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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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PLA (polylactic acid, commonly used for 3D printing) is made from biomass, and is thus sustainably sourced.
Bio-PET is functionally identical to petroleum-based PET, but is readily produced from plants, and is thus sustainably sourced.
I don't think energy is a particularly scarce commodity. We are utilizing only a tiny fraction of the energy readily available to us. We haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit of energy production yet.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary. Every boomer has stories of finding cigarette butts in their soda and beer. Previous buyers regularly used their empties as ash trays before turning them in for the deposit, and the cleaning process was not nearly as effective as one would hope.
A better cleaning process would be needed to even consider commercial reuse of consumer glass today. Superheated steam, for example, would burn off pretty much any organic material, and machine inspection would be able to identify remaining contaminants and defects.
Renewable sourcing is nice, but that doesn’t really address the main problem, which is what happens to the plastic after you’ve used it. If it’s burned, it will release the previously stored carbon into the atmosphere. If it’s recycled, the carbon stays in circulation. If it’s biodegradable, it solves the plastic problem for the most part.
"Biodegradable" and "burning" release the same mass of carbon into the environment. Burning releases it as CO2. Biodegraded plastic releases that carbon as methane.
Biodegradability is not a desirable property of trash bound for a landfill.
Actually it depends on how it decomposes. Anaerobic processes tend to produce methane, whereas aerobic ones usually produce CO2. Anyway, I was mainly thinking of the microplastics though. Biodegradable plastic wouldn’t stay in a harmful form for thousands of years, but it would still produce carbon in some form.