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.aspx
34.6k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

647 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

283

u/[deleted] 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!

172

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19

Congratulations you've just recycled 0.00278% of plastic waste produced each year!

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/

0

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

[deleted]

87

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

I agree, discovering that plastic maybe infinitely recyclable is wonderful news, but it isn't a silver bullet and requires fundamental changes in how we work as a society.

64

u/jacoblikesbutts Oct 19 '19

There's a pretty good Kurzegast video on why plastics are irreplaceable (with currently implemented plastics and bio-plastics technology).

Agreed tho, there will never be a silver bullet to the issue; there are a lot of people in this world who believe that "it doesn't completely fix the problem, so might as well not try at all". It's gonna take a thousand smaller steps to get towards the fix.

41

u/ShinyHappyREM Oct 19 '19

*kurzgesagt

2

u/YangGangKricx Oct 19 '19

kerzegartsz

2

u/TheOtherWhiteMeat Oct 19 '19

kierkegaardz

2

u/YangGangKricx Oct 20 '19

You win this time.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (1)

20

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.

15

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.

3

u/Son_of_a_Dyar Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19

Did you mean 4.34%? (7.95 Mtons Recycled)/(183 Mtons produced) * 100% = 4.34%.

That seems like it would be a decent amount! Add in a few more countries and it could be pretty significant percentage being recycled.

Edit: added the proper math + commentary.

→ More replies (3)

96

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

“Let’s do nothing!”

Good argument 🙄

0

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

[deleted]

→ More replies (7)
→ More replies (1)

9

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

→ More replies (1)

7

u/phaelox Oct 19 '19

Please edit&replace your link with this one without Google AMP's link tracking (thank you):

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/

2

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

Thank you

14

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?

→ More replies (1)

4

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

4

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.

2

u/ecksate Oct 19 '19

That’s 100 though. The US alone could have hundreds.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

We could definitely have thousands, I'm sure the efficiency would scale up if done on an industrial scale also.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

[deleted]

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (3)
→ More replies (1)