"One thing that I immediately realized about the team is how passionate they are."
🙄
This is an ad for a for-profit, publicly traded company that claims to have the solution for plastic waste, but also holds patents for said solution. Either they've found the solution, in which case, they should open source that shit because we're in a global ecological crisis, or they're exaggerating their claims and this absolute handjob of a video is uncritically repeating every single thing that the company's PR is feeding them, without consulting a single other person.
Plastic waste already has a solution, and it's a political solution. We could start by nationalizing all oil companies and banning single use plastics. Instead, we invest in a "solution" that, if it works as advertised, actually entrenches a perverse incentive for more plastic waste. Were this company to become hugely successful, they would lobby heavily against any bans of single use plastics, since it would ruin them.
This is what I call a technological antisolution:
We are asked to marvel at the shiny innovations brought to us by our technological superiors, and while we wait for them to solve climate change for us [or, in this case, plastic waste], we are given strategies to cope with the stress. Climate Change is thus transformed – or perhaps reduced – from a political problem to a technological one. I propose we name these kinds of technologies Technological Antisolutions.
A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D. A technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context. [...] Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.
I hear a lot of what you're saying, and I agree to a large degree. What I don't think is so valid is what do we do with the 9 billion tons of plastic waste we already have? Reducing our need for oil with our current (bad) behavior is a start. Taking care of the mess we've made is also a huge win, even if it's converted into other, longer-lasting products, and assuming it doesn't require too much energy. Having a world where the bottom line isn't such a big factor would also help, and I'm not sure that will change quickly enough to help us out of this mess.
Totally a puff piece, though, and I'm not optimistic is will be energy-efficient enough to work.
That's why I say that antisolutions are context-dependent. This is being presented as the solution to plastic, not as a clean-up plan after we have banned plastic, or even while we ban plastic. The former is an antisolution, while the latter could be a responsible project. Antisolutions are dangerous because they deflate the political will necessary to actually solve the problem, not because the technology is problematic in and of itself.
I don't think that's a practical solution for this society. There's definitely loads of things we change. Swapping plastic for glass, hemp plastic, etc. But plastic is kinda here to stay and capitalism isn't letting us nationalize conglomerates any time soon,
There is nothing more impractical than destroying the only home for life as we know it. We literally have nowhere else to go. Banning single use plastics and nationalizing oil companies is so unbelievably convenient compared to the alternative.
In fact, revolutionary change is not just possible, but inevitable. It's a question of whether we're going to do it proactively, mitigating the harm that we've already done in the most just way that we can, or do it reactively. Either way, the day that enough of us wake up and decide to stop doing capitalism -- and that day will come -- it'll stop, because labor wakes up every single day and makes capitalism happen.
there's concepts like biorefinery where we take plastic and agricultural waste and put it into a heavily modified oil refinery and out comes biochar and some chemical feedstocks (e.g. ethylene) for making new virgin-grade plastic. Depending on the design it can be more carbon efficient than carbon capture, but in general these industries use a gigantic amount of energy while producing less plastic and much less gasoline/diesel than a normal oil refinery.
