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I don't see why it would be at all like plastic recycling: plastic "recycling" was never practical because there are too many kinds of plastic and making new pl
by not2b 5y ago
I don't see why it would be at all like plastic recycling: plastic "recycling" was never practical because there are too many kinds of plastic and making new plastic is so much cheaper. When the Chinese were buying it they were landfilling most of it in exchange for payments to take it off of our hands. On the other hand, aluminum recycling works very well.
- lrem 5y agoI'm slightly surprised by landfilling plastic. I hear it's pretty high calorie, up to the point of being energy-positive to burn it with filtering out the fumes. Is it just not enough to make this money-positive when accounting for handling?
- nitrogen 5y agoSome places do have energy and material recovery facilities next to their landfills that try to extract useful metal and useful energy from trash.
- dnautics 5y agoI believe Japan does this, but there are dioxins all over the place there.
- fomine3 5y agoDioxins were become problem in 90s so smaller incinerator is banned and now incinerators must run on high temperature (> 800C) for not to emit dioxins. Emissions are also must be measured.
- londons_explore 5y agoThere are plenty of manmade chemicals that don't break down at 800C. For example F-C bonds... We really ought to be incinerating things at 3000C, but so far we haven't been able to engineer machines to do this without melting themselves...
- fomine3 5y agoOf course not every material can be burned but still fine.