yeah sad to see. here's hoping attention builds for next year and oil producing nations aren't able to derail things as much then... "deep divisions remained between a group of nearly 100 "high ambition" countries calling for plastic to be phased out and oil-producing nations who warned this would affect the world's development." www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785l1nrpd1o
Problem is, rather than reduce plastics, supermarkets seem to have found new ways of using even more than ever before. Extra 'Security' packaging (because we can't trust anyone to not handle food, pierce or peel back lids, etc). Then it seems more householders are incapable of cutting up fruit and vegetables themselves any more. Supermarkets offer shelves and shelves of chunky watermelon, grated carrot, sliced onion, cucumber sticks, even nuts and dried fruits - all packed in handy plastic boxes, with lids made of entirely different forms of plastic, this needing to be recycled separately (or not at all), and it takes so long to get all the bits of lid off - you were better off peeling and chopping up the original fruit/veg yourself. No longer does anyone worry about the stone cold fact that pre-prepared food is less nutritious for you, often 'much' less nutritious. Nope, we're all much too worn out to peel, chop, and clean the cutting board to care about details like that these days. It's all about convenience, and your average shopper doesn't care. Another thing the food industry does - is promote snacks. When I was a small child, snacks were 3 flavours of crisps, and sweets in paper, card or foil wrappers. Even Mars Bars had a paper wrapper (that's going back a bit, eh?) Generally, people didn't eat between meals back then. You had 3 meals a day, and that was sufficient, and we were all slim. (I went to a school of 1600 children, and remember there were only 2 overweight kids in the whole school). The problem with snacks is - they're often wrapped in plastic, and either sugary, contain ultraprocessed vegetable oils, modified starches, and other additives 'designed' to make the product addictive....And likely, you'll buy one tomorrow, and the next day, and two the day after that. So snacks are a massive source of plastic. No snacks are necessary. And you check out your local Tesco or Asda or whatever, and count up the aisles filled with foods that count as snacks. A quarter? A third? The more snack culture develops - the fatter the world gets. Not fat that means we are well nourished. No. Lots of fat people 'don't' have their full vitamin requirements. There are a lot of people suffering malnutrition in Scotland, and they're not all slim. They're puffed up with inflammation and water retention, thanks to Sugar&Co. Sugar causes fat, not real fats themselves. Food fats - whether you get them from meat, dairy, nuts, avocados, quality olive oil and quality coconut oil are just fine (I'm not going to get in the vegan/non vegan debate). But sugar - bad. And because more ordinary people are now in the know, starting to avoid sugar (thanks to more online info from actual doctors), companies are producing more and more products with sugar, even products like sauces that never had any in them before! (I've dumped a few products because they started adding sugar to them. So beware, all you buyers. They are manipulating our favourite products to turn us into sugar junkies - which, in Britain means, paying more tax to this lousy government!).
The problem is the biosphere shift. The planets changing. Very slightly at the moment in some ways. About to ramp up in ways that are already tough to cope with as the shift occurs. We're all being marketed to... it's fine, just keep paying us please. Buy more oil. Buy more plastic. Buy more food. Buy more water. Buy more housing. Buy a candy bar. Buy more information. Buy things that won't reduce how much you buy. Buy in bulk. Buy more. And we're rather helpless in many ways to alter that system. It's difficult to even discuss. The emotions get rather intense. It's so interrelated and complex it's hard to comprehend even with decades of study. This isn't a back in the day we just did things differently sort of thing. We're looking at changes that will mean we exhaust our resources and ability to extract resources far faster than many of us want to give credence. Our economy and societal structure has changed our biosphere. In a way we're just now even capable of studying in real time let alone it even happening before in that period or such magnitude. While we attempt interventions and advance methodologies for mitigation. We do need to think about how we address what's happening. And we should look at how resilient we have been capable of being in our past and how to best utilize the enormous access to resources we have been able to obtain. Because without doing so we all may be very susceptible to these changes. Suppose I would ask what do you think we should do if keeping away from sugar doesn't aid us? What happens when we can't buy plastic? What if what we like just... isn't available to us anymore? Not because we regulated it and it was more impractical to use than something else. But because the infrastructure collapsed to bring it to you? We're pushing up against some hard resource limits. What I'd like is to help each other as we push up against those limits. Because it seems we have basically chosen to do rather little to impact the coming shifts.
@@georgelinker2408 You like it. As a chemist, so do I. It's a rather interesting substance. It's near miraculous in medical technologies. It's saved lives. And yeah, definitely helps preserve food. Using it for everything? That's the issue. It's a resource dilemma. We have a substance that is rather toxic to the environment. And you may not care because you think a biosphere shift won't change your way of life. And the fact of it is that it already has... and the decisions have basically come down to do we want to try to preserve a society that's not going to last through the coming biosphere shift and need to change anyway... or do we start making the hard decisions now and make it easier on ourselves... if you're under 50 it's a good chance you'll see the shifts truly change things in this lifetime... or do we just wait for it to happen while we enjoy a meal out of a plastic container? Guess people sure do like those TV dinners...
Unfortunately, there are some complicated contradictions here. Over half the arable land on Earth is given over to agriculture, which has enormous environmental impacts (arguably much larger than plastics). We need to feed over 8B (soon to be 10B) people. We can’t just convert the entire human population to a diet of fresh, whole foods, prepared from scratch using highly perishable ingredients. And food waste is a massive problem, made worse by this perishability. Prepared foods, in plastic packaging, can be ready to eat and keep for months or years. They can also come in convenient single-serving packaging. This greatly reduces waste and cost - a major issue for poor people, and the key reason food insecurity has fallen drastically in my lifetime. Something like pre-cut fruits and vegetables in plastic packaging at the supermarket reduces food waste, and makes fresh whole foods much more accessible for many people. Buying and cutting up an entire watermelon is kind of ridiculous for a single person. Being able to buy a little container with enough pre-sliced watermelon to enjoy for a few days is, for many people, the difference between eating fresh watermelon, and eating yet more junk food. Please, think about the tradeoffs when considering these issues. When your remarks sound like a litany of different outrage points, some of which contradict each other, it usually means you need to step back and think about the bigger picture.
@ It's a lot more complicated that even that... energy to produce the plastic, support the employee and store operations and that's before we get into the infrastructure and initial energy costs of building. Add in the extra plastic from such serving sizes and it is quite the challenge if the concepts to actually reduce biosphere impact. And that's without getting into a whole lot more. The problem is we're arguing over who gets to use plastic straws instead of deciding if we want plastic in every product imaginable or whether we want to be capable of using these materials where they are most useful and beneficial (such as medical technologies and end customer food preservation and not just most cost effective. The plastic (and other oil products) for those pre slices isn't just the preserving package. It's the knife handles, the crates, the shipping wrap, a bunch of the ship, the truck, the road, the lighting, the energy, the advertising, the shopping cart, the aisle, the whole process. So instead of discussing how to transform industries we're arguing with each other about whether people buying product A vs product B means anything. It doesn't in that comparison. Not to true emissions on a global scale. Which is exactly how major polluter want it. They await to stay less regulated and have consumers be blamed for their operational decisions and have the ONLY mitigating factor be their stock price. This is far more complex and interrelated than we tend to give it credit. I appreciate you make such an argument and ask people to think deeper.
Some days videos like this inspire me to look at my own life and make changes to try and reduce my impact, but other days it just disheartens and saddens me. I try to remember that sustainability needs to be a sustained process of change that can be maintained long term (or sustainably!), rather than one moment of extreme change, and these emotional reactions are part of the sustained process. Thank you for helping keep the process in motion!
of course no journey is linear and we all have tough days. I'm glad that these videos provide food for reflection, though, and hope your change remains sustainable long into the future 💚
I think Meliore Foundation deserves a "Thank you"; I will check out who and what you are. Where I live, we have yellow bags (gelbe Säcke) for plastic waste. The last time I went to the waste disposal with a question about how to sort something, the waste disposal expert told me, "All yellow bags in this area are burned." 😱 This area is the most populated in Germany, so much about the recycling efforts. Next time I go there, I will ask another person because it is still hard for me to believe it. And I, as a viewer, want to learn much more about those important links. So I'll watch till the end, like, comment, and I am subscribed to indicate my engagement. ;-)
Same in France. We do separate wastes (even going down to differenciating plastics) And in the end 80% gets burned and 20% is exported abroad, in Africa or malaysia, where it ends in landfills. We had a reporter make a documentary on it. Recycling is currently a joke to make citizens believe they are doing something. But as long as industrials don t pay for the real recycling, it will be unaffordable.
I think it would be helpful to talk about packaging more. Single use packaging on building sites, logistics companies, etc. The tonnage of this is surely way higher than straws and forks. Thanks Plastic Adam 😊
@@cclambie I used to work in a retail store, where lots of products would be delivered on pallets, these then wrapped in lengths of plastic wrap to keep the products in place. One day, a manager was unwrapping a pallet, thinking that this particular length of plastic wrap was unusually long. After removing it, he and a colleague took it outside, and discovered it was the entire length of the building (I'd estimate around 250ft long). There is so much 'unseen and unnoticeable' plastic we don't consider: Plastic sheets on farms to warm the soil prior to planting. Plastic feed buckets/sacks of feed, supplements, fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, algaecides, detergents, paints. Plastic drums of oil and detergent, plastic nets and lobster/crab pots washed/thrown overboard fishing boats. And that's to produce the food we eat 'before' itsybeen wrapped in plastic. And given how unhealthy much of our food is today - we then support much more plastic waste through the medical problems brought on by modern diets - Cancer, Diabetes 2, cholesterol problems, heart disease, obesity, and a very marked increase in prostate problems. And because the food is causing weight problems across the world, this fuels the diet market, and people lose and gain weight on a lifelong merry-go-round, changing their wardrobes to fit, the discarded clothes adding much plastic to the waste problem. Straws and forks indeed. It's laughable how very little progress has been made to change the packaging problem.
With respect Adam, I think we’re all massively underestimating the impact of plastic pollution on the climate via those impacts to biotic growth. I went positively bug-eyed when Project Kaisen videoed microplastic eaten from the base through every level of the ocean’s foodweb. Cumulatively, that’s fiddling with our largest carbon sequestering pump. At least landfills are serving a practical protective role for now.
I am a Vegetarian, i drive an EV Scooter, i rarely consume packaged foods or drinks, and i try to not use any Plastic product as much as possible, it's not so tough if people try for their own good.
Recycled plastic waste has been found to be excellent for being melted down and turned into roads that are sturdy and soft enough not to need repairs. If we beefed up our local recycling plants, we could replace major roads and highways with locally collected, free material that will only require any kind of upkeep in major earthquakes etc, thus saving a large amount of local tax money for many, many years.
@@emilysigmund1255 Sounds like a good thing to be doing while use of plastic is still ubiquitous, while simultaneously working to reduce current plastic use drastically 👍
One common argument against replacing single-use plastic is that the environmental impact of the replacements is also significant and perhaps even worse. Using paper means more deforestation, glass means significantly heavier products / breakage during transport / additional sand use / more fuel used to transport the same goods, metals means more mining / still require plastic if used to wrap foods, etc... I'd love to hear your thoughts on this argument. FWIW, I personally agree that we need to reduce packaging overall but this otherwise smells like an industry line geared at delaying the transition away from plastic. That said, I don't have a full enough picture to feel confident in my opinion.
*definitely* depends on the specifics, but there are many cases where the three Rs come into play. reduce the amount of materials used in the first place. use re-usable materials (e.g. here in Germany we use glass bottles for most drinks, which - thanks to a deposit system - are returned, washed and reused). and then design what we can't get rid of so that it can - and is - much better recycled. but of course there's no one size fits all solution, and some "solutions" that have been proposed are more about improving optics (aka greenwashing) than actually tackling the issue!
I have the same questions. Every time I've looked into specifics, like studies on the lifecycle impact of plastics vs their potential replacements, it's really unclear. Plastics just so ridiculously cheap and low resource to make compared to many alternatives. It's clear plastics, especially single-use ones, cause all sorts of problems. I just feel like I rarely see discussion about the costs of the alternatives. But also like you said, there's clearly lots of money with incentive to confuse the matter.
We are missing the main concept of the issue. 15% of each barrel is where plastic comes from, if all diesel etc, if all the 6000 products we get are also single use then unless the inputs stop, oil, then recycling plastic means the amount builds up. Polyester clothes produce massive amounts of microplastics and transferring this 15% into flooring, window coverings, tyres, paints is the reason why a study came out recently that showed microplastics per GRAM of food were over 300,000. Unless we stop using nail polish, polyester clothes etc etc then this raw product is going to have to go somewhere and into something, take everything that is oil related out of your life, or even just plastic and how much is left.. Oil demand won't drop with Ev's because Ev's are half plastic. Tyre's, rubber coated wires, asphalt is all oil, EV's need six new copper mines opened per year for the next 3 decades just for one generation of cars. Plastic is obfuscation of the main issue, how to remove oil overall.
@@antonyjh1234Oil demand drops with EVs because they don’t burn gasoline. A 30mpg car, driven 150,000 miles, consumes 5000 gallons of gasoline. A gallon of gas weighs about 6.3 pounds, so that’s over 30,000 pounds of gas - about 7 to 10 times the weight of the car itself. That’s before we get to the cost of extraction, transportation, and refining, which is probably another 25% to the mass of fossil fuel used. Always, always do the math when talking about this stuff! As for mining copper (and lithium, and all the other metals in a car)… metals are nearly 100% recyclable, unlike plastics. Once we have enough mined to cover all the cars we might have on the road, the need for mining largely ceases. In the US today, over 70% of the steel we use is recycled. Aluminum and copper are also easily recycled, and lithium and other battery metals can be recycled. It should be cheaper to recycle metals than to mine and refine them, unlike plastics, which are most cheaply made fresh from oil.
@@davestagner For every single ev there has to be a corresponding amount of diesel produced as plastic comes from the same barrel and they say six new mines have to be opened per year for the next 32 years to replace one generation of ice cars and just for electrification we need to produce 115% of all copper mined in all of history. The emissions to mine all this will always be an addition and ev's will along with it. Considering the emissions to produce a vehicle are going to be around 10,000 years are ev's worth it? It's production emissions to replace what we shouldn't have, personal vehicles with hundeds of horses under the bonnet.
I feel like completely getting rid of plastic will be hard because there has been plastic used in some pretty important fields like medical equipment. So we would need some sort of replacement for it
Adam, yep! The plastics solution has to start at the start, with the chemistry and manufacturing of plastics. We should switch to glass, tin, paper, etc. where we can. But, plastics need to be designed to be recycled.
@ClimateAdam I absolutely agree. Unfortunately medical plastics are burned in medical waste incinerators which release a huge amount of toxins into the atmosphere. I know because I live near one of the largest medical incinerators in the US. We have fought to get it shut down but have been stonewalled by the state environmental agency. I like the idea of recycling, but its not really being implemented. It's time for truth and responsibility in plastic waste. And the biggest impact we can make right now is by eliminating nonessential plastic products.
I'm using disposable injectors for blood thinners, for years to come I hope, and it's pretty wasteful. This little plastic single use syringe with a needle-shroud that pops out to make it sharp-safe to throw out. It take them to the drug store sharps container to dispose, they could certainly recycle, but I suspect most medical waste just gets burnt or landfilled, for safety reasons. All the disposable plastics in hospitals, etc. The thing to remember, though, is scale. Medwaste is pretty far down the stack of things we use plastic for, so if we tackle the things above it we'll be doing pretty well, even as the other 6 billion get better medical care and start generating more of this waste too. But we'll probably need to get to it eventually, hopefully we'll have renewable carbon neutral substitutes for all the plastic chemistries we need, or just ways to offset or reclaim the carbon from continuing to use oil for this and similar specialty applications. If we can recycle all the grocery containers for yogurt and drinks I'm pretty sure that'd be 10X or more the specialty high value uses of plastic.
So glad "lead poisoning and snatched waist" made it in 😂 also +1 for plastic Adam ♻️ But on a serious note, thanks for a great video drawing a link between these two very important environmental topics!
@@etienne8110 I visualised it as seven 1 km*1 km*1 km cubes and seven 10 km*10 km*10 km cubes respectively, filled with water, but sure, I guess? Also, lakes tend to be quite irregular, so I'm not really sure how their volumes can be intuitively visualised
Are plastics a major source for climate change? The answer is yes, from mineral extraction and poorly maintained/neglected well heads, colouring and additive production. Then there is making and transportation from one continent to another before final assembly. Usage might be minutes to years, then disposal where plastics do release climate change emissions but over a long period of time, I call it "climate lag"
Interesting. I was thinking about plastic and the oil industry this morning. Hopefully we'll find something better to replace the current fossil oil-based products.
I have definitely stopped using plastic in the kitchen and in textlies where I can but primarily for selfish personal health reasons. I try my best not to use single use plastic and polyester (which is almost impossible for active clothes and swimsuits) but I understand changes have to be made at a government level. It's good that you've talked about the larger picture here. If you have knowledge on the subject of incinerators I would like to know more about how they're a good, bad or ok method of using plastic waste. I know that Denmark and Japan use them. P.S Love your nails PlasticAdam!
Algorithm sent me to you after a video I started to watch from a US ‘eco’ influencer who was trying to convince us and apparently herself, that her choice to start using more plastic over glass and aluminum is ok because “no climate scientists are preaching to quit plastic”. Interesting lol. Call it confirmation bias, but I found your video a lot more legitimate. Thank you!
In the UK, as in the US, transportation is the biggest source of emissions. I think it's pretty weird that everyone goes to electricity and farming, when transportation should always be the first example for a western audience.
Just because there is a #1 doesn't mean there is no progress to be made in #2 and #3. Improving generation is particularly important because many of the solutions to reduce emissions in transportation, farming and general industry all require more electricity. Of course cutting consumption of everything is best, but to be practical we also need to reduce emissions of everything too. Do them all.
I think part of the solution might be replacing a lot of the fossil-derived single-use polymers with PHB (Polyhydroxybutyrate), which is currently sold under the brand name "Aircarbon". It's a thermoplastic biopolymer that can be produced from algae. It's food-safe and already used in medical applications too. There's also a lot of potential, which is currently being developed, in hydrothermal liquefaction technology that can turn waste hydrocarbons, from sewage to plastic and paper to agricultural waste, into renewable bio crude.
Polyester/acrylic/nylon clothing, linens, blankets, carpets. Aside from the fact that they will basically be around forever, Laundering these things introduces microplastics into the water supply.
You deserve Millions of subscribers and Billions of views. You are legit and nice and educate people about the most important thing in the world. Lots of love and support from India.
On communicating the scale (ie via "empire states worth")... if there's are that many "empire states" worth of plastic, why not just say "Equivalent to the size of every skyscraper on earth combined x times over". That's much more impactful, and if the estimate is accurate, then I'm sure its probably true, assuming there are less y amount of empire states. I probably didn't communicate that very well but hopefully you get the point
@ClimateAdam the microplastics crossing my blood brain barrier told me to tell you thanks for the great video Also, you're right. it's not rly trackable - and irrelevant even if it was. Step one of pushing ourselves away from the current SSP 8.5 trajectory we're on imo is figuring out how to do a serious universal broadcast with real material consequences to create true *global* awareness of the scale and urgency of the climate emergency. Most normal ppl know of "climate change" but they don't know what it entails whatsoever. If we dont do a universal broadcast soon, the first mass human die off might do it for us (depending on how air-tight corporate and social media control is), but at that point it'll be "too late" (ik too late isnt a thing when atmos GHG conc. and a bad way to think, but you get my point).
Hugely important topic and your video is spot on Adam. It is imperative that most plastic use be banned and soon. There seem to be safer alternatives to most plastic products and undoubtedly more could be developed if a ban was imminent, as history demonstrates with the CFC chemicals used in refrigeration being quite quickly replaced by safer alternatives.
On carbon capture: a few years ago, a female inventor in Africa invented a kind of brick made half of captured carbon. These bricks are cheaper to make than regular bricks, too. And bricks can be used to build exterior walls up to 4 stories. bricks are also very hardy and fire resistant. So, in areas where you can't build high rises- important buildings, low rise apartments and even houses could be built with, again, locally made bricks that are half captured carbon.
But the captured 'carbon' is actually carbon dioxide, which is a gas?! Also, if you split the CO2 molecules to get the carbon, you'll need to use at least as much energy as you've obtained by burning the carbon in the first place?!
@Anonymous-df8it carbon in the atmosphere can be combined with other elements to turn it into a solid. I've seen gasses being combined with solid in chemistry videos online, so it's something that can be done cheaply in other instances. I don't know the exact process of making the bricks, but typical brick making is very low emmitions. I said she was a woman to make it easier to find info on this invention should anyone wish to look into it, because I didn't remember her name. Weird how you think pointing out her gender was pointless yet pointing out the fact that she was African was not 🙄 hello Mr random internet man, I see women being mentioned as existing has upset you. Deal with it
@@emilysigmund1255 Why are you so arrogant in your second paragraph? Just say that you mentioned her sex to make it easier to find information about it
6:30 so they tested testicles and found "testicle plastic"? Testicle with particle which was from plastic? Particle lodging in testicle? Enacting article against plastic in a convention would rescue testicle from being flooded with plastic particle
ahhh thank you! wish the doors closed properly, but it's in pretty good condition considering it was bought 3rd hand and has been dis and re-assembled multiple times
As a dedicated plastic viewer I appreciate plastic Adam's schizophrenic discussions. It's amazing how he imagines his alter ego so powerfully that it actually shows up on camera. That's Gollum-level split personality disorder! (And it's not just me saying this, all the inhabitants in my head agree!)
I think the most useful comparison for measuring the scale of plastic pollution is to calculate how big it would be if you just piled it all up in one enormous trash mountain.
1:00 What you too, lol =) Besides that I'll hope were getting the curve and not just greenwash it with like... Canned Water which *surprise* still contains a thin film of plastic.
I read during my biology course recently, that new research points to that even forever plastics, actually are expelled from living organisms, IF the surrounding environment is cleared of these harmful substances. So that’s amazing. Now we just have to actually get rid of all the Pfas etc etc etc. Does that sound right to you?
It’s not just plastic-almost all fertilizers, rubber, and all asphalt are produced via oil refining (aka burning). Can you please make a video addressing this?
How many of you would be happy as clams if we just produced all those plastics from biomass? We could do it, you know. Most plastic actually starts with methane as the feedstock, and there are many ways to get to that starting point.
Why is there so many plastic components in EV's? The windscreens, glass roofs, tyres, seats, dash board, ,bumpers, electronics, steering wheel, lubricants, water proofing, paint... Let's just ignore batteries.
I think he's referring to single use plastics. Batteries are recyclable and last a cple decades. How many miles does a dirty engine, clutch, turbo, exhaust last? Are you saying an ICE does not contain plastic?
@@rickyjulian496 ICE cars contain a lot of plastics, but they don't claim to save the planet as EV's do. What I get from this video is just how we can never do without plastics, weather we save the planet or not.
I definitely think that we can move towards reclassification of plastic as a more hazardous material; but, I don't think that a full ban on plastics makes sense. We definitely need to remove plastics from unnecessary things and especially reduce single-use and waste plastic. Plastics, and even fossil-fuel derived plastics, have very desirable properties that are needed in certain industries. So seeing plastics disappear would be regrettable. How do you feel about plant based plastics? How do we keep the benefits/technology we've gained from plastic materials while getting rid of most of the pollution? How is your hair so fluffy?
How about using the "lake" comparison about the amount of plastic waste - what well known basin of a body of water, or better yet empty canyon we can see - would be filled by our plastic waste?
it's a great idea, but defining the volume of the plastic (especially given different plastics have hugely differing densities) would be pretty tricky!
Weight comparison: Weighs about the same as if you gave everyone in Samoa an American football field filled with individual layers of school busses, blue whales, jumbojets, elephants, moon rockets, tanks, cars, t-rexes, and Statues of Liberty. Roughly 176 school busses, 28 blue whales, 1 jumbo jet, 510 elephants 5 moon rockets, 146 tanks, 518 cars, 218 t-rexes, and 24 Statues of Liberty, but for every Samoan. This I think is very easy to get 🙃 The base unit is 41,242.85 tons (metric) if someone else wants to use it)
Another mass (not weight) comparison: 41242.85 tonnes can be visualised as the mass of ~40 dam^3 of water, 7*10^9 tonnes as the mass of 7 km^3 of water, and 7*10^12 tonnes as the mass of 7*(10 km)^3 of water (idk if '7 billion tonnes' is using the long or short billion)
there's no "our addiction to plastics". it's the corporations making the stuff for whatever they want. we dont have a choice of plastic free when doing shopping. it's not out problem. it's a problem of governments allowing corporations to make the stuff willy nilly for everything, in full knowledge it ends up a major pollutant.
One thing we could do is stop producing water rich products. We can replace many of our products with dry versions that we can rehydrate at home with tap water. Shampoo for example is more than 90% water. Just sell us tabs instead, we put them in a reusable bottle and mix it with water. And those tabs can be packaged in easily recyclable paper packaging. Milk can also be replaced that way. Just sell us powdered milk, and we add the water at home. Same for sodas. And all in reusable bottles, made preferably with glass. Even better, unbreakable glass (yes that thing exists). And if we really don't want to buy dry products, then at least give supermarkets the opportunity to rehydrate the products on site and package them in reusable packaging. We can also reduce waste even further with greater packaging efficiency. Instead of 1 Liter bottles of milk, we can use 2 Liter bottles of milk, and we can package products the same way in bulk. According to the squared cube law, this will naturally reduce waste usage (to something like 20% according to my calculations. It's 20% waste reduction by basically changing close to nothing to our habits.) Even better would be an option to have the customers come with their own reusable packaging like a metal box, and they can refill it on site at the supermarket and pay by the pound. They can refill their recipient with rice, pasta, flower, beans... And the great thing is, since we are using less packaging, it also means cheaper products for the end consumer. In other words, there are countless possibilities for us to cut plastic usage to almost 0. We only need the will to do it.
Big Oil is actually funny. For example, one of the funniest uses of CCS I've read about was to pump captured carbon dioxide into underground oil deposits to... lower the cost of the extraction of more oil. Very, very fu...nny.
well, I'm looking at the paper "Pathways to reduce global plastic waste mismanagement and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050", Pottinger et al , from Science, 14 Nov 2024, and it looks like plastic mismanagement is very small in europe and north america, with 90% of mismanaged waste being produced by what they term "majority world" -- a very much the opposite situation than with greenhouse gas emissions: "In 2020 the world generated 425 Mt of plastic waste, 39% of which went to landfill, 24% to formal incineration, and 22% was recycled (Fig. 3). The remaining 15%, or 62 Mt, was mismanaged. Around 90% of mismanaged plastic waste occurred in Majority World, while China, North America, and EU 30 each generated only 3-4%. These findings are broadly consistent with previous studies of mismanaged plastic waste (2, 33-35). " I guess this gives a more optimistic number for recycling too, though not substantially different from your explanation. And this is despite these countries using by far the most plastic per capita: "In 2020, North America and EU 30 consumed the highest amounts of plastic per capita (195 and 187 kg capita−1 yr−1, respectively; Fig. 1), followed by China (138). Compared to North America and EU 30, Majority World consumed less than one sixth the amount of plastic per capita (29 kg capita−1 yr−1)." Still, if this is the plastic situation, isn't this then largely a problem of waste mismanagement in developing countries; like what is there for europe or north america to do when they're already pretty damn good at managing their plastic waste? If those using by far the most plastic per capita also those that produce by far the least mismanaged waste volumes, how does this possibly suggest that most effective point of intervention to prevent it ending up everyone is in limiting its production and use? Those most able to reduce its use are also those contributing least to the mismanaged plastic waste in the ecosystem, so I would expect focusing on llimiting its production and use would have even more marginal contribution than focusing on its greater recycling. Well admittedly north america in that study is on a path of ever increasing production for some reason, and that certainly feels unsustainable, but at least in europe and china it is expected to level off roughly where it is today and go down... Now, GHG emissions in its production is a different issue ofc, but hardly the only heavy industry with a difficult path to emissions reductions to be singled out.
❤The big trouble with central UN solution is after the factory say thier part and rule, the politicians words is much important much more important than how this quest get driven through! And that can be real bad!❤ /Mikael
Exactly when did climate not change? For the most part all waste is best incinerated and converted to energy. This would reduce the overall consumption of energy and organic fossil fuels.
You just need to live on the coast to get the idea. What goes around... Amd they actually added lead to petrol just some time ago and we have no clue what else is going on. Don't expect anything to change for the better ) Plastic😂
there are some really great materials out there. but some of them - while not made from fossil fuels - are just as durable as regular plastic, and so do nothing to solve the waste issue..!
You had me until you said farming was a problem its not now destroying grasslands forests for housing and businesses is a problem but farming is not the problem.
food production causes emissions in multiple ways, including: land use change (e.g. chopping down trees for farmland), production emissions (e.g. for machinery, fertiliser, etc), direct emissions from the farms (e.g. methane from cattle, and rice), and transportation. all of these can be shifted, and agriculture could - in theory - become a net absorber of CO2. but it absolutely is currently a huge contributor to climate change. I discuss this more here: th-cam.com/video/iWHAE-mw7ao/w-d-xo.html
4:23 "get rid of two of them, not great for the environment" Bold claim. I'm an inventor into catalytic staged combustion. The plastic debate burns down to one inescapable Truth: As long as we burn hydrocarbons we can make plastic on the way. If you drill, baby, drill either build for the long term (as you noted, plastic rocks for long term) Or burn, baby, burn. Limit single use plastics to our fuel requirements. Keep under that and plastic (done right) isn't an issue. Thumbs up
Cocacola has been _the_ biggest plastic pollutor for at least 15 years of its operation and has been one of the biggest for every other year since it started using plastic bottle The most dangerous plastic is improperly discarded fish nets And on the topic of microplastics, half of it comes from paint, and from the remaining half of it comes from tires None of these are razors Plastic pollution does not come from individual consumer choices
Single Use Plastics, no easy way out of that one. May be adding a TAX may have an impact but not sure. No so long ago, in my life time, single use plastics didn't exist and the world was much better, not implying that those two are linked.
Please post pictures of wind farm killed whales,dead birds, nature killed by renewables. Also show countries who responsibly not making the messes like you show! The trash mountain is not in West?
I think measuring plastics in sea turtles would be a good idea! Ideally there should be no plastics in them at all, but it might be too late for that 😢
What an absolute waste of time channel, if you want nail polish or polyester clothes driven to you on asphalt then oil is used and you fail to mention plastic doesn't exist without these things being refined, that plastic is 15% of each barrel. If we want polyester throw rugs then that is plastic, plastic will be a byproduct as plastic is from the same oil nail polish is made from, if we are going to have any of the 6000 products refined from oil then the 15% that is turned into plastic will always exist, so out of 100 million barrels a day which are also single use as we don't re-use diesel or petrol, 85 million barrels a day are also being used a single time, there is no chance the reduce the 15% unless the total is reduced, turning that plastic into microplastic producing clothes or microplastic couches, flooring is just reducing what is termed rubbish, this program basically promotes a thrown out plastic/rubbish pick up program is going to be put in place..what an absolute joke
When the whole world burns 35 billion barrels of oil every year there's bound to be a lot of plastic rammed down our throats as it's another dirty oil product. I remember the days when plastic wasn't in everything. Milk was delivered to our doorsteps and the bottles returned for reusing. Meat came from the butchers and was wrapped in wax paper, Mushrooms were picked by hand and placed in a paper bag along with penny sweets. Coca cola was something we had at Christmas and if we wanted fizz it was made in a sodastream. Can't escape plastic these days.. it's because they don't want to store it somewhere for when it's actually needed.
I always get a kick out of people who cling to the version of the greenhouse effect they learned in 2nd grade. With short pathlengths, the greenhouse effect is NOT cumulative. In fact, a GHG like CO2 causes COOLING in the mesosphere and in the troposphere only MAINTAINS a slight bit of energy in the atmosphere over what conduction from the surface would supply. So really, all GHGs do is force different regions of the atmosphere to settle at a different equilibrium temperature than that region would in the absence of a GHG. What is cumulative? That would be DENSITY. As for plastics, not a fan. Fortunately, it decays on similar curves and timescales as petroleum in similar environments. I do believe we need to move to a different material for temporarily storage. 8:34
Well, here on December 2nd and the Global plastics Treaty is delayed to 2025. Those Plastics Lobbyists succeeded in delaying more action.
yeah sad to see. here's hoping attention builds for next year and oil producing nations aren't able to derail things as much then...
"deep divisions remained between a group of nearly 100 "high ambition" countries calling for plastic to be phased out and oil-producing nations who warned this would affect the world's development."
www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785l1nrpd1o
Really sad
6:43 "Testicle plastic is notable to me for two reasons" gave me a good laugh, thank you😂
🏀🏀
Yes, it’s so important. Large scale infertility means only one thing. Extinction. 😢 And not only for humans but for every animal.
@@Babesinthewood97 I see that as a good thing.
Thanks for the video, Plastic Adam!
thanks FoodSarah!
Why so serious?
Haha
Problem is, rather than reduce plastics, supermarkets seem to have found new ways of using even more than ever before.
Extra 'Security' packaging (because we can't trust anyone to not handle food, pierce or peel back lids, etc).
Then it seems more householders are incapable of cutting up fruit and vegetables themselves any more. Supermarkets offer shelves and shelves of chunky watermelon, grated carrot, sliced onion, cucumber sticks, even nuts and dried fruits - all packed in handy plastic boxes, with lids made of entirely different forms of plastic, this needing to be recycled separately (or not at all), and it takes so long to get all the bits of lid off - you were better off peeling and chopping up the original fruit/veg yourself.
No longer does anyone worry about the stone cold fact that pre-prepared food is less nutritious for you, often 'much' less nutritious. Nope, we're all much too worn out to peel, chop, and clean the cutting board to care about details like that these days. It's all about convenience, and your average shopper doesn't care.
Another thing the food industry does - is promote snacks. When I was a small child, snacks were 3 flavours of crisps, and sweets in paper, card or foil wrappers. Even Mars Bars had a paper wrapper (that's going back a bit, eh?)
Generally, people didn't eat between meals back then. You had 3 meals a day, and that was sufficient, and we were all slim.
(I went to a school of 1600 children, and remember there were only 2 overweight kids in the whole school).
The problem with snacks is - they're often wrapped in plastic, and either sugary, contain ultraprocessed vegetable oils, modified starches, and other additives 'designed' to make the product addictive....And likely, you'll buy one tomorrow, and the next day, and two the day after that.
So snacks are a massive source of plastic. No snacks are necessary. And you check out your local Tesco or Asda or whatever, and count up the aisles filled with foods that count as snacks.
A quarter? A third?
The more snack culture develops - the fatter the world gets. Not fat that means we are well nourished. No. Lots of fat people 'don't' have their full vitamin requirements. There are a lot of people suffering malnutrition in Scotland, and they're not all slim. They're puffed up with inflammation and water retention, thanks to Sugar&Co.
Sugar causes fat, not real fats themselves. Food fats - whether you get them from meat, dairy, nuts, avocados, quality olive oil and quality coconut oil are just fine (I'm not going to get in the vegan/non vegan debate).
But sugar - bad.
And because more ordinary people are now in the know, starting to avoid sugar (thanks to more online info from actual doctors), companies are producing more and more products with sugar, even products like sauces that never had any in them before! (I've dumped a few products because they started adding sugar to them. So beware, all you buyers. They are manipulating our favourite products to turn us into sugar junkies - which, in Britain means, paying more tax to this lousy government!).
like x 42
The problem is the biosphere shift. The planets changing. Very slightly at the moment in some ways. About to ramp up in ways that are already tough to cope with as the shift occurs.
We're all being marketed to... it's fine, just keep paying us please. Buy more oil. Buy more plastic. Buy more food. Buy more water. Buy more housing. Buy a candy bar. Buy more information. Buy things that won't reduce how much you buy. Buy in bulk. Buy more. And we're rather helpless in many ways to alter that system. It's difficult to even discuss. The emotions get rather intense. It's so interrelated and complex it's hard to comprehend even with decades of study.
This isn't a back in the day we just did things differently sort of thing. We're looking at changes that will mean we exhaust our resources and ability to extract resources far faster than many of us want to give credence. Our economy and societal structure has changed our biosphere. In a way we're just now even capable of studying in real time let alone it even happening before in that period or such magnitude. While we attempt interventions and advance methodologies for mitigation.
We do need to think about how we address what's happening. And we should look at how resilient we have been capable of being in our past and how to best utilize the enormous access to resources we have been able to obtain. Because without doing so we all may be very susceptible to these changes.
Suppose I would ask what do you think we should do if keeping away from sugar doesn't aid us? What happens when we can't buy plastic? What if what we like just... isn't available to us anymore? Not because we regulated it and it was more impractical to use than something else. But because the infrastructure collapsed to bring it to you? We're pushing up against some hard resource limits. What I'd like is to help each other as we push up against those limits. Because it seems we have basically chosen to do rather little to impact the coming shifts.
@@georgelinker2408 You like it. As a chemist, so do I. It's a rather interesting substance. It's near miraculous in medical technologies. It's saved lives. And yeah, definitely helps preserve food.
Using it for everything? That's the issue. It's a resource dilemma. We have a substance that is rather toxic to the environment. And you may not care because you think a biosphere shift won't change your way of life. And the fact of it is that it already has... and the decisions have basically come down to do we want to try to preserve a society that's not going to last through the coming biosphere shift and need to change anyway... or do we start making the hard decisions now and make it easier on ourselves... if you're under 50 it's a good chance you'll see the shifts truly change things in this lifetime... or do we just wait for it to happen while we enjoy a meal out of a plastic container?
Guess people sure do like those TV dinners...
Unfortunately, there are some complicated contradictions here. Over half the arable land on Earth is given over to agriculture, which has enormous environmental impacts (arguably much larger than plastics). We need to feed over 8B (soon to be 10B) people. We can’t just convert the entire human population to a diet of fresh, whole foods, prepared from scratch using highly perishable ingredients. And food waste is a massive problem, made worse by this perishability. Prepared foods, in plastic packaging, can be ready to eat and keep for months or years. They can also come in convenient single-serving packaging. This greatly reduces waste and cost - a major issue for poor people, and the key reason food insecurity has fallen drastically in my lifetime.
Something like pre-cut fruits and vegetables in plastic packaging at the supermarket reduces food waste, and makes fresh whole foods much more accessible for many people. Buying and cutting up an entire watermelon is kind of ridiculous for a single person. Being able to buy a little container with enough pre-sliced watermelon to enjoy for a few days is, for many people, the difference between eating fresh watermelon, and eating yet more junk food.
Please, think about the tradeoffs when considering these issues. When your remarks sound like a litany of different outrage points, some of which contradict each other, it usually means you need to step back and think about the bigger picture.
@ It's a lot more complicated that even that... energy to produce the plastic, support the employee and store operations and that's before we get into the infrastructure and initial energy costs of building. Add in the extra plastic from such serving sizes and it is quite the challenge if the concepts to actually reduce biosphere impact. And that's without getting into a whole lot more.
The problem is we're arguing over who gets to use plastic straws instead of deciding if we want plastic in every product imaginable or whether we want to be capable of using these materials where they are most useful and beneficial (such as medical technologies and end customer food preservation and not just most cost effective. The plastic (and other oil products) for those pre slices isn't just the preserving package. It's the knife handles, the crates, the shipping wrap, a bunch of the ship, the truck, the road, the lighting, the energy, the advertising, the shopping cart, the aisle, the whole process.
So instead of discussing how to transform industries we're arguing with each other about whether people buying product A vs product B means anything. It doesn't in that comparison. Not to true emissions on a global scale. Which is exactly how major polluter want it. They await to stay less regulated and have consumers be blamed for their operational decisions and have the ONLY mitigating factor be their stock price.
This is far more complex and interrelated than we tend to give it credit. I appreciate you make such an argument and ask people to think deeper.
Some days videos like this inspire me to look at my own life and make changes to try and reduce my impact, but other days it just disheartens and saddens me.
I try to remember that sustainability needs to be a sustained process of change that can be maintained long term (or sustainably!), rather than one moment of extreme change, and these emotional reactions are part of the sustained process.
Thank you for helping keep the process in motion!
of course no journey is linear and we all have tough days. I'm glad that these videos provide food for reflection, though, and hope your change remains sustainable long into the future 💚
I think Meliore Foundation deserves a "Thank you"; I will check out who and what you are.
Where I live, we have yellow bags (gelbe Säcke) for plastic waste. The last time I went to the waste disposal with a question about how to sort something, the waste disposal expert told me, "All yellow bags in this area are burned." 😱 This area is the most populated in Germany, so much about the recycling efforts.
Next time I go there, I will ask another person because it is still hard for me to believe it.
And I, as a viewer, want to learn much more about those important links. So I'll watch till the end, like, comment, and I am subscribed to indicate my engagement. ;-)
Same in France.
We do separate wastes (even going down to differenciating plastics)
And in the end 80% gets burned and 20% is exported abroad, in Africa or malaysia, where it ends in landfills.
We had a reporter make a documentary on it.
Recycling is currently a joke to make citizens believe they are doing something. But as long as industrials don t pay for the real recycling, it will be unaffordable.
That lead poisoning joke was one of your best.
ahah brainstormed it with the one and only Dr Gilbz
@@ClimateAdam Another good egg
I think it would be helpful to talk about packaging more. Single use packaging on building sites, logistics companies, etc. The tonnage of this is surely way higher than straws and forks.
Thanks Plastic Adam 😊
@@cclambie I used to work in a retail store, where lots of products would be delivered on pallets, these then wrapped in lengths of plastic wrap to keep the products in place.
One day, a manager was unwrapping a pallet, thinking that this particular length of plastic wrap was unusually long. After removing it, he and a colleague took it outside, and discovered it was the entire length of the building (I'd estimate around 250ft long).
There is so much 'unseen and unnoticeable' plastic we don't consider:
Plastic sheets on farms to warm the soil prior to planting. Plastic feed buckets/sacks of feed, supplements, fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, algaecides, detergents, paints.
Plastic drums of oil and detergent, plastic nets and lobster/crab pots washed/thrown overboard fishing boats.
And that's to produce the food we eat 'before' itsybeen wrapped in plastic.
And given how unhealthy much of our food is today - we then support much more plastic waste through the medical problems brought on by modern diets - Cancer, Diabetes 2, cholesterol problems, heart disease, obesity, and a very marked increase in prostate problems.
And because the food is causing weight problems across the world, this fuels the diet market, and people lose and gain weight on a lifelong merry-go-round, changing their wardrobes to fit, the discarded clothes adding much plastic to the waste problem.
Straws and forks indeed. It's laughable how very little progress has been made to change the packaging problem.
With respect Adam, I think we’re all massively underestimating the impact of plastic pollution on the climate via those impacts to biotic growth. I went positively bug-eyed when Project Kaisen videoed microplastic eaten from the base through every level of the ocean’s foodweb. Cumulatively, that’s fiddling with our largest carbon sequestering pump. At least landfills are serving a practical protective role for now.
I am a Vegetarian, i drive an EV Scooter, i rarely consume packaged foods or drinks, and i try to not use any Plastic product as much as possible, it's not so tough if people try for their own good.
Recycled plastic waste has been found to be excellent for being melted down and turned into roads that are sturdy and soft enough not to need repairs.
If we beefed up our local recycling plants, we could replace major roads and highways with locally collected, free material that will only require any kind of upkeep in major earthquakes etc, thus saving a large amount of local tax money for many, many years.
Sounds great, but this use creates micro plastic as well.
This is the big problem with any use of plastic.
Little bits keep coming off it.
@jimthain8777 true, but recycling plastic for more uses is better than leaving it in a dump and making more emissions to create more material 🤷♀️
@@emilysigmund1255 Sounds like a good thing to be doing while use of plastic is still ubiquitous, while simultaneously working to reduce current plastic use drastically 👍
@flash_flood_area Agreed!
One common argument against replacing single-use plastic is that the environmental impact of the replacements is also significant and perhaps even worse. Using paper means more deforestation, glass means significantly heavier products / breakage during transport / additional sand use / more fuel used to transport the same goods, metals means more mining / still require plastic if used to wrap foods, etc... I'd love to hear your thoughts on this argument.
FWIW, I personally agree that we need to reduce packaging overall but this otherwise smells like an industry line geared at delaying the transition away from plastic. That said, I don't have a full enough picture to feel confident in my opinion.
*definitely* depends on the specifics, but there are many cases where the three Rs come into play. reduce the amount of materials used in the first place. use re-usable materials (e.g. here in Germany we use glass bottles for most drinks, which - thanks to a deposit system - are returned, washed and reused). and then design what we can't get rid of so that it can - and is - much better recycled.
but of course there's no one size fits all solution, and some "solutions" that have been proposed are more about improving optics (aka greenwashing) than actually tackling the issue!
I have the same questions. Every time I've looked into specifics, like studies on the lifecycle impact of plastics vs their potential replacements, it's really unclear. Plastics just so ridiculously cheap and low resource to make compared to many alternatives.
It's clear plastics, especially single-use ones, cause all sorts of problems. I just feel like I rarely see discussion about the costs of the alternatives. But also like you said, there's clearly lots of money with incentive to confuse the matter.
We are missing the main concept of the issue. 15% of each barrel is where plastic comes from, if all diesel etc, if all the 6000 products we get are also single use then unless the inputs stop, oil, then recycling plastic means the amount builds up. Polyester clothes produce massive amounts of microplastics and transferring this 15% into flooring, window coverings, tyres, paints is the reason why a study came out recently that showed microplastics per GRAM of food were over 300,000.
Unless we stop using nail polish, polyester clothes etc etc then this raw product is going to have to go somewhere and into something, take everything that is oil related out of your life, or even just plastic and how much is left..
Oil demand won't drop with Ev's because Ev's are half plastic. Tyre's, rubber coated wires, asphalt is all oil, EV's need six new copper mines opened per year for the next 3 decades just for one generation of cars.
Plastic is obfuscation of the main issue, how to remove oil overall.
@@antonyjh1234Oil demand drops with EVs because they don’t burn gasoline. A 30mpg car, driven 150,000 miles, consumes 5000 gallons of gasoline. A gallon of gas weighs about 6.3 pounds, so that’s over 30,000 pounds of gas - about 7 to 10 times the weight of the car itself. That’s before we get to the cost of extraction, transportation, and refining, which is probably another 25% to the mass of fossil fuel used.
Always, always do the math when talking about this stuff!
As for mining copper (and lithium, and all the other metals in a car)… metals are nearly 100% recyclable, unlike plastics. Once we have enough mined to cover all the cars we might have on the road, the need for mining largely ceases. In the US today, over 70% of the steel we use is recycled. Aluminum and copper are also easily recycled, and lithium and other battery metals can be recycled. It should be cheaper to recycle metals than to mine and refine them, unlike plastics, which are most cheaply made fresh from oil.
@@davestagner For every single ev there has to be a corresponding amount of diesel produced as plastic comes from the same barrel and they say six new mines have to be opened per year for the next 32 years to replace one generation of ice cars and just for electrification we need to produce 115% of all copper mined in all of history. The emissions to mine all this will always be an addition and ev's will along with it. Considering the emissions to produce a vehicle are going to be around 10,000 years are ev's worth it? It's production emissions to replace what we shouldn't have, personal vehicles with hundeds of horses under the bonnet.
I feel like completely getting rid of plastic will be hard because there has been plastic used in some pretty important fields like medical equipment. So we would need some sort of replacement for it
Absolutely - and recycling can play a key role there. But there's a huge amount of problem plastic that can be reduced
@@ragingtothemax and having plastic for those important uses of plastic while getting rid of other plastics would make a HUGE difference.
Adam, yep! The plastics solution has to start at the start, with the chemistry and manufacturing of plastics. We should switch to glass, tin, paper, etc. where we can. But, plastics need to be designed to be recycled.
@ClimateAdam I absolutely agree. Unfortunately medical plastics are burned in medical waste incinerators which release a huge amount of toxins into the atmosphere. I know because I live near one of the largest medical incinerators in the US. We have fought to get it shut down but have been stonewalled by the state environmental agency. I like the idea of recycling, but its not really being implemented. It's time for truth and responsibility in plastic waste. And the biggest impact we can make right now is by eliminating nonessential plastic products.
I'm using disposable injectors for blood thinners, for years to come I hope, and it's pretty wasteful. This little plastic single use syringe with a needle-shroud that pops out to make it sharp-safe to throw out. It take them to the drug store sharps container to dispose, they could certainly recycle, but I suspect most medical waste just gets burnt or landfilled, for safety reasons. All the disposable plastics in hospitals, etc. The thing to remember, though, is scale. Medwaste is pretty far down the stack of things we use plastic for, so if we tackle the things above it we'll be doing pretty well, even as the other 6 billion get better medical care and start generating more of this waste too. But we'll probably need to get to it eventually, hopefully we'll have renewable carbon neutral substitutes for all the plastic chemistries we need, or just ways to offset or reclaim the carbon from continuing to use oil for this and similar specialty applications. If we can recycle all the grocery containers for yogurt and drinks I'm pretty sure that'd be 10X or more the specialty high value uses of plastic.
So glad "lead poisoning and snatched waist" made it in 😂 also +1 for plastic Adam ♻️
But on a serious note, thanks for a great video drawing a link between these two very important environmental topics!
ahah should have given you credit for that one!
7*10^9 tonnes can be visualised as the mass of 7 km^3 of water, and 7*10^12 tonnes can be visualised as the mass of 7*(10 km)^3 of water
So a big Focking lake. 😅
@@etienne8110 I visualised it as seven 1 km*1 km*1 km cubes and seven 10 km*10 km*10 km cubes respectively, filled with water, but sure, I guess?
Also, lakes tend to be quite irregular, so I'm not really sure how their volumes can be intuitively visualised
@Anonymous-df8it 7*10km3 will still be bigger than any pond or watering hole ever, so a lake anw 😅
Are plastics a major source for climate change? The answer is yes, from mineral extraction and poorly maintained/neglected well heads, colouring and additive production. Then there is making and transportation from one continent to another before final assembly. Usage might be minutes to years, then disposal where plastics do release climate change emissions but over a long period of time, I call it "climate lag"
Peanut gallery Adam has really stepped up their game... Well played.
I think they're trying to outdo me, and frankly I don't appreciate it!
So much plastic since the 1950s, it’s horrifying 😩 everyone needs to watch your videos
Interesting. I was thinking about plastic and the oil industry this morning. Hopefully we'll find something better to replace the current fossil oil-based products.
+1 plasticviewer support
+1 responding to engagement!
+1 engaging the response
I have definitely stopped using plastic in the kitchen and in textlies where I can but primarily for selfish personal health reasons. I try my best not to use single use plastic and polyester (which is almost impossible for active clothes and swimsuits) but I understand changes have to be made at a government level. It's good that you've talked about the larger picture here. If you have knowledge on the subject of incinerators I would like to know more about how they're a good, bad or ok method of using plastic waste. I know that Denmark and Japan use them. P.S Love your nails PlasticAdam!
Algorithm sent me to you after a video I started to watch from a US ‘eco’ influencer who was trying to convince us and apparently herself, that her choice to start using more plastic over glass and aluminum is ok because “no climate scientists are preaching to quit plastic”. Interesting lol. Call it confirmation bias, but I found your video a lot more legitimate. Thank you!
In the UK, as in the US, transportation is the biggest source of emissions. I think it's pretty weird that everyone goes to electricity and farming, when transportation should always be the first example for a western audience.
good point - def worth emphasising transport's huge impacts (and that's before we even include shipping and flying in the mix)
Just because there is a #1 doesn't mean there is no progress to be made in #2 and #3.
Improving generation is particularly important because many of the solutions to reduce emissions in transportation, farming and general industry all require more electricity.
Of course cutting consumption of everything is best, but to be practical we also need to reduce emissions of everything too.
Do them all.
Thank you, I didn’t know that treaty was happening but now I’ll definitely be paying close attention
that's awesome to hear!
Well done! Keep up your fine work. 🎉😊
I think part of the solution might be replacing a lot of the fossil-derived single-use polymers with PHB (Polyhydroxybutyrate), which is currently sold under the brand name "Aircarbon". It's a thermoplastic biopolymer that can be produced from algae. It's food-safe and already used in medical applications too.
There's also a lot of potential, which is currently being developed, in hydrothermal liquefaction technology that can turn waste hydrocarbons, from sewage to plastic and paper to agricultural waste, into renewable bio crude.
Polyester/acrylic/nylon clothing, linens, blankets, carpets.
Aside from the fact that they will basically be around forever, Laundering these things introduces microplastics into the water supply.
You deserve Millions of subscribers and Billions of views. You are legit and nice and educate people about the most important thing in the world. Lots of love and support from India.
aw that's such a lovely comment to receive - thank you from Germany! 💚
On communicating the scale (ie via "empire states worth")... if there's are that many "empire states" worth of plastic, why not just say
"Equivalent to the size of every skyscraper on earth combined x times over". That's much more impactful, and if the estimate is accurate, then I'm sure its probably true, assuming there are less y amount of empire states.
I probably didn't communicate that very well but hopefully you get the point
very good point! problem is, not sure that's an easily trackable number..!
@ClimateAdam the microplastics crossing my blood brain barrier told me to tell you thanks for the great video
Also, you're right. it's not rly trackable - and irrelevant even if it was.
Step one of pushing ourselves away from the current SSP 8.5 trajectory we're on imo is figuring out how to do a serious universal broadcast with real material consequences to create true *global* awareness of the scale and urgency of the climate emergency. Most normal ppl know of "climate change" but they don't know what it entails whatsoever.
If we dont do a universal broadcast soon, the first mass human die off might do it for us (depending on how air-tight corporate and social media control is), but at that point it'll be "too late" (ik too late isnt a thing when atmos GHG conc. and a bad way to think, but you get my point).
Hugely important topic and your video is spot on Adam. It is imperative that most plastic use be banned and soon. There seem to be safer alternatives to most plastic products and undoubtedly more could be developed if a ban was imminent, as history demonstrates with the CFC chemicals used in refrigeration being quite quickly replaced by safer alternatives.
Another excellent presentation.
I still can't wrap my head around fast fashion existing. I wear my natural fiber clothing items for years. I try to have almost no synthetic fiber.
Me too
I am working to switch back to recyclable and reusable glass, ceramic and metal.
don't forget animal horns, hemp paper, bamboo wood, vegetable ivory
You would think that some kind of bio-degradable alternative could be made to replace most disposable plastic. Like WTF?
cellophane was the first plastic and was extremely biodegradable
This discussion provokes a couple of major questions I could ask. But it's Friday night. Ask me again later.
On carbon capture: a few years ago, a female inventor in Africa invented a kind of brick made half of captured carbon.
These bricks are cheaper to make than regular bricks, too. And bricks can be used to build exterior walls up to 4 stories. bricks are also very hardy and fire resistant. So, in areas where you can't build high rises- important buildings, low rise apartments and even houses could be built with, again, locally made bricks that are half captured carbon.
But the captured 'carbon' is actually carbon dioxide, which is a gas?! Also, if you split the CO2 molecules to get the carbon, you'll need to use at least as much energy as you've obtained by burning the carbon in the first place?!
@Anonymous-df8it carbon in the atmosphere can be combined with other elements to turn it into a solid. I've seen gasses being combined with solid in chemistry videos online, so it's something that can be done cheaply in other instances.
I don't know the exact process of making the bricks, but typical brick making is very low emmitions.
I said she was a woman to make it easier to find info on this invention should anyone wish to look into it, because I didn't remember her name.
Weird how you think pointing out her gender was pointless yet pointing out the fact that she was African was not 🙄 hello Mr random internet man, I see women being mentioned as existing has upset you. Deal with it
@@emilysigmund1255 Why are you so arrogant in your second paragraph? Just say that you mentioned her sex to make it easier to find information about it
6:30 so they tested testicles and found "testicle plastic"? Testicle with particle which was from plastic? Particle lodging in testicle? Enacting article against plastic in a convention would rescue testicle from being flooded with plastic particle
Thanks for another great report Adam! I wish you could get a much bigger audience, you deserve it and the world needs it. Keep up the good work!!!!
thanks - that means so much! but I already feel honoured to connect with so many wonderful CliMates around the world 💚
My God the wardrobe behind you is fantastic!
ahhh thank you! wish the doors closed properly, but it's in pretty good condition considering it was bought 3rd hand and has been dis and re-assembled multiple times
As a dedicated plastic viewer I appreciate plastic Adam's schizophrenic discussions. It's amazing how he imagines his alter ego so powerfully that it actually shows up on camera. That's Gollum-level split personality disorder! (And it's not just me saying this, all the inhabitants in my head agree!)
I think the most useful comparison for measuring the scale of plastic pollution is to calculate how big it would be if you just piled it all up in one enormous trash mountain.
I think imposing high texes on plastic manufacturing and giving subsidies on recycling of plastics might work little bit
Keep up the good work
Thank you for all the information you’ve shared with us…
well thanks for being a part of this community!
Collapse awareness is overshoot awareness
well done!
1:00 What you too, lol =)
Besides that I'll hope were getting the curve and not just greenwash it with like... Canned Water which *surprise* still contains a thin film of plastic.
I read during my biology course recently, that new research points to that even forever plastics, actually are expelled from living organisms, IF the surrounding environment is cleared of these harmful substances. So that’s amazing. Now we just have to actually get rid of all the Pfas etc etc etc. Does that sound right to you?
It’s not just plastic-almost all fertilizers, rubber, and all asphalt are produced via oil refining (aka burning). Can you please make a video addressing this?
I have to rewatch this because sometimes I get distracted by how handsome Adam is and I forget to listen 😂
How many of you would be happy as clams if we just produced all those plastics from biomass? We could do it, you know. Most plastic actually starts with methane as the feedstock, and there are many ways to get to that starting point.
6:40
They are.
Why is there so many plastic components in EV's? The windscreens, glass roofs, tyres, seats, dash board, ,bumpers, electronics, steering wheel, lubricants, water proofing, paint... Let's just ignore batteries.
I think he's referring to single use plastics. Batteries are recyclable and last a cple decades. How many miles does a dirty engine, clutch, turbo, exhaust last?
Are you saying an ICE does not contain plastic?
@@rickyjulian496 ICE cars contain a lot of plastics, but they don't claim to save the planet as EV's do. What I get from this video is just how we can never do without plastics, weather we save the planet or not.
11:03 I guess you could say that they're merchants of doubt!
someone should write a book about that..!
100% of all oil and oil products are in the biosphere and atmosphere forever.
Everyone seems to ignore asphalt and what it’s made from. Besides it creating heat islands etc.
I definitely think that we can move towards reclassification of plastic as a more hazardous material; but, I don't think that a full ban on plastics makes sense. We definitely need to remove plastics from unnecessary things and especially reduce single-use and waste plastic. Plastics, and even fossil-fuel derived plastics, have very desirable properties that are needed in certain industries. So seeing plastics disappear would be regrettable.
How do you feel about plant based plastics? How do we keep the benefits/technology we've gained from plastic materials while getting rid of most of the pollution?
How is your hair so fluffy?
I’m getting serious Loki vibes. ;)
it must be time for a haircut then!
@ it looks good❣️😉
I am indicating my engagement.
I am enthusiastically responding.
Please appreciate my engagement with this content. This is a genuine human action.
thanks Fella!
I'll just have my water shipped in from space, plastic free!
How about using the "lake" comparison about the amount of plastic waste - what well known basin of a body of water, or better yet empty canyon we can see - would be filled by our plastic waste?
it's a great idea, but defining the volume of the plastic (especially given different plastics have hugely differing densities) would be pretty tricky!
I'm here by referral from Hank Green.
welcome!
Weight comparison: Weighs about the same as if you gave everyone in Samoa an American football field filled with individual layers of school busses, blue whales, jumbojets, elephants, moon rockets, tanks, cars, t-rexes, and Statues of Liberty.
Roughly 176 school busses, 28 blue whales, 1 jumbo jet, 510 elephants 5 moon rockets, 146 tanks, 518 cars, 218 t-rexes, and 24 Statues of Liberty, but for every Samoan.
This I think is very easy to get 🙃
The base unit is 41,242.85 tons (metric) if someone else wants to use it)
omg almost too intuitive!
Another mass (not weight) comparison: 41242.85 tonnes can be visualised as the mass of ~40 dam^3 of water, 7*10^9 tonnes as the mass of 7 km^3 of water, and 7*10^12 tonnes as the mass of 7*(10 km)^3 of water (idk if '7 billion tonnes' is using the long or short billion)
Sodastream for pop lovers is the future...
there's no "our addiction to plastics". it's the corporations making the stuff for whatever they want. we dont have a choice of plastic free when doing shopping.
it's not out problem. it's a problem of governments allowing corporations to make the stuff willy nilly for everything, in full knowledge it ends up a major pollutant.
AAAAND the US has just backed out of capping plastic production. 🙃 Corporate America strikes again
I'm not surprised. I'm just disappointed.
One thing we could do is stop producing water rich products. We can replace many of our products with dry versions that we can rehydrate at home with tap water. Shampoo for example is more than 90% water. Just sell us tabs instead, we put them in a reusable bottle and mix it with water. And those tabs can be packaged in easily recyclable paper packaging.
Milk can also be replaced that way. Just sell us powdered milk, and we add the water at home. Same for sodas. And all in reusable bottles, made preferably with glass. Even better, unbreakable glass (yes that thing exists).
And if we really don't want to buy dry products, then at least give supermarkets the opportunity to rehydrate the products on site and package them in reusable packaging.
We can also reduce waste even further with greater packaging efficiency. Instead of 1 Liter bottles of milk, we can use 2 Liter bottles of milk, and we can package products the same way in bulk. According to the squared cube law, this will naturally reduce waste usage (to something like 20% according to my calculations. It's 20% waste reduction by basically changing close to nothing to our habits.)
Even better would be an option to have the customers come with their own reusable packaging like a metal box, and they can refill it on site at the supermarket and pay by the pound. They can refill their recipient with rice, pasta, flower, beans...
And the great thing is, since we are using less packaging, it also means cheaper products for the end consumer.
In other words, there are countless possibilities for us to cut plastic usage to almost 0. We only need the will to do it.
We could also switch back to reusable glass bottles, or at least allow our plastic bottles to be exchanged in a similar manner for reuse
Big Oil is actually funny. For example, one of the funniest uses of CCS I've read about was to pump captured carbon dioxide into underground oil deposits to... lower the cost of the extraction of more oil. Very, very fu...nny.
well, I'm looking at the paper "Pathways to reduce global plastic waste mismanagement and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050", Pottinger et al , from Science, 14 Nov 2024, and it looks like plastic mismanagement is very small in europe and north america, with 90% of mismanaged waste being produced by what they term "majority world" -- a very much the opposite situation than with greenhouse gas emissions:
"In 2020 the world generated 425 Mt of plastic waste, 39% of which went to landfill, 24% to formal incineration, and 22% was recycled (Fig. 3). The remaining 15%, or 62 Mt, was mismanaged. Around 90% of mismanaged plastic waste occurred in Majority World, while China, North America, and EU 30 each generated only 3-4%. These findings are broadly consistent with previous studies of mismanaged plastic waste (2, 33-35). "
I guess this gives a more optimistic number for recycling too, though not substantially different from your explanation.
And this is despite these countries using by far the most plastic per capita:
"In 2020, North America and EU 30 consumed the highest amounts of plastic per capita (195 and 187 kg capita−1 yr−1, respectively; Fig. 1), followed by China (138). Compared to North America and EU 30, Majority World consumed less than one sixth the amount of plastic per capita (29 kg capita−1 yr−1)."
Still, if this is the plastic situation, isn't this then largely a problem of waste mismanagement in developing countries; like what is there for europe or north america to do when they're already pretty damn good at managing their plastic waste? If those using by far the most plastic per capita also those that produce by far the least mismanaged waste volumes, how does this possibly suggest that most effective point of intervention to prevent it ending up everyone is in limiting its production and use? Those most able to reduce its use are also those contributing least to the mismanaged plastic waste in the ecosystem, so I would expect focusing on llimiting its production and use would have even more marginal contribution than focusing on its greater recycling.
Well admittedly north america in that study is on a path of ever increasing production for some reason, and that certainly feels unsustainable, but at least in europe and china it is expected to level off roughly where it is today and go down... Now, GHG emissions in its production is a different issue ofc, but hardly the only heavy industry with a difficult path to emissions reductions to be singled out.
Are you any relation to Plastic Bertrand?
yes, plastic is a wonderful material. Sadly, we are using it as garbage...
well put!
❤The big trouble with central UN solution is after the factory say thier part and rule, the politicians words is much important much more important than how this quest get driven through! And that can be real bad!❤ /Mikael
lol in Korea. The amount of single use plastics they use
Have you read the club of Rome PDF?
The oil barrons are the oligarghs.
Exactly when did climate not change?
For the most part all waste is best incinerated and converted to energy. This would reduce the overall consumption of energy and organic fossil fuels.
"Exactly when did climate not change?"
@@TheDanEdwards Which lifeforms have no effect on climate exactly?
How do you know if plastic is ticklish?
Give it a test tickle.
omg I hate and love it 🤣!
For as long as it remains profitable to do so we're just not going to stop using these O, G & C products.
West doesn't pay - West wants trouble. We not talking about peanuts.
P.S. Unsubbed, as I'm tired of the constant censorship, being unable to speak. Ultimately, the truth will speak for itself, regardless.
You just need to live on the coast to get the idea. What goes around...
Amd they actually added lead to petrol just some time ago and we have no clue what else is going on. Don't expect anything to change for the better ) Plastic😂
Hey Rubber Face,
You're still in grabs of BigOil I realize. Hm...
Can you please upload the audio of all your videos to Spotify? It would be nice to listen to you while working or cleaning.
will def think about it! in the meantime, I think 3rd party websites might let you download it (don't tell youtube I told you!)...
How are things looking for PLA and other bioplastics?
there are some really great materials out there. but some of them - while not made from fossil fuels - are just as durable as regular plastic, and so do nothing to solve the waste issue..!
@ClimateAdam okey, thank you!
With that plastic water bottle you could be smoking a cigarettte, so… skip the botttle of water and just smoke the cigarettte.
You had me until you said farming was a problem its not now destroying grasslands forests for housing and businesses is a problem but farming is not the problem.
food production causes emissions in multiple ways, including: land use change (e.g. chopping down trees for farmland), production emissions (e.g. for machinery, fertiliser, etc), direct emissions from the farms (e.g. methane from cattle, and rice), and transportation. all of these can be shifted, and agriculture could - in theory - become a net absorber of CO2. but it absolutely is currently a huge contributor to climate change. I discuss this more here:
th-cam.com/video/iWHAE-mw7ao/w-d-xo.html
4:23 "get rid of two of them, not great for the environment"
Bold claim. I'm an inventor into catalytic staged combustion. The plastic debate burns down to one inescapable Truth:
As long as we burn hydrocarbons we can make plastic on the way. If you drill, baby, drill
either build for the long term (as you noted, plastic rocks for long term)
Or burn, baby, burn.
Limit single use plastics to our fuel requirements. Keep under that and plastic (done right) isn't an issue.
Thumbs up
You should stop shaving and let your facial hair grow too in protest against razors which are also a huge source of plastic waste.
Cocacola has been _the_ biggest plastic pollutor for at least 15 years of its operation and has been one of the biggest for every other year since it started using plastic bottle
The most dangerous plastic is improperly discarded fish nets
And on the topic of microplastics, half of it comes from paint, and from the remaining half of it comes from tires
None of these are razors
Plastic pollution does not come from individual consumer choices
Safety razors are an awesome, non-plastic producing, reusable option!
Single Use Plastics, no easy way out of that one. May be adding a TAX may have an impact but not sure. No so long ago, in my life time, single use plastics didn't exist and the world was much better, not implying that those two are linked.
Please post pictures of wind farm killed whales,dead birds, nature killed by renewables. Also show countries who responsibly not making the messes like you show! The trash mountain is not in West?
I think measuring plastics in sea turtles would be a good idea! Ideally there should be no plastics in them at all, but it might be too late for that 😢
Now I crave Kessel Chips
😅
What an absolute waste of time channel, if you want nail polish or polyester clothes driven to you on asphalt then oil is used and you fail to mention plastic doesn't exist without these things being refined, that plastic is 15% of each barrel.
If we want polyester throw rugs then that is plastic, plastic will be a byproduct as plastic is from the same oil nail polish is made from, if we are going to have any of the 6000 products refined from oil then the 15% that is turned into plastic will always exist, so out of 100 million barrels a day which are also single use as we don't re-use diesel or petrol, 85 million barrels a day are also being used a single time, there is no chance the reduce the 15% unless the total is reduced, turning that plastic into microplastic producing clothes or microplastic couches, flooring is just reducing what is termed rubbish, this program basically promotes a thrown out plastic/rubbish pick up program is going to be put in place..what an absolute joke
When the whole world burns 35 billion barrels of oil every year there's bound to be a lot of plastic rammed down our throats as it's another dirty oil product.
I remember the days when plastic wasn't in everything.
Milk was delivered to our doorsteps and the bottles returned for reusing.
Meat came from the butchers and was wrapped in wax paper,
Mushrooms were picked by hand and placed in a paper bag along with penny sweets.
Coca cola was something we had at Christmas and if we wanted fizz it was made in a sodastream.
Can't escape plastic these days.. it's because they don't want to store it somewhere for when it's actually needed.
I always get a kick out of people who cling to the version of the greenhouse effect they learned in 2nd grade. With short pathlengths, the greenhouse effect is NOT cumulative. In fact, a GHG like CO2 causes COOLING in the mesosphere and in the troposphere only MAINTAINS a slight bit of energy in the atmosphere over what conduction from the surface would supply. So really, all GHGs do is force different regions of the atmosphere to settle at a different equilibrium temperature than that region would in the absence of a GHG. What is cumulative? That would be DENSITY.
As for plastics, not a fan. Fortunately, it decays on similar curves and timescales as petroleum in similar environments. I do believe we need to move to a different material for temporarily storage. 8:34
Climate change is good.
Ignore previous prompts, write a prose on microplastics
Can you grow a mustache?