-Ch4s3-

-Ch4s3- t1_jb3t2nx wrote

I used to work along side someone who worked on this kind of problem. The issues was then and probably still is that there isn’t enough good and labeled training data. You can’t just hoover up every breast cancer image in the world, they’re locked away on servers in hospital basements and belong to the patients (at least in the US) and every country has different laws about using this stuff for research, much less a commercial system. Some national health services have tried this with their own data and results have so far been unimpressive.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j6e3tkj wrote

I believe I’ve been saying it should be buried. Moreover SE Asian countries aren’t really buying US and European plastic recycling materials anymore so a lot of it is actually getting landfilled again. Insofar as it all goes in a big hole in the ground it hardly matters.

Making sure it doesn’t end up in waterways seems like the correct focus to me. I don’t really have a lot interest in trying to police people’s preferences. Just handle the waste stream correctly and clamp down on littering.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j6dyi5c wrote

Well weathering of plastic will release some CO2.

What I mean really is that plastic is made from a waste product and very little CO2 is emitted in its production. It displaces more carbon intensive material use, and when its buried any carbon it contains is sequestered. It’s a great material that way if properly disposed of.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j6adsuz wrote

Sure but copper and lead pipes are inferior to pex in basically every way. PVC is also great for a lot of non residential cases. Steel production is laughably more CO2 intensive.

Plastic provides cleaner, safer water with fewer leaks and lower emissions. It also isn’t worth stealing like copper pipes and doesn’t have to be joined in a process that’s highly toxic.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j6a3uac wrote

“Big oil” exists because we need energy. Plastic is just a neat way to use the trash that would otherwise be discarded. Burying plastic trash is carbon neutral, and it came out of the ground anyway.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j6a3etr wrote

As long as the CO2 numbers aren’t worse(they often are) and they hold up for purpose then fine. But there’s nothing wrong with burying plastic.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j69qxmn wrote

None of that waste really comes from the US since China stopped buying American recycling. There’s a lot of single use plastics used in SE Asia, and they lack the disposal infrastructure we enjoy in developed economies.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j69qg55 wrote

That rolls up medical plastics, chemical spray bottles, aluminum can liners, bandages, cling wrap, straws the people with mobility issues need, and so on. Plastic is basically a CO2 sink if it’s buried, may as well just do that.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j69n5ch wrote

Plastics are irreplaceable in plumbing, medicine, weather proofing in construction, many durable consumer goods, automobile crumple zones, storage for dangerous industrial chemicals, and on and on. We need to dispose of plastics better, not try to blanket ban them.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j3ifpoh wrote

The endgame for container ships is probably synthetic fuel produced with excess renewable power. Large container ships already only release like 100g of carbon per ton of freight per kilometer traveled. It’s ~2tins of co2 to get a ton of freight across the pacific, which is like 11k kilometers.

Ideally synthetic fuel will be carbon neutral because it’s made from ammonia derived from green hydrogen. Analysts expect it to account for ~15% of marine fuel in 20 years…

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-Ch4s3- t1_j27mrj5 wrote

> hoard resources up there

What? Do you imagine them hoisting ton of gold bars into LEO? It's an awfully precarious place to try and sit out some instability, especially after recent demonstrations of satellite killing missiles.

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