clouds of methane over scotland

[ewx]

Mr Woodall said: "Plastic bags do not degrade, and thank goodness for that. When things do degrade they produce CO₂ and methane, the most potent green house gases.

"What will happen is that people will turn to buying paper and retailers will provide paper carrier bags which will degrade and there will be clouds of methane over Scotland."

Now I don't know exaclty what the relative environmental effects of plastic and paper bags over their entire life cycle amount to (and Mr. Woodall's views may be biased), but perhaps carbon sequestration through landfill of cheap consumer goods is an idea whose time has come?

Comments

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Theres a good idea - we send all our plastic bags to Scotland where they can degrade them for us. Or am I missing the point too?

[gerald_duck]

A similar argument states that it's environmentally friendly to build more roads: better to turn petrochemicals into tarmac, safely trapping all the CO₂ in blacktop, than to burn them as fuel for a car stuck in a traffic jam. I believe this argument is to at least a certain extent valid, though I remain agnostic on the plastic v. paper bags issue.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Environmentally it just comes down to whether you want to use up landfill or create methane. To be honest, people should be using reusable cloth bags rather than either, since the paper bags have stupid quantities of chemicals in to make them strong which means when they degrade they also release unpleasant things into the ground. But plastic fills landfill sites permanently, which is possibly less of an issue for Scotland, currently, but I don't know.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Woodall is also apparently incapable of distinguishing between CO₂ from fossil carbon, which adds to the greenhouse effect, and CO₂ from paper, which is part of today's biosphere and had been taken out of the atmosphere by the trees the paper came from only a few years previously. And the point about reusing permanent bags is a very valid one. (I have also many times had difficulty persuading Lndon shopkeepers not to give me plastic bags.)

[gerald_duck]

The atmosphere cares little where the CO₂ comes from.

Growing forests is good; chopping down forests is bad. While paper sourced from wood grown in a sustainable forest is better than paper made from denuded Brazilian rainforest, it would be even better to grow those trees and then not chop them down to make paper.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Young growing trees absorb more CO₂ than they produce; mature trees IIRC do not. In nature carbon does not remain permanently locked up in living things; it cycles back and forth between biota and the atmosphere. Chopping trees down for paper achieves, in terms of CO₂ absorption, the same effect as them dying naturally; it only distorts the cycle time, in that the tree dies younger (but then another one can grow, and absorb CO₂ fast during its growth period), but its carbon takes longer to return to the environment (because it is locked up in paper, or wood). And whilst rotting paper bags might release methane, so would the trees they had come from, if they had been allowed to die naturally.

[armb.livejournal.com]

They could, in theory, be allowed to die but not to release their carbon into the atmosphere as they decay, instead forming new coal reserves to be exploited in millions of years....

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Wait wait wait. Scotland is degrading?

[naath.livejournal.com]

Wood and/or paper burning/degrading is Carbon neutral as you just grew the tree and it took the CO2 out of the air and now you put it back. Hydrocarbons dug out of the ground are not... that tree grew in the Cretaceous.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Surely a paper bag decaying is just a tree dying, delayed a while? Polythene bags are made from already sequestered carbon, landfilling them is just moving it from place-to-place. Both seem CO2/CH4 neutral to me.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Landfill as currently practiced won't achieve sequestration because the methane reaches the surface — indeed landfills are usually built with pipes sticking out of them to transport the methane to the atmosphere as quickly as possible, to prevent a buildup of explosive gases underground!