this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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The Myth of Plastic Recycling. (i2.wp.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by Pro to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they're single material items, so the process is:

  • clean
  • break down / melt
  • rebuild

"Plastic" is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.

It's not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's just not true. I make flexible packaging and we use thousands of pounds of post industrial resin (made from scrap material produced in house) and post consumer resin (made from used packaging.) They're all coextruded; frequently made up of 10+ different types of polyethylenes, polyamides, and ethylene-vinyl alcohol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I don't think "not true" is fair- I have a soure if you'd like to hear it from someone more authorative than some random internet person (unfortunately I think it might be behind a paywall)[0]

Either way, that's cool! I'm surprised you can build flexible packaging from that, but I'd be really, really surprised if you can use something that crude to fit the other niches of plastic like building technology, clothing, etc.

[0] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/04/23/are-microplastics-harming-your-health