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Most plastics are very hard if not impossible to recycle. Especially when different plastics are mixed or a product is made of multiple materials, i.e. nearly a
by dtech 6y ago
Most plastics are very hard if not impossible to recycle. Especially when different plastics are mixed or a product is made of multiple materials, i.e. nearly all products.
- whatever1 6y agoAll plastics can be recycled. Is it economical? No. Same goes for nuclear waste.
- redisman 6y agoWhat do you mean by recycled in this case? From my understanding you can pretty much only grind it down to garbage filler and maybe press it into some primitive shape. It’ll never become cling film or whatever again
- whatever1 6y agoPolymers can fundamentally be de-polymerized and then you can reuse the monomers, for example see [1]. They call it "chemical recycling". Questionable whether it will ever be price competitive with direct production from crude oil derivatives. You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon. [1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-chemical-recycling-solution/97/i39 https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-ch...
- exporectomy 6y agoIf you convert it to solid carbon, there's no need to recycle it any further because it's already harmless to the environment. So perhaps it could be more cost effective than it seems.