It seems like the only sane way to make use of refuse mixed plastic is to incinerate it for energy. Perhaps as peaker plants that can be brought online when there isn't sufficient renewable energy to meet demand.
Burning plastic is clearly dirty, but with sufficient heat and airborne pollutant scrubbers I doubt it's any worse than coal.
Burning plastic is clearly dirty, but with sufficient heat and airborne pollutant scrubbers I doubt it's any worse than coal.
It depends on which plastic exactly (which is one of the reasons the whole "plastic=bad" mentality irritates me in the same way as stereotyping), but a regular plastic bag is going to be almost pure polyethylene --- essentially a very long-chain wax --- and combustion of that will definitely be cleaner than coal. At the other end are the halogenated polymers like PVC and PTFE whose combustion products are definitely much worse than coal.
PVC and PTFE are rarely found in trash, certainly not in the volumes of the rest of the types.
With a properly made incinerator (which isn't hard to do) burning plastic is cleaner than burning oil or coal. A bit of filtration will catch the halogens in case they slip in.
PTFE, no, not common at all. Its relatives are rather common in food packaging (liners and seals), though.
PVC... man, PVC is in a lot of things. Surprisingly many things. The monomer/polymer itself isn't that awful, but some of the plasticizers truly scare me. And I'm often favorably inclined towards the chemical industry!
I keep wondering if there is a way to make a "stomach" that can dissolve plastic/make energy with it, whether directly or as an electrolyte base (add zinc/copper)
I am aware of the bacteria that can eat plastic but too slow
Weird. This comment says 15 minutes ago in the main view, but 20 hours ago when I go to reply to it. I guess the whole post got "pushed to the front" again.
You don't burn those though, they stay in the walls of homes/mains/whatever for a long time, by the time they need replacing I'm hoping we'll have a solution (easily 50 years in some cases)
Also actually that covers a huge portion of plastics considered "strong enough" ironically perhaps, this may turn out to be a huge nightmare but we won't be here to see it, so
Are we really trying to substitute plastics with less polluting/toxic materials?
Isn't plastic's source the byproduct of fossil fuel generation, and therefore there are still economic incentive to use it somehow, as long as we keep extracting oil?
Yeah, I dont mind plastic as a material, it has lots of interesting uses. Anything that funds fossil fuel extraction though is best avoided whenever there's an alternative. They're going to use those profits to try to continue to destroy human society.
A million years ago the bark of a tree was impossible to degrade in nature, but now you can't prevent a log from decomposing. Similarly, nature will find a way-it always finds a way.
This wasn't as bad as I expected. So a lot of it gets incinerated at high temperatures, where it displaces fossil fuel use? That's ok. I was afraid it was going to get dumped in the ocean off Indonesia.
I can never tell if these articles are intentionally trying to undermine their stated cause or if it's just a side effect of corporate owned media fishing for clicks.
"Recycling doesn't work" is pro-corporate click bait.
"Recycling regulation only makes things worse" is even more so.
"Corporations try to wriggle out of every regulation and are basically sociopathic so you need to rule them with an iron fist of democratic oversight" seems more accurate but less likely to make it into a corporate press designed from inception to deliver the opposite message.
Old "recycling doesn't work" articles used to feature quotes from the very same industry groups that are now being accused of inventing recycling to fool consumers.
Burning plastic is clearly dirty, but with sufficient heat and airborne pollutant scrubbers I doubt it's any worse than coal.