So Much For The Guardian/Observer Newspaper’s Green Credentials, Backing The Burning Of Plastic!

Even by The Guardian and The Observer (the Guardian on Sunday)’s standards of stupidity, this beats them all.

The cheerleaders of Extinction Rebellion publishing this ignorant crap, proving how little clue they have about environmentalism:

As Professor Noelle Eckley Selin of MIT’s Engineering Systems Division and Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences noted back in 2013, when plastic is burned, what gets released straight into the atmosphere are dangerous chemicals such as hydrochloric acid, sulpher dioxide, heavy metals and worst of the lot dioxins and furans – the most toxic chemicals known to the human species.

Dioxins and furans have been classified as top grade carcinogens since a World Health Organisation report in 1997. In the case of the worst one of all – 2, 3, 7, 8 – Tetrachlorodibenzo-P-Dioxin (TCDD – best known to the Vietnamese as one of the active ingredients in Agent Orange) – if you breath any of that in, best get your will written pronto.

The rest of them can cause birth defects, miscarriages, infertility to both sexes, a shit load of very nasty uteral conditions you don’t want to read about on a Sunday afternoon, diabetes, learning disabilities, breathing difficulties, skin disorders and crash your immune system. Most of the time it gets into our bodies is from poisoning the food we eat: once it’s in crops and farm animals, that’s it, you’ve got to hope your body can flush them out. Trouble is our body’s aren’t evolved to deal with them – hence why they can trigger cancers.

As recently as March this year, National Geographic was warning of the dangers of so-called ‘waste to energy’ schemes’ which ignored what they may be releasing into the atmosphere.

As they pointed out, the main cheerleaders for such schemes are Exxon, Dow, Total, Shell, Chevron Phillips, and Procter & Gamble – energy companies or major producers of plastics with a vested interest in stopping their usage becoming severely restricted – and much of their spin to the public and moronic newspaper journalists is based on plastics being hydrocarbons, just like the fossil fuels they derive from.

Through their mouthpiece The Alliance To End Plastic Waste, they dismiss the dioxins and furans risks as ‘minimal’ – or rather the amount released as being as such. Yes, but only as a percentage of the byproducts created by burning it. Only a little is required to have catastrophic health effects – as the WHO report of 1997 noted.

The only safe way of disposing of non-recyclable plastics is pyrolysis – whereupon they are melted down rather than burned by lower temperatures over a period of time into hydrocarbons which can be reused. It can even be recycled into fuels where the pollutant by products can be more controlled. But because it is currently expensive, major conglomerates want everyone else to make the investment (ie. governments via their taxpayers), and they’ll buy into it only once it is sustainable enough to generate a healthy profit.

In the meantime, could The Guardian please shut the f**k up about the environment until it knows what it’s talking about?