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Smart plastic incineration posited as solution to global recycling crisis
- KozmoNau7 7y agoThis is merely treating a symptom. We need to stop producing so much single use plastic and so many disposable products.
- thinkingkong 7y agoSo. Not recycling. Got it.
- stefanfisk 7y agoIt’s usually seen as energy recycling.
- willismichael 7y agoI recently saw a bumper sticker with the words "Fueled by recycled dinosaurs". Does that count as energy recycling?
- stefanfisk 7y agoI've never heard that being counted as anything but trolling.
- sbdodbdjfzi 7y agoSassy! Uninformed, but sassy! It’s is substituting one fossil fuel product that is buried in the ground with a fissile fuel that’s about to be tossed in the ocean. Would it be better to recycle said fissile fuel? Somewhat [0], but recycling is very hard and is not going to happen any time soon. [0] recycling the plastic is only better if you also substitute the need to burn most any fissile fuels (since you could always make CH4 from the plastic) We’re not there yet, so burning plastic is probably the best we can do using scalable, easily accessible and proven technology.
- thinkingkong 7y agoBest we can do to accomplish what goal? If we’re just talking about keeping it out of oceans then thats fine. But let’s not do semantic gymnastics and call it recycling.
- sbdodbdjfzi 7y agoNo semantics needed. In both cases waste plastic is transformed into feedstock for a process that would have otherwise extracted non-renewable resources. Except one works but gives people the geebee geebes. The other one makes us forget our opulent consumption but doesn’t work and kills marine life.
- DennisP 7y agoEven though I support nuclear energy, I'm kinda glad plastic isn't fissile :)
- seniorsassycat 7y agoShould we recycle if recycling creates more pollution than an alternative?
- Anka33 7y agoThis is what Sweden do.....
- andrewstuart 7y agoOld concept - recycle. Proven to not be a real thing. New concept - make infinite garbage - burn that shit. Good to know it's "smart" incineration - not the bad old kind. Like "clean coal" - not the bad old dirty coal. Good news for packaging industry - infinite demand to burn stuff up to make energy.
- Flavius 7y agoWe're burning coal and gas to generate energy. Why not burn some plastic instead? It's not like it's worse than burning coal.
- FrozenVoid 7y ago"Smart burning" is still burning. Why not convert it to oil? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20729477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20729477
- wolfi1 7y agoif you use it for combined heat and power the efficiency is far higher
- m4rtink 7y agoThats what the Brno (a Czech city with ~400 000 thousand inhabitants) does with its trash - its incinerated in a modern incinerator plant, yielding a couple dozen MW of electricity and enough heat to run the city wide distroct heating system during the summer. During the winter it contributes about 20%.
- PeterisP 7y agoAnd what will you do with that oil afterwards? It'll get burned as well, just not that cleanly.
- kube-system 7y agoWhy not simply bury it? Plastic is pretty intert and non-toxic. Wouldn’t that be much better in terms of carbon sequestration?
- phkahler 7y agoThat almost made me laugh. IMHO carbon sequestration isn't a good solution for anything. But those who think it is should be fine with sequestering plastic in a landfill.
- diyseguy 7y agoIt can also be incorporated into concrete to provide structure and fill volume
- jfim 7y agoPlastic particles will end up in drains when the concrete structure gets eventually demolished.
- BubRoss 7y agoI think you will need a source for that, how often are plastic infused concrete structures being demolished? Why would more plastic end up in drains after being used in concrete? This seems like a nonsense dismissal.
- ggm 7y agoNo, its not. A huge amount of reinforced concrete is repurposed on-site to make aggregates for building. This means its destructively ground down in machines and the steel is usually removed for smelting. At this point, the plastic is going to be light chaff and will disburse. Concrete buildings have a 50 year life, but after 50, the concrete becomes aggregates, and this is going to liberate a lot of the plastic binder used. Binder in concrete is really good, it can help in earthquake zones and fire zones to keep building integrity, its also very possibly useful for penetrating shock events on concrete which some people face. So overall I think it is sound to use known quality plastic fibres in concrete for the additional strength, but we have to beindfull of full life effect: its good for now, it has consequence in 20-50 years time. (S.O proofreads civil engineering papers on GRP reinforced concrete, earthquakes and fire safety engineering)
- kfk 7y agoSo normally I read 30 to 40 % of municipal waste is organic. There is a lot of interesting work being done in accelerating that conversion to proteins and fats via insets. Shouldn’t we couple incinerator strategies with something like this? Also with bioplastics coming the organic % is likely to go up.
- harimau777 7y agoMy understanding is that the issue with plastic recycling is that the quality of the resulting plastic goes down as it is repeatedly recycled and goes down if different types of plastic is mixed. However, it surprises me that there aren't applications such as building, roads, ground fill, furniture, etc. where all you need is "a somewhat hard block of stuff" where the quality of the plastic wouldn't be that much of a concern.
- esotericn 7y agoLooking around me right now, plastic doesn't really see much use as a bulk material. It's more for specialized small objects, coatings, etc. Food containers. Small formed inexpensive objects like straws and cutlery. PVC pipes. Cars have a decent amount of plastic in the interior but still not as a structural element. Windows, maybe? Though the quality would seem to matter a lot there unless you want partially opaque windows....
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago> Windows, maybe? Though the quality would seem to matter a lot there unless you want partially opaque windows.... Bathroom windows and shower doors? Make it a feature, not a bug.
- esotericn 7y agoMhm. Personally it feels as if we need a better market for, well, 'not quite perfect' items, for lack of better terminology. Not having a super shiny perfect shower door is really not the end of the world. It's gonna be covered in limescale in about a week unless you're super meticulous anyway. It's kind of broken that we have an enormous infrastructure around brand new things whilst buying second hand or refurbished is usually a case of scouring ebay or pawn shops.
- voisin 7y agoEmbrace the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
- pfdietz 7y agoA renewable energy system benefits from having stored chemical energy, to help cover variability in wind and solar. Plastic waste can serve as that energy store, if the plastic was originally made from renewable energy and carbon sources. It's like burning biomass, except it's been a bit more processed.
- benj111 7y agoAgreed. My major concern would be rather than this being a last resort, it becomes the first choice. It should in my view be seen as a failure that we are attempting to make the best of, rather than any kind of success. Obviously the calculations change once bio plastics start to take over.
- pfdietz 7y agoWhy the bias against it? I don't understand why you would think that. It's not like recycling of plastic into plastic is superior by definition. That sounds like dogma.
- esotericn 7y agoI think the issue is that production of plastic seems to be problematic in and of itself because it's so difficult to get rid of. Especially at the enormous scale we're doing it (a single use fork made of metal would be ludicrous). Contrast to say, very small bits of sawdust or rocks or metal filings or whatever making their way into wastewater. I'd be interested to know the behaviour of other 'pollutants' i.e. materials that aren't especially toxic but modify the environment regardless. You can't rely on it all being recycled by virtue of it simply existing - we seemingly don't have a solution for microplastics in clothes for example, but also, every item of plastic litter is in the environment "forever" - imagine 200 years of people chucking the odd thing out of the window, car tires, carpets, etc. So whilst this seems to be a good solution for recycling, it may not be a good idea to allow plastic use to continue ballooning, and if you look at it through that lens we don't actually want to make disposal too cheap.
- 7y ago
- Dowwie 7y agoWhat is the status of hemp plastic?
- orev 7y agoPlanet Money has a good two-part series on this (episodes 925, 926). Basically plastics are only really useful for recycling if they’re washed thoroughly (which requires water, possibly hot, using more resources), and not shipped all the way around the world. Until we have recycling facilities locally, it’s just not worth it. Using them for energy would seem to be a better option, but I think that landfill is still probably the best one. The real solution is to reduce consumption and push the packaging waste costs back on the companies making the products.
- whenanother 7y agothis burning will lead to toxic gas being released that will increase cancer rate. I bet wealthy people see this as a money making proposition for their pharmaceutical companies.
- TheGallopedHigh 7y agoThe ‘smart’ in the title refers to a method of incineration without the emission of toxic gases; the air is scrubbed clean. So that money making scheme probably won’t work.
- whenanother 7y agothat's bs all incinerating technologies produce toxic gases. for incinerating plastic the argument is that it's less toxic than letting it sit in a landfill.
- adrianN 7y agoAs you probably know there are problematic toxins like dioxins that stay in the environment basically forever and toxins like NOx that are no big deal because they decay rapidly to safer substances.
- liability 7y agoThese incinerators are not your typical campfire. When your scout master yelled at you for throwing plastic in the fire, he was right because such a fire is relatively cool and has lots of incomplete combustion. Burning plastic in such fires produces a lot of nasty gases. But modern industrial incinerators are another sort of beast. They burn hot enough to tear apart most of the nasty shit and burn that too.
- carapace 7y agoMolten salt oxidation. Essentially you "burn" the waste within a molten salt bath and get "synthesis gas" (mix of CO and H2) out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas Feed that through a water column to get CO2 and more H2, send the CO2 to greenhouses or algae and the H2 to fuel cells. > Molten salt oxidation is a non-flame, thermal process that destroys all organic materials while simultaneously retaining inorganic and hazardous components in the melt. It is used as either hazardous waste treatment(with air) or energy harvesting similar to coal and wood gasification(with steam). The molten salt of choice has been sodium carbonate (m.p 851°C), but other salts can be used. Sulfur, halogens, phosphorus and similar volatile pollutants are oxidized and retained in the melt. Most organic carbon content leaves as relatively pure CO/CO 2/H2/H2O gas (depending on the feed conditions, whether steam or air is used), and the effluent only requires a cold trap and a mild aqueous wash (except mercury-containing wastes). It has been used for safe biological and chemical weapons destruction, and processing waste such as scrap tires where direct incineration/effluent treatment is difficult. The major downside of the process compared to direct incineration is the eventual saturation of the melt by contaminants, and needing reprocessing/replacement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation
- sitkack 7y agoHow does that compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization ?
- carapace 7y agoThat's the other one I usually try to mention on threads like this, but last time someone pointed out that the one company pursuing it folded. There may be some ongoing research. On the other hand my understanding is that MSO is used today actively to deal with e.g. chemical weapons disposal etc. I'm not qualified to give a detailed answer. MSO happens at much higher temperatures than TDP but doesn't require pressurization, whereas TPD is essentially a pressure cooker.
- 08-15 7y ago
- basicplus2 7y agoPlastic containers should be made with inbuild label holders so no glue is required to attach a label reducing toxic chemical and water use to clean it before recycling
- spraak 7y agoGood to find better ways to deal with the plastic we have, but we should probably just stop making so much conventional plastic.