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You can also coke iron with carbon from plastic. It's still not super great. But it does reuse plastics which don't get recycled enough.
by gonzo41 5y ago
You can also coke iron with carbon from plastic.
It's still not super great. But it does reuse plastics which don't get recycled enough.
- danuker 5y agoReminds me of "Plasteel" from RimWorld.
- XorNot 5y agoReusing plastics is honestly one of those "do we need to" things these days. The theory is that if we reuse them, then the waste doesn't pollute the environment - but landfilled plastic waste is basically sequestered carbon, and plastic pollution is ocean-borne and mostly being directly produced by poor environmental practice - not unrecycled plastic waste or landfill escape.
- gonzo41 5y agoYeah I agree, I'm pretty pro, bury plastic in the ground, but I figure if we need to coke steel rather than digging up coal we can just divert a few trucks.
- gremloni 5y agoYeah seriously, bury the plastic really deep away from water tables and forget about it. We clearly can’t recycle most of the stuff. Couple that with moving away from a frivolous use of plastic and I think we are golden. There are a bunch of abandoned mines miles away from substantial water tables. Fill those up.
- politician 5y agoWe can’t figure out how to store a minimal quantity of radioactive waste in a purpose-built salt mine dozens of miles away from any small town. I have no faith that we can find places to store megatons of plastic waste.
- potatoman22 5y agoPlastic doesn't radiate.
- politician 5y agoNIMBY neighbors don’t compromise.
- Chris2048 5y agofunny question: could we mix the nuclear waste with the plastic to make (the plastic) degrade faster?
- politician 5y agoThat's brilliant. I would love to learn if that could work and wouldn't just create a bunch of radioactive plastic.
- Chris2048 5y agoEven if it did, if it ended up enriching the soil carbon-content, would it matter?
- contravariant 5y agoI suppose it solves littering but in the end you're still just burning plastics and turning them into CO2, which isn't great.