3 ms·

You don't really need the insane taxes part, just an insistence that the plants are not allowed to emit halogens in the flue gas. The halogens are completely r

You don't really need the insane taxes part, just an insistence that the plants are not allowed to emit halogens in the flue gas. The halogens are completely recoverable by bubbling them through an alkali mixture, doesn't matter what earth metals are used (some combination of sodium and calcium is cheapest), this will result in salts. You want to be a bit more careful about some metals, so that you don't have to precipitate them out of the salts to render them nontoxic. There are ways to preferentially bind the metals even in the gas phase, but it's best not to burn them to begin with, which isn't that hard because metals aren't found in high quantities in plastics to begin with, especially not the bad ones like cadmium and lead. Other than that, plastics are economically useful, but burying them is just delaying their release into the environment, which is not great. So burn them, and stop pretending they're useful for anything but fuel at the end of their service life. Pretty simple.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>bubbling them through an alkali mixture Which turns the liberated halogens back to salt automatically, in a very favorable reaction which is so strongly favored it is almost irreversible. Almost. But not if you carefully apply energy to the brine using an electrochemical process, especially one which has been improved for over a century after the patent expired, and you can't get much more efficient than that. Especially at the scale these operate at. These are not petrochemical plants since they were doing this before petrochemicals actually had plants. Crude oil wasn't even that popular yet. But who's going to need to do that, the spent alkali after scrubbing the halogens has no need for additional energy to be added. Unless you wanted to turn it back into full-strength alkali. Which wouldn't be cost-efective anyway, and nobody should be paying more than it's worth. Because there's planty of fresh material coming out of the caustic plants already. But you know how much energy it takes to produce that alkali originally from the virgin brine feedstock those plants use? More than it's worth. It a plain electrochemical reaction. No other raw materials needed. It's that "irreversable" reaction that's just a little too strong. So it takes a lot of energy to reverse. Kind of like trying to turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons. And if you want to try and capture CO2 from the atmosphere using alkali, fuggedaboutit. You're going to need a bigger caustic plant, and a lot more of them. There's a thing called material balance too, not just electrochemistry and thermodynamics at work.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  Sorry to hurt anybody's feelings who absolutely hates electrochemistry. Or industrial-scale chemical operations. I don't blame you, this stuff can be confusing.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

>bubbling them through an alkali mixture Which turns the liberated halogens back to salt automatically, in a very favorable reaction which is so strongly favored it is almost irreversible. Almost. But not if you carefully apply energy to the brine using an electrochemical process, especially one which has been improved for over a century after the patent expired, and you can't get much more efficient than that. Especially at the scale these operate at. These are not petrochemical plants since they were doing this before petrochemicals actually had plants. Crude oil wasn't even that popular yet. But who's going to need to do that, the spent alkali after scrubbing the halogens has no need for additional energy to be added. Unless you wanted to turn it back into full-strength alkali. Which wouldn't be cost-efective anyway, and nobody should be paying more than it's worth. Because there's planty of fresh material coming out of the caustic plants already. But you know how much energy it takes to produce that alkali originally from the virgin brine feedstock those plants use? More than it's worth. It a plain electrochemical reaction. No other raw materials needed. It's that "irreversable" reaction that's just a little too strong. So it takes a lot of energy to reverse. Kind of like trying to turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons. And if you want to try and capture CO2 from the atmosphere using alkali, fuggedaboutit. You're going to need a bigger caustic plant, and a lot more of them. There's a thing called material balance too, not just electrochemistry and thermodynamics at work.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
Sorry to hurt anybody's feelings who absolutely hates electrochemistry. Or industrial-scale chemical operations. I don't blame you, this stuff can be confusing.