As the world strives to wean itself off fossil fuels, oil companies have been turning to plastic as the key to their future. Now even that's looking overly optimistic.
The global crackdown on plastic trash threatens to take a big chunk out of demand growth just as oil companies like Saudi Aramco sink billions into plastic and chemicals assets. Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc, Total SA and Exxon Mobil Corp. are all ramping up investments in the sector.
Renewed emphasis on recycling and the spread of local bans on some kinds of plastic products could cut petrochemical demand growth to one-third of its historical pace, to about 1.5% a year, said Paul Bjacek, a principal director at consulting firm Accenture Plc.
Maybe they can convince consumers to accept clamshell packaging for everything.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:16AM (22 children)
So the industry will still be making more money every year. What's the problem?
Don't count on consumers to be good stewards here. I am reducing and reusing plastic and I'm still seeing more of it coming in all the time. Most people probably don't care at all. Do they even notice 5-cent plastic bag charges?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:28AM (5 children)
What's the matter with you? Petrochemicals are a gift from god! He doesn't offer a second gift when you refuse the first.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:30AM (2 children)
I just want the bioplastics, or plastics intended for years of use (such as Sterilite containers).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:48AM (1 child)
Oy! Doesn't anybody remember anything [getyarn.io] anymore?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:21AM
string [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 06 2019, @02:31PM (1 child)
There is the whole Flood thing in the bible. Thus, the origination of all those petrochemicals. Decayed plant and animal matter. You're likely filling your car up with ancient human.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:00PM
Heh, we only use the freshest humans, premixed with leaded additives
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jasassin on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:41AM (6 children)
The Hy-Vee grocery store here gives a discount (something like five or ten cents I can't remember) per cloth bag you use to bag up your groceries. Every store should do that. I think it would make a big difference in wasted plastic bags, especially if they advertised it.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Funny) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:52AM (4 children)
But instead they do the reverse, and sell you a *for a better planet* shopping bag. And now, you have to buy extra bags for garbage.
It's all part of the Shopping Bag Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:31AM (3 children)
An estimate that I've seen was that unless you reused that "reusable bag" more than 30 times, it was more environmentally destructive than the single use plastic. This is clearly subject to a lot of variation, as different bags are considerably different, but the point here is that the "reusable bags sold by Lucky Supermarket (I didn't check the others) are so flimsy that they'd be luck to get five uses before collapsing while you were carrying them. They aren't the durable canvas that people used to use.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:32AM (1 child)
If you're going to go with a plastic-ish bag, "BAGGU" [baggu.com] is a good contender for durability and weight-bearing (albeit pricey). They also never seem to go on sale.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 07 2019, @12:32AM
Actually, as I write this, Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom's online both have sizable-discount limited-quantity sales on some of the uglier/plainer designs this week. I just bought some.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday June 06 2019, @09:17AM
Like either of those will ever happen. Having said that, I've returned a small pile of brown paper bags to my local beer shop a few times, so at least some of them are getting more than one use.
The spare plastic bags I keep in the side pocket of my rucksack have been there for a few years, and have been used a dozen or so times. There's nothing intrinsically demonic about plastic bags, as long as you're prepared to pay the same attention to their use as you would to brown paper bags or bags for life. "Doing your bit for the environment" most sensibly means "using the plastic bag 30 or so times, and when it's lost its integrity, disposing of in in the 'plastics only' recycling bin".
This is one of those religious green issues, where alas far-from-ideal idealistic woo-woo reigns supreme.
Oh, 173: https://fee.org/articles/banning-plastic-bags-isnt-just-bad-economics-its-bad-for-the-environment/
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by schad on Thursday June 06 2019, @12:22PM
Probably every store should do what Costco does, i.e., not provide any bags at all. All they have is a big pile of used cardboard boxes that the products in the store originally arrived in.
Some people bring reusable cloth bags. Coolers and collapsible wheeled carts are also options. But it seems from my experience that most people just use the cardboard boxes, which is probably the most environmentally-friendly solution.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 06 2019, @01:44AM (7 children)
Yeah,
as if growth can continue for ever.
Anyway, if the Saudi royal family wind up broke the world will be a better place. Not that they will, when they run out of oil they will just go and live in their Mayfair mansions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:36AM (6 children)
Unless, of course, that comes at the expense of the well being of many other people. Policies that harm one person need not help another.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:05PM (2 children)
You only have to check the usual cost/benefit ratio. All you need is a pocket calculator.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 07 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
I recall the cost/benefit ratio supposedly wasn't exciting for other examples of regime change.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday June 08 2019, @12:35AM
Wouldn't know about "exciting". It is merely the primary method of deciding whether to invade or not. It's like the riot index, you balance the "benefits" of austerity to the costs of the resulting property damage. Everything is done by the numbers. Perfectly natural and normal.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 06 2019, @09:12PM (2 children)
Policies that remove power from the House of Saud are likely to be a net benefit for everyone involved.
I don't see why anyone should have to live under an absolute monarch in 2019.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 07 2019, @01:53PM (1 child)
I see policies that removed (or could remove) bad people from power heavily criticized before - such as supporting the Arab Spring, invasion of Iraq which removed Saddam Hussein from power, the current sanctions against Iran, and current support for Venezuela opposition. I don't buy that there's likely to be a net benefit in that light.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Saturday June 08 2019, @07:54AM
You're right, when the US meddles they always screw things up.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday June 06 2019, @02:51PM
The problem is when you're not even sure whether it's worth trying.
For example, in an apartment building or condo complex, all residents trash and recyclables are centralized. If just one or two people toss trash into the recycling, then there's a chance that the entire recycling bin will be reclassified as trash and throw away instead of recycled.
So we have a situation very similar to vaccination. Unless everybody does it, it means nothing. And we all know there are more than enough morons to ruin it for everyone else... both for vaccinations as well as recycling.
And this doesn't get into the fraudulent recyclers that don't actually recycle and just ship it all off to Malaysia or China or Africa or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @02:11AM
Plastic is so, like, 60s. Dumb whipper-snappers.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Tokolosh on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:00AM (11 children)
We are supposed to be rational and scientific. Where is the evidence that plastics are worse than the alternatives? Because it appears that economics is telling us that plastic is fine.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:28AM (4 children)
Sure. Let's start with "if you care about sea turtles, some of which - the leatherbacks - are among the 'living fossils' - then plastic use and disposal is a direct threat to those species"
https://www.globalanimal.org/2013/09/26/sea-turtle-populations-plummet-due-to-plastic-pollution/ [globalanimal.org]
It's gotten worse since that study; one from this year found plastics in 100% of about 100 necropsies of bycatch turtles.
There's lots of other trivially accessible data. Look up the Sargasso Sea and so on.
Economic is showing us that water runs downhill, and that mercury-tainted water does too.
Shame that a 3-digit user like you is apparently a troll or a shill, because claiming "dur I don't believe plastics are impacting the environment without evidence" is ignoring media and scientific output of the last >40 years. Disappointing, and shameful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:19AM
But if you ban plastics, what will the turtles eat? Won't somebody please think of the turtles!
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:24AM (2 children)
So how does the leatherback get into landfills hundreds of miles away from any ocean? Just curious how that's supposed to work.
Meanwhile I bet we see far more plastic in the oceans from failed recycling efforts (such as the US and Europe shipping via water their waste plastic to the developing world in order to check that box).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @06:12AM (1 child)
Believe it or not, landfills sometimes slide into the sea. There's a particularly picturesque area in Bolivia where there's a big splash of colour on the shore of Lake Titicaca, and if you get close, it turns out it's a 100 year old midden that then got the last 50 years of trash piled on, and the latter trash is jam packed with colourful plastic, and the whole shebang slid down to the water's edge.
Then there's leeching, were eg. downstream water tables from older landfills will be unsafe for well water due to lead and mercury (and other stuff), and generally those flow out to the ocean over time (more for the hydrocarbons which float, but whatever).
Then there's birds. Did you know that seagulls love to pick up trash and move it? There was a hilarious article about some bald eagles doing the same in the NW USA.
I could go on.
> Meanwhile I bet we see far more plastic in the oceans from failed recycling efforts
Meanwhile I see you provide no evidence whatever for this idea. Cool idea! But you're bullshitting and looking stupid.
Your inability to imagine things (eaily imagined things!) doesn't make those things impossible, or untrue.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 07 2019, @02:27PM
And what evidence really needs to be presented to support the claim that the developed world ships a massive amounts of waste plastic elsewhere via boat? Well, there's the recent story [soylentnews.org] about US recycling so deeply impacted by China ending the receiving of US plastic waste (all shipped by boat BTW) that a bunch of urban recycling programs outright ended. That indicates both problems I claimed, that lots of plastics for recycling were being shipped by boat, which is a significant source of ocean-based plastic and then gets dumped in China or elsewhere in the developing world, which is another significant source of ocean-based plastic.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:28AM
not recyled [nationalgeographic.com]
then ends up in the ocean [wikipedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:33AM
wtf who upvoted this trash? parentposter literally was too lazy to google, and then said economics are proscriptive - which is, literally in the literal sense of the word literally, one of the arguments that was (is, apparently) used to justify slavery. Literally.
whoever upvoted - use some brain cells and stop polluting the discourse here by floating turds like this to where others will be exposed to the stench.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @09:19AM (1 child)
Economics also tells us that slavery is fine: Slave traders did make profits, or else they would have stopped that trade without being forced to by law. I hope you agree that slavery is not fine.
Economics is not the answer to everything.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:33AM
Given that law forced slaves to be slaves in the first place, what point are you really making?
I'd say rather that the economic success of free societies over those of slave societies (such as the Communist and Fascist societies of the 20th century) indicates that economics came to a different decision than you thought.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday June 06 2019, @02:54PM
According to economics, slavery is fine.
According to economics, Hitler did a great job.
If you rely on economics as a basis for moral code, health, survival, etc, you scare the living f__k out of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:09AM
Ivo, is that you?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @03:40AM (1 child)
Hipsters are willing to spend large sums on just about everything, so why not?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:14AM
I think a hostage situation is more appropriate for an oil company.
Hipsters must buy this oil or the Earth gets killed off!
(Score: 1) by sydbarrett74 on Thursday June 13 2019, @08:58AM
Glad the fucking fossil fuel companies are worried. It's about time they stopped treating the planet as their personal sewer.