Basically yes. Petroleum burned produces CO2. Petroleum plasticized does not. The more market share that plastic packaging eats up, the lower emissions are.
Older trees fix less carbon than newer trees. Paper products are essentially made of carbon extracted from the air, and you just plant new trees in the farm afterwards.
Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint.
All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.
You're twisting my words. Trees can't be the solution to our carbon problem, because they have no way to compete with humanity burning millions of years of carbon storage as fuel.
That doesn't mean trees aren't extremely important in countless different ways.
Which also doesn't mean that we shouldn't use wood as a material, if it's produced with principles.
Timber industries have shown for centuries they aren't concerned with carbon capture of forests and actively try to monoculture "regenerating" forests with herbicides which drastically reduces carbon capture.
This documentary gives a good idea into my reasoning on why believing timber propaganda that "trees are better when cut down and regrowing" is false:
Plastic pollution is the pollution that is causing climate change. The process of producing plastic emits huge amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that's nearly 300x more potent than CO2.
"Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the
greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. "
You can't evaluate plastic production in a vacuum because it's numbers are enormous and will scare anyone. There is a reason though why that article makes no comparisons though.
For reference, the two plastic plants mentioned in the article you linked can emit 3.65 million tons of CO2 per year (about 30% of the nations plastic production annual total). This is a little less than what the average natural gas power plant produces in a year.
And there are about 1000 gas plants in the US. And gas is the least emissive of the power fossil fuels.
So while strictly speaking plastic production does create greenhouse gases, you can basically offset an entire years worth of plastic production emissions with only a handful of wind and solar farms displacing fossil fuel power plants.
Also I don't count burning plastic in lifecycle assessments. That is trivial to outlaw and dramatically pumps emissions figures.
Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute
It's more manageable because the impact on the climate is very small. Oil that is burned is far more harmful to the climate than oil that is turned to plastic.
Not true. Plastic has a huge carbon footprint because huge amounts of greenhouse gases, in particular nitrous oxide, are emitted by the process of manufacturing it.
Only if plastic packaging ends up in a landfill, if we burn it we still release the carbon into the atmosphere. "Bioplastics" (ie made from atmospheric carbon captured by plants) are a better example, and if we landfill those they're a true carbon sink.
But what happens to that carbon when the plastic decomposes, biodegrades, burns, is digested, or meets any other end? That once-below-ground carbon is now in the atmosphere, whether it takes a year or a decade to break down.
Even Orient disposed of plastic decomposes and biodegrades, and is often burned.
And recycling most common types of plastics actually releases more CO2 than creating new plastic products. There is no panacea one the carbon has been pumped out of the ground.
