> The trouble with chemical recycling is that it produces the kind of chemicals that come out of an oil refinery/petrochemical complex (which are used to make p

> The trouble with chemical recycling is that it produces the kind of chemicals that come out of an oil refinery/petrochemical complex (which are used to make plastics) and those are all worth about 50 cents a pound. Let's flip that around -- the benefit of chemical recycling is that no new petro resources need to be fed into refineries etc to produce these -lenes (which themselves are major industrial feeds). If this process were to be scaled up, certain plastic trash would become valuable, which would divert them from waste streams (similar to how eg. aluminum cans are treated). I can see major objections coming from those who sell petro resources, but otherwise, how is this not a good thing?