. Plastic would be good if we developed more ways to turn old milk jugs into consumer products.

As far as biodegradable stuff, it's good if we know it has to end up in the dump. The carbon ends up back where it belongs, in growing plants and the animals that eat the plants. There's no advantage to sequestering carbon by burying plastic. In fact, carbon should be made available to plant life, where it is not just sequestered, but contributes to growing tress for that wood deck.

Seperating CO2 from the atmosphere is incredibly easy: You pass air over a set of plates cooled to about -40 C to remove all of the water vapor. Then the dry air stream is passed over a second set of plates cooled to about -90 C. Solid CO2 (dry ice) condenses out at -78.5 C, so you can just scrape it off those second set of plates.

Of course you can make it much more efficient if you design a continuous process where the CO2-covered cold plates are allowed to warm up (by cooling the water condensation plates) as the dry ice sublimates back into pure CO2 gas.

if you take oil out of the ground, and turn it into a milk jug, 2 things happen

1 - that oil doesn't become gasoline (or diesel, or home heating oil) and go into the atmosphere in smoke.

2 - the plastic bottle is recyled, or goes to a landfil, and never re-enters the carbon cycle.

Yes, but any carbon that comes out of the ground can only be either a zero or a positive contribution to atmospheric carbon. It is impossible to sequester this carbon, since it has been removed from long (think millions to hundreds of millions of years) term sequestration. Most plastic will be recycled or landfilled, but some will be burnt. Use of fossil fuels=net addition to the atmospheric carbon reservoir. There is no getting around this fact.

On the other hand, plastic or consumer goods made from renewable resources can only be either a zero or a negative contribution to atmospheric carbon, since the carbon contained within them originally came from the atmosphere. Any of this carbon that gets landfilled or otherwise sequestered creates a net loss of atmospheric carbon.