The footprint calculation is our best effort to factor everything in, and that includes environmental degradation.
I don't want to minimize the difficulty of this- it's really, really hard to get right. But we do learn things, and (perhaps most importantly) we learn counter-intuitive things. And one of them is that plastics, even taking the tremendous problems with garbage patches in the ocean and the like, and not the clear-cut negative that our emotional side tends to think.
I don't want to minimize the difficulty of this- it's really, really hard to get right. But we do learn things, and (perhaps most importantly) we learn counter-intuitive things. And one of them is that plastics, even taking the tremendous problems with garbage patches in the ocean and the like, and not the clear-cut negative that our emotional side tends to think.