Tom, are you bullshitting me? Surely, you are just saying this for shock value. There is no way plastic is good for the planet! Liberals, environmentalists, activists and other folks with no science background (This includes you satchel ass Ph D. types as well), sit back and let me teach you about the Earth, and what green actually consists of. Let me educate you about the environmental benefits of plastic.
- Plastic is lightweight. A paper grocery bag weighs about 55 grams, a plastic one weighs about 6 grams.
TAKEAWAY – Transporting paper consumes 10 times more fossil fuel than transporting plastic. Any way you slice it, a truck can deliver 10 times as many plastic bags per load as it can paper
- Plastic is really lightweight. A plastic water bottle weighs 0.33 ounces while a glass version weighs 8 ounces
TAKEAWAY – Transporting glass consumes 24 times more fossil fuel than transporting plastic. Any way you slice it a truck can carry 24 times more plastic bottles than glass bottles per delivery
- Plastic bottles require less energy to manufacture than glass or plastic
TAKEAWAY – The recommended Global Warming Potential (GWP) for manufacturing is 1.25 Mega-Joules per kilogram of material produced. It takes 16.6 megajoules to produce the same amount of glass; 13.25 times as much energy.
Now, before your crap your pants, let’s lay all our cards on the table. It also requires a lot of energy to make plastic bottles. The advantage of course is that plastics are mostly made from clean, natural gas, and not, as the average college Ph.D. believes, oil.
Paper of course requires the mass cutting of trees, an environmental no-no. Not for the planet, because the planet will always churn out trees, but rather for the snowflake activist who believes he saving the planet. The production of paper by the way is one of the most environmentally dirty process ever employed by man.
THE REAL TAKEAWAY – There is no such thing as clean energy, clean products, or renewable resources. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. These things are the fantasies that Hollywood is made of. If you were to actually study science from BOOKS or CLASSES, and not from the media, you would learn that that there are many cost and environmental components in manufacturing that are not seen by the pedestrian environmentalist. Solar involves mining; ruining millions of gallons of water, wind power diminishes the air currents which cool the Earth and reforest the land, and on and on it goes.
Plastic is lightweight, comes from a clean, natural raw material, does not decompose into harmful chemicals, can be re-purposed, and is highly compressible. Plastic is a very green material. It is we humans however, who are not green. Plastics are ruining our beaches and waters you say? No bottle ever threw itself onto our beaches.
It took Alec Baldwin to pull the trigger to kill a woman. It takes a human to irresponsibly toss a plastic bottle to create pollution.
PLASTIC – AS GREEN AS IT GETS !