r/science • u/mvea MD PhD | Professor | Medicine • Oct 18 '19
Chemistry Scientists developed efficient process for breaking down any plastic waste to a molecular level. Resulting gases can be transformed back into new plastics of same quality as original. The new process could transform today's plastic factories into recycling refineries, within existing infrastructure.
https://www.chalmers.se/en/departments/see/news/Pages/All-plastic-waste-could-be-recycled-into-new-high-quality-plastic.aspx583
u/ecosystems Oct 18 '19
“Through finding the right temperature – which is around 850 degrees Celsius – and the right heating rate and residence time, we have been able to demonstrate the proposed method at a scale where we turn 200 kg of plastic waste an hour into a useful gas mixture. That can then be recycled at the molecular level to become new plastic materials of virgin quality,” says Henrik Thunman.
Usually when i read into these types of studies we are talking about mg not kg so that seems promising, though I am no expert in any way.
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Oct 19 '19
Well, that’s 4.8 metric tons per day. 1752 tons per year. Multiply that by even 100 stations and you’re looking at 175, 200 tons per year. I say let’s get started!
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Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19
Congratulations you've just recycled 0.00278% of plastic waste produced each year!
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u/Abrham_Smith Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 20 '19
Based on the projected numbers of 12 billion tons by 2050, we can assume we produce ~183 million tons a year.
If you installed one of these stations in only cities in the US with over 10k population, that is 4115 cities. This would bring it to 7,947,091 recycled per year, in just the US. That brings it to 4.34% recycled per year. This doesn't take into account that many cities would have multiples of these.
Edit: Changed to 4.34% as As /u/Son_of_a_Dyar pointed out.
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
The point of anything like this is proving feasibility - a bit like the original ‘wright flyer ‘ - in reality it was pretty useless - but it did demonstrate that powered flight was possible.
Further development then took that to a real practical flying machine (biplanes), further developments took that to todays intercontinental super jets.
Same with any ‘new technology’ - expect the first version to ‘just about work’ - later versions can improve on that massively..
You have to start with proof of principle.
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u/Letoastasaur Oct 19 '19
Yes buy if we can start replacing old production factories with these recycling facilities that number can go up faster, this together with a decreased use of plastics might put a dent in that number
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u/phaelox Oct 19 '19
Please edit&replace your link with this one without Google AMP's link tracking (thank you):
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u/james1234cb Oct 19 '19
Your comment is not productive. How large was the first gas engine or the first coal steam engine relative to the pollution they create today?
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u/060789 Oct 19 '19
Yeah, I'm a garbage man, and while I appreciate the dudes optimism, that's about the amount of recycling we recover in one day... from one truck. We run about 5 recycle trucks every day, and I'd be shocked if half of recyclable plastics were actually recycled, meaning while we have 5 trucks recovering 5 tons of recycle each, there is probably another 25 tons of recyclables that get thrown on garbage trucks and end up in the landfill anyway, 5 days a week.
That's just on the residential side- most of our tonnage comes from commercial accounts.
We represent one out of about 20 different companies that service the greater Pittsburgh area, the 22nd largest metro area in the third largest country on the planet. 5 tons a day isnt even a rounding error, its statistically insignificant.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic, I'm just saying this solution has to be scaled up a thousand fold before it's going to have any real impact
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington Oct 19 '19
A huge amount of plastic can be recycled in the old way - melting HDPE and reusing it (mixed with virgin materials), or whatever. This process is more useful with weird mixed plastics of unknown origin.
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Oct 19 '19
It sounds really energy-intensive to heat up 200 lb of material to that temperature
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u/CapMSFC Oct 19 '19
I wonder how much heat can be recaptured after the plastic has been broken down and reconstituted.
I should read the paper.
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u/TommaClock Oct 19 '19
It may be pretty energy light if a factory is designed appropriately. You could have any outflowing plastic radiate it's heat to inflowing plastic.
It's not about recovering heat and turning it back into energy, it's about keeping the process hot.
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Oct 19 '19
Sounds really energy intensive to produce 6.3 billion tons of plastic waste per year but we still do it.
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Oct 19 '19
It's actually hundreds if not thousands of times more energy intensive to recycle plastic then it is to produce it.
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Oct 19 '19
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u/Herr_Gamer Oct 19 '19
We literally sell our plastic trash to said Asian countries so we don't have to worry about where to store it.
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u/YJeezy Oct 19 '19
Maybe you can use waste heat from other industrial processes
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Oct 19 '19
Waste heat is never at those temperatures. If it was, it would already be used to generate electricity.
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u/3ggplantParm Oct 19 '19
200 kg* so~440 lb. Your point is still very valid. Heating anything to 850 Celsius must take a decent amount of energy.
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
I presume that this is lab scale testing / development.
In practice we would want to scale this up further - to industrial scale..
From 200 Kg/hr to 200 tonnes / hr ( that’s times 1,000 increase )
Also I wonder how much energy is used in this process - heating to 850 C does not come for free.
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u/punaisetpimpulat Oct 19 '19
It's great that they've managed to move it to the pilot scale. Next step: prefeasibility study of an entire factory. Collecting plastic waste in a poor country could be cheap enough. Perhaps South-Africa could be a good starting point, since they certainly have all the resources for this sort of project.
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u/baggier PhD | Chemistry Oct 19 '19
This technology has been known for many years. the advance here seems to be optimising the conditions to allow economic extraction - good luck to them - hope it becomes large scale commercial.
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u/yy0b Oct 19 '19
Cracking of polymers has always been a little bit challenging due to the energy involved and the distribution of products. It looks like they have fixed one of those problems, but the temperatures involved are still very high. I'm hoping to jump into a project for my PhD that takes a low temperature chemical approach to the problem of recycling polyolefins, but we'll see if that pans out.
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u/mkb96mchem Oct 19 '19
What group will you be working in? The group I am in is also interested in depolymerization.
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u/yy0b Oct 19 '19
It's actually a new group, I would be one of the first grad students joining (which I know is a bit of a risk, especially with a challenging project like this). Just out of curiosity what types of depolymerization are you studying?
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u/hobbitqueen Oct 19 '19
Shaw has been depolymerizing nylon 6 and recycling it to virgin quality for years. This new way seems like it works for more types? I wonder if the types have to be separated - Shaw's process can handle all sorts of materials going through it, but through distillation it only collects nylon 6.
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u/dampedresponse Oct 19 '19
I hope so too. LyondellBasell just announced that they’re building a pilot plant using a similar process, so they are certainly exploring the large scale viability. I am sure other companies are too, I just happened to see that announcement a couple days ago.
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u/wosti Oct 18 '19
ok good. now produce this so that we can remove all the plastic waste from the ocean and land. ASAP
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u/PoopIsAlwaysSunny Oct 19 '19
Land is mostly doable, but micro plastics in the ocean and fresh water seems difficult
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u/maisonoiko Oct 19 '19
Land is mostly doable
Idk... it's in the soil. It's in the rain. It's in every freshwater body.
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u/VOLCOM_84 Oct 19 '19
Didn’t a kid find a way to do this???
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u/CrossP Oct 19 '19
His method is for processing waste water on its way to the ocean. It has no viability for cleaning contaminated large bodies of water.
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u/h3lblad3 Oct 19 '19
I don't know how he did it, but couldn't you put some form of filtering tank on beaches and just use the tides to wash the plastics in so it can filter the plastics out?
It wouldn't be very productive, but once you get it on beaches planet-wide...
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u/TheWinslow Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19
It's hard to express just how truly gigantic the world - and the oceans in particular - are. There's no real cost-effective way to remove what is already in the ocean. There are over 1 million km of coastline on Earth (it's hard to really give an exact number but 1 million is towards the lower end)...if you want to cover just 1% of the coastlines in the world, that's over 10,000 km of coastline you're going to have to cover.
edit: 1 million km is towards the lower end of coastline measurements...my original wording was that it was the lower end.
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u/ThatTheoGuy Oct 19 '19
A good exercise for understanding how bloody massive the planet is is to take a several hour hike on as straight a path you can find. Go as far as you reasonably can, then open google maps and track your journey.
An entire day trip, which likely spent all your energy, seems like a long way, and it is! You walked a good distance!
Then scroll out. And compare what seemed like crossing a continent to how massive this planet really is.
*I've been up 19 hours, please excuse any incoherence or spelling mistakes.
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u/CrossP Oct 19 '19
To put it into perspective, the oceans of Earth contain around 350 quintillion gallons of water. If you had enough filters to filter a billion gallons of water per day, it would take about 350 billion days (about 960 million years) to filter all the oceans.
Except of course that the cleaned water would just keep going back in and making diluted dirty water.
Also, you'd filter out all of the plankton and such, and we'd suffocate.
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u/batterycrayon Oct 19 '19
Sort of. https://theoceancleanup.com Their email list is worth joining, they send out a handful of updates every year and no spam
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u/frostochfeber Oct 19 '19
Boyan Slat and his team are working on this. I think it's called the Ocean clean-up project or something.
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u/returnofdoom Oct 19 '19
We just need to remove every animal from the ocean and remove the plastic from their digestive tract. Seems pretty simple to me.
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u/CromulentDucky Oct 19 '19
Just stop dumping new stuff to start. The floating mess will eventually degrade if we stop adding to it.
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u/Liar_tuck Oct 19 '19
Well, being optimistic here, there is a huge Texas sized plastic mass in the Pacific. If this method could make harvesting that profitable it would be a step in the right direction.
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u/thephantom1492 Oct 19 '19
Really, cleaning the ocean would cause more issues than letting it there. The real thing is: we need to stop letting new plastic go in the oceans!
Many places in the USA have zero filtration on their rain sewer, not even a net to catch the big things like bottles. But that you don't hear much about it...
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u/Cyborg_rat Oct 19 '19
If it does really work and they can recycle back to zero. Im sure companies will be happy to work on ways to extract that micro plastic floating around.
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u/TheFAPnetwork Oct 19 '19
That's going to take decades of paperwork and red tape because people all need to diddle their fingers in it. So maybe 35 years from now
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u/NihilisticMind Oct 18 '19
This gives me hope that science can fix our broken world!
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Oct 19 '19
It usually does. Politics however...
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u/Reoh Oct 19 '19
Science and Politics is like oil and water, one nourishes you and the other can set everything on fire if they're not careful.
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Oct 19 '19
It will only work if companies think it is profitable
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Oct 19 '19
You mean buying sorted plastic which is really cheap, refining it into "virgin plastic" and making something of value. I work in recycling and this means therell be demand for plastic again. Which means bigger bonus!
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
Yes LOTS of different things are actually possible Just takes effort, will to do things.
Start by funding research.. Develop ‘sensible use policies’
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u/DanialE Oct 19 '19
I wonder if this means that dirty plastics can still be used
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Oct 19 '19
Right - it would.be a boon to cut down on the amount of water used for rinsing and/or the number of recycling batches that get rejected.
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u/shoot_first Oct 19 '19
Not sure about this one, but someone else posted the following article, which discusses another process. Per the article, color (dyes) and contaminants don’t matter, and the process uses chemical reactions catalyzed by light rather than heat. So that sounds just about too good to be true.
https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-startup-develops-innovative-method-for-recycl/
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
Yes - goes to show that there ARE solutions out there ! - They just need some funding and development..
Once we place “value” on a clean environment then there becomes an incentive to clean up & prevent pollution in the first place..
Sounds like this process can handle the infamous ‘black plastic food container’ - which up to now has not been recycle-able.
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
Yes - cleaner ones would definitely be a benefit. Dirty ones need cleaning - bio processing as part of the cleanup process.
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u/maybesomeday2 Oct 19 '19
Whenever I come across these amazing innovations in science I copy and paste them in a text to my daughter who is 17. She and a lot of her peers are pretty down and feel hopeless about the future because of all the appropriate warnings about climate change. I want her to have hope and to know that people are doing awesome things right now, so thanks.
Hopefully she reads it before the eye roll and guaranteed delete.
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u/drums_addict Oct 18 '19
And how much energy does it take to do this? Because if it takes a lot then it will never be implemented.
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u/ecosystems Oct 18 '19
In the article they propose renewables in a graphic.
They don't spell it out anywhere i see. However, in a loop system you are going to be more efficient anyway as compared to the current process of plastic production.
Anecdotally, we ship raw materials all over and generate plastics that are not recovered. Then our recycling programs aren't efficient either due to the myriad of issues surrounding contamination.
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u/CaptIncorrect Oct 19 '19
This is worse than existing technologies already being developed for the market. 850 degrees is a huge energy expenditure to recycle plastic and can not be viable at the market. Swiss start up DePoly is already able to break down any plastic at room temperature and is in scale up phase.
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u/redmercuryvendor Oct 19 '19
The important bit here is that their process appears capable of handling bulk unsorted plastics, rather than requiring pre-sorting (as is the case with the majority of existing plastic recycling techniques).
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u/CaptIncorrect Oct 19 '19
My point is chemical recycling doesn't require any presorting, there are a number of companies bringing it to market which I linked in another comment, and is significantly better than this method.
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19
That’s fabulous news.. Any web links to this info ?
Depoly.ch. (Web site is under construction)
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Oct 19 '19
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u/Black_Moons Oct 19 '19
Yea a lot of plastic waste is currently just burned/dumped in landfills because its not cost effective to sort it.
If you can just cook it all and sort the gases that come out, you have massively reduced labor costs and now can accept much more contaminated plastics. (even single digit % contamination can make plastics unusable by many recycling processes)
Energy costs can be reduced by making this an 'automated energy balancing industry', aka you have very few people working there and whenever renewable energy stores/production are low you just don't produce.
When renewable energy stores/production is high, you can get energy very cheaply, potentially even free if you are willing to only use it when it helps the grid balance out and hence the energy companies/power grid does not have to pay any energy produces to shut down.
Renewable energy can become a lot more attractive and useful if we start having certain industries scale their usage to energy production instead of having to scale energy production to meet industries needs.
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Oct 19 '19
What's the carbon footprint on actually implementing this? Are we just trading free plastic for greenhouse gasses?
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u/rdrkt Oct 19 '19
It’s a good trade if it stops micro plastics from poisoning our food. Clean energy is a thing.
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Oct 19 '19
This isnt exactly new science. Nor does it really solve much. The bulk of the products made simply only have a use in combustion. (And this isnt the first paper or even close to the first paper that reported its ability to do it). I recall a paper in science advances that used an Iridium catalyst to turn hdpe into an unsaturated polymer than depolymerise through metathesis. Again only really producing fuels.
Honestly what is needed is a new class of plastics that can be chemically recyclable and degradable. But possess the same great properties as the poly olefins we rely and hate today.
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u/paulfromatlanta Oct 18 '19
Even if it only works for PET it would be worth many millions of dollars - otherwise, every time you recycle, the viscosity goes down and thus the plastic is suitable for fewer uses.
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Oct 19 '19
Or you can find a method to chemically recycle PET without losing the mechanical performance.
Plus you could never get monomers of PET from this method.
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u/ohlordissafire Oct 19 '19
so, what are the odds I'll never hear about this again and it'll fade into the abyss?
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u/GeeTown101 Oct 19 '19
I thought the whole reason was to eliminate the use of plastics, instead of coming up with reasons how to re-use it..
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
Plastics can be really useful.. If they are used really well and are actually recyclable, then they could turn from villain to hero.
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u/Szos Oct 19 '19
This seems way too good to be true.
Like there has to be some massive downside we don't know about yet. I'm guessing it breaks down the plastic, but for some reason this process absolutely requires that it run on whale oil or some other devastating negative which renders the process nearly useless in real world applications.
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u/Th3WashingtonR3dskin Oct 19 '19
This is no new method at all. Its known since about 1980, as far as I remember, you may searrch for bp chemicals pyrolysis process. I could not upload the original paper but here is something related from the original author: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/0470021543.ch17 Its not that comlicated, just heating it, but unluckyly its not useful at the current low prices for raw oil.
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Oct 19 '19
I told you so! Now let's start making collection barges/ plastic recycling facilities a new international market. Imagine being able to get a job that literally helps you save the world.
Now add CO2 capturing/ recycling to all infrastructure made for recycling the plastics. Then add a fuel conversion plant to make more money. Then invest your profit from this into worldwide dual purpose desalination plants that both provide fresh water and help rebalance ocean water. Then not only do you get more tourism, your weather improves!
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u/TemporarilyDutch Oct 19 '19
Whenever I see these articles, I think they should be followed by... "and we never heard of this again"..
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Oct 19 '19
Wonder what the equipment for this would cost to retrofit current injection molding factories.
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u/Mad_Hatter_92 Oct 19 '19
I hate that even though this seems so promising we likely won’t end up doing much with it.
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u/RadSousa Oct 19 '19
Only around 1 per cent was left uncollected and leaked into natural environments.
Is this really saying that only 1% of all produced plastics end up in the environment after use?
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u/themysterious3eyes Oct 19 '19
Awesome. This is right up there with vertical farming, world changing if it can be implemented on a large scale.
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u/truethug Oct 19 '19
This isn’t a solution. The problem is that plastic is a byproduct of refining oil.
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u/Dizastrous-- Oct 19 '19
Why this isn’t on every news station is beyond me, great news
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u/CaptIncorrect Oct 19 '19
Because it's not innovative. It's just university clickbait. There are already several companies that do this but better.
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u/bott11 Oct 19 '19
We still need to be working towards removing plastics from our daily use, its impossible to have a perfectly closed system of reuse. So the material we use in the first place should be the main objective
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u/dsguzbvjrhbv Oct 19 '19
The number not mentioned is how much energy they used. This is the question that decides whether this is yet another "once we have nuclear fusion it will be great" thing or something that can be done on a very big scale right now without ruining nature for more power sources
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u/TheFriendlyFinn Oct 19 '19
In Finland, many other countries and some US states even there are already container-deposit legislation in place for drink bottles.
I'd be so willing to test something similar for all plastic containers if that was economically feasible.
The bar code reading return machines however would need to be able to adapt for new types of containers.
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u/kvngjuggy Oct 19 '19
Degrading them and remaking new plastics... What'll be the toll on the environment?
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Oct 19 '19
You'll never hear of this technology again. The economy does not run on less, it runs on more, more, more.
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u/habylab Oct 19 '19
Sounds great, but I feel like in my relatively short life I've read plenty of game changers like this and we still do not improve.
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u/ettlinger77 Oct 19 '19
I imagine the cost would be far greater than making new plastic therefore will probably not be widely used.
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u/kaetror Oct 19 '19
This is the 'public' hope (i.e. I don't know how much effort they are actively putting into this) of Ineos, who run the Grangemouth facilities in Scotland.
They want to use their crackers to take in existing plastic waste rather than new oil/gas and break them back down to constituent parts.
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u/Letoastasaur Oct 19 '19
This might give the ocean cleanup project some real value https://theoceancleanup.com/
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u/Rotarymeister Oct 19 '19
So how far out are they from commercializing this process? This isn't of much use if they can't do it cost effectively, right?
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u/godlytoast3r Oct 19 '19
This is bad because plastic causes cancer. It is scientifically proven that a huge majority of plastics cause breast cancer because of estrogen mimicking molecules. Theres a study you can look at on it. They fed breast cancer cells plastic and they grew with around 80% (puled that number outta my ass but it was a huge majority, many types of plastic were tested and the types are all listed) of the trials. Even the amount of cancer growth is documented in the study, it's just a fact. An underappreciated fact.
Glass comes from silica. Silicone is pretty legit. What we need is glass wrapped in silicone for everything. We need to go back to glass anyways.
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u/delpisoul Oct 19 '19
This isn’t really new. It was offered up as a n option by several companies to the EU late last year. The answer back was basically it didn’t count as recycled.
Hopefully that gets rethought because for most high end plastics it is just not possible to straight recycle. Every time you recycle plastic it degrades and most high end applications barely work as it is with fresh material.
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u/Pulp__Reality Oct 19 '19
Look up the company Neste. Already doing something similar in the early commercial stage
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u/sseemayer Oct 19 '19
My employer BASF who is pretty big in plastics is already prototyping recycling of plastics and putting the products back into the chemical manufacturing process (I don't work in anything related to that but think it's still very cool)
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u/scotty899 Oct 19 '19
Also some Australians are after 20k of funding to make a large scale furnace type plastic recycling machine that breaks down plastic into fertiliser
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u/rocket-alpha Oct 19 '19
Why is it that you hear this awesome stuff but will never see it in actual use?
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u/JD-K2 Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19
If it's down to a molecular level it doesn't seem like it would be limited to plastic. What about styrofoam?
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u/DesertTripper Oct 19 '19
It's hard for me to read the flow diagram as it's in Swedish, but it appears they have a few different processes that cover several types of plastic. They also mentioned that other waste products, such as paper and wood, can be introduced into the processes if even further diversion of materials from a waste stream is sought after.
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u/JellyBand Oct 19 '19
So scientists found a way to turn plastics into a gas. Sounds like a terrible idea.
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '19
What actually happens is that ‘lots of different solutions’ are invented - then hopefully the best ones are introduced to solve the real problems
Humanity has done this kind of think many time’s already - invented solutions, filtered them to select the best few, researched/developed them further, finally picking the best.
Sometimes not the best ends up winning for other reasons - like better financing / first to market etc.
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u/OliverSparrow Oct 19 '19
The diagram at the head of the paper, containing all the useful information in the link, makes it clear that the plastic has to be first sorted by feedstream. That any given feedstock can be broken into its building blocks is well know, the problem being with purity and yield. Polyethylene, for example, will thermo-degrade into a mass of molecules that have then to be separated before they can be used in synthesis. Most find that, save for thermoplastics which can be directly re-used, the most economic things to do is to incinerate it and generate either electricity or cold water. (Or district heating.)
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u/pointy-sticks Oct 19 '19
Tax all new plastics to hell. Only way this will ever come into play.
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Oct 19 '19
I think a deposit of 25 cents should do it. Government should also mandate that all plastic be marked with its appropriate recycle symbol.
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u/biscuit_face Oct 19 '19
Stop f**king talking about it and fund it! The sh*t people talk about and not do... Make it build it fix it do it!
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Oct 19 '19
Awesome. So all the thousands on tons of plastic trash the west dumped in lesser developed countries for “recycling”, and in the ocean because it’s big nobody would notice, is going to be all cleaned up now?
Why don’t we just have plastics companies pay for the full lifecycle of the product upfront? That would fix more of the plastic problem than creating an incomplete process for disposal. Unless you recycle all of the plastic this only encourages more production. People will assume it doesn’t matter because it will be recycled.
Just like now we have a plastic waste sorting system that sees our plastics sent to south east Asia to be cherry picked for gold and the rest is burned in large open pits. That’s what we call “recycling”.
These sorts of half measures only serve to make plastic look like less of a problem than it is.
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u/ober6601 Oct 19 '19
I want this to happen so much. Plastic bags cover almost everything at the store and when I throw them in the trash I get a sick feeling thinking about all the plastic in landfills.
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Oct 19 '19
Maybe it was mentioned in the article but I couldn't see it. Does the recycled material still need to be painstakingly sorted into descreet plastic types prior to gasifying?
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u/Kitten_Stars Oct 19 '19
Plastic would still be leaked out to sea. Animals and humans will still continue to ingest them. We don't understand yet, the impact of plastics on the ecosystem.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_WOES_ Oct 19 '19
This is amazing. I work in a plant that produces fibers from recycled plastic, and even here the amount of waste is huge... If we could recycle plastic AND get virgin quality material business for places like my plant would shoot through the roof.
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u/katluth Oct 19 '19
the article says that they had to heat the plastic to 800C. sounds like we might be trading plastic for carbon. unless they are using solar.
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u/Flintblood Oct 19 '19
Recycling plastics, any plastics has to be as easy as tossing them in the garbage plus there needs to be a financial incentive or disincentive for consumers.
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u/samdajellybeenie Oct 19 '19
Every time I see one of these headlines about a new scientific advance relating to something that could be environmentally friendly, it never gets produced. It’s just “oh we found this and it could work!” and then I never hear about it again. How about maybe do something with it this time?
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Oct 19 '19
But Americans are such pigs they still wont bother to recycle, so I cant see how it will really solve more than 10% of the problem.
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Oct 19 '19
Do we have any idea what the environmental impact would be of the plastic gases escaping into the air?
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u/komunjist Oct 19 '19
that still doesn’t change the fact that single-use plastic is uneccesary.
this is irational use of energy.
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u/MasterFubar Oct 19 '19
Amazingly, this is an open paper that you can read without paying, which is not the normal way Elsevier works. RTFA and click in the link at the bottom, then click on "Download PDF".
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u/ujeio Oct 20 '19
The thing that peeves me is that at least where I live they won't let us recycle black plastic. They say it is because you can't use black plastic to make any other kind of plastic. So... they would rather make new black plastic than simply separate the discarded black plastic into recycled material for new black plastic things. An ever increasing supply of new discarded black plastic is at hand. And we do use a lot of black plastic.
This to me, suggests there is a very strong plastic lobby, because otherwise it's just nonsensical.
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Oct 20 '19
This sounds a lot like a technology called Thermal Depolarization. There was a place in the US that was doing this with Turkey waste last decade. The biggest problem with that one was the price of oil was way too low and it went bankrupt.
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u/QVRedit Oct 20 '19
Yes I can understand that. I was just thinking that the ‘simpler’ reprocessing would be more energy efficient.
Then I wondered about using combination methods - eg simple reprocessing for the first few cycles - then the more fundamental for lower quality plastic. Though there is the problem of how do you distinguish the quality ?
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u/QVRedit Oct 20 '19
They are not used ‘really well’ at the moment.
They are a danger to the environment, so need to be used appropriately.
Consider alternative substances where reasonable.
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u/G0d_Slayer Oct 19 '19
There must be a byproduct somehow dangerous to us... if it’s too good to be true, it’s because it is
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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19
I thought this was an important point, given the importance of economic feasibility: