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An intermediate step between recycling and combustion would be disassembling the plastics back to useful feedstocks, potentially including monomers of the plast
by pfdietz 1y ago
An intermediate step between recycling and combustion would be disassembling the plastics back to useful feedstocks, potentially including monomers of the plastics involved.
This (and combustion) would be easier if the plastics were not chlorinated, I think. So maybe focus on elimination of PVC and the like from the waste stream?
- ninalanyon 1y agoThis article is mostly about soft plastics used for food packaging, surely little to none of that is PVC. It least here in Norway most such plastic is low density polythene and PET, neither of which are chlorinated. Most PET bottles are separated from general waste because bottles have a deposit on them here.
- pfdietz 1y agoI was going to point to Saran Wrap, but it was changed from polyvinylidene chloride to polyethylene in 2004.
- olejorgenb 1y agoThis is pyrolysis based recycling (also called chemical recycling I think). My impression is that it's fairly energy intensive and can still be hard to purify. Some companies claim to be able to to it relatively effective. https://www.quantafuel.com/ https://www.quantafuel.com/ claims to have a catalyst which improves the efficiency for instance. They are now privately owned and the amount of news they publish has become limited. This makes me believe they still struggle to make optimize the process.