GM been using nostr as a budgeting tool. How has nostr improved your life in unexpected ways?
Every time I eat at home instead of eating out, I figure I save at least 3000 sats. So to help motivate this, I tell myself I can donate 1000 sats to a random nostr user every time I do. Much more powerful motivator than knowing I saved money. Love bringing a smile to so somebodys face and getting to pick valuable projects to send zaps to.
#asknostr #gm #pv
Hot take for the week: it's totally fine from an environmental perspective that we produce tons of plastic and that it's not recyclable and just sitting in landfills. You shouldn't feel guilty about using it. Arguably you should feel good about it. Hear me out.
Not everything needs to be or benefits from being recycled. Recycling takes energy and money, so we don't want to recycle unless it really needs to be done. Some things are important to recycle, for example, paper. Why is paper important to recycle? Because paper comes from trees and we have a limited amount of those, and our use of paper far exceeds the regenerative capacity of trees. Trees are important for absorbing CO2 in the atmosphere and biodiversity, both of which we'd all perish without. We have to share trees with the rest of life on this planet. So keeping a good amount of trees around is important.
Plastic, on the other hand, is not limited in the same way and doesn't need to be shared. The primary thing we use to make plastic is ethane, we produce more ethane than we know what to do with, which is why plastic is so cheap, which is why recycling plastic always costs more than making new plastic, which is why we don't recycle plastic. We get ethane because we drill for methane (natural gas). As long as we keep using and needing natural gas, we basically have an infinite supply of nearly free ethane. We have to do something with the ethane, as long as we're drilling for methane, Ethane is coming out of the ground whether we want it or not. Nothing else uses ethane, biodiversity doesn't depend on ethane existing, we could use every last unit of ethane and the consequence would be we'd either have to start recycling plastic or switch to a different material at that point in time. And if, in the present time, we use something else *aside* from ethane/plastic, like for example, wood? Now we're using a limited resource we have to be more careful about our consumption of. And we've wasted the ethane.
Ok fine, we've got plenty of plastic, but I can hear you already saying that plastic takes forever to degrade in landfills. Do you know how long Ethane takes to "degrade"? It's stuck in the earth's crust, close enough that we can access it with drills, which means it's basically at the surface. If we didn't take it out of the ground, it would be sitting there for tens of thousands or millions of years, gradually making its way to the center of the earth where it would be turned into magma and then eventually back into more rock for earth's crust. So when we make plastic, all we're really doing is turning ethane into a slightly different form and storing it in a different place. The landfill isn't any worse to store it in than the earth's crust. That landfill we put it in will also, eventually, make it to the center of the earth.
Another common environmental downside people accuse plastic of is creating hazardous conditions for animals, for example, sea turtles getting their heads stuck in those plastic rings that hold drink cans together. This is more of a problem of the shape of the material than the material itself, and this can be solved without eliminating plastic use altogether.
The final and most compelling environmental argument against plastic is the impact of plastic on things like human and animal health. Let's skip human health for a second, because that's a different topic. If we're talking about animal health, that's an environmental impact and I agree that it's an issue with plastic. Proper disposal of (but not recycling of) plastic would solve this, this critique of plastic is more a critique of our waste management system than of plastic itself. And remember that any time we replace plastic with something else, it's not like the "something else" is free from environmental consequences, it has to be weighed against any plastic has. Wood is great, but it means chopping down trees, treating wood is environmentally hazardous, and it's also heavier to transport. Concrete is great but concrete also has a massive CO2 footprint, etc.
"Plastic bad" isn't enough, it has to be "plastic worse" for us to use other options. And in many, many use cases, I really don't see other options as being any better.
The environmental argument against plastic imo is weak af. #environment #plastic #sustainability