Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

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PET being a 100% recyclable outlier and much of plastics use being inherently unrecyclable aren't necessarily contradictory.

Open questions would be: how much use can be replaced with recyclable variants on the application side? (perhaps some use cases are not doable with PET?) How much use can be replaced on the supply side? (can only a fraction of the crude extracted from the ground enter that PET cycle or does a percentage of the extracted mass have to become other kinds of plastics that are inherently unrecyclable?)

And as long as any of those questions stay answered "not all" and we are still burning some of the extracted crude for energy: how much efficiency does that energy conversion lose when the crude takes a detour as un-recyclable plastics application between getting extracted from the ground and ending up in the atmosphere after burning? If that efficiency loss is small, un-recyclable plastics use can be environmentally cheap if it happens within the envelope of unavoidable energy use and vice versa.

(edit: mis-posted before)

I've responded to food grade plastics. As I'm trying to stick to Reduce Reuse Recycle, I choose PET and stay away from PP. And we need good HDPE recycling.

There are also ABS, PVC and many others — construction, textiles, shoes, asphalt, consumer goods. But they are not sold as recyclable.

EDIT: can we incinerate trash instead of burning oil? It is a controversial topic.

Would it produce less CO2 than glass? Assuming green energy no, but in such case we could sequence carbon from air. Would it require less energy than recycling? I don't think so.

Many plastics used in construction tend to have much longer lifespans (years to decades) so their recycleability, whilst it shouldn't be dismissed, is a less immediate concern.

E.g., I'm adding PVC cable and pipe ducting in various areas of my house, and am using polycarbonate discs as spacers for shelf uprights on an uneven wall. Both will stay in situ at least until I move (which I have no plans to do at present).

When I get 35 kg bags of sand and gravel, I keep the bags and reuse them for years now. They are almost worth the price of their contents.

> EDIT: can we incinerate trash instead of burning oil? It is a controversial topic.

In many parts of the world even the question of incinerating trash instead of coal is still meaningful and that one should be far less controversial.

Looks like incinerator may leak toxins [1]. It is possible to construct modern incinerator that should not leak [2]. So Europe can afford it, can "many parts of the world"?

Still questions remain

* Should we mark it as clean energy?

* Should we subsidy it? Or should we subsidy recycling?

[1] https://www.no-burn.org/europewasteburning/

[2] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/05/03/copenhagen-trash-...

This is called Waste Valorization and is common in Europe. The idea is to run efficicent incinerators (with good filters on emissions to catch various nasty things we don't want in the air/soil/water and use the energy for heating purposes.

I was just wondering if it is possible to just vaporize the matter and absorb/recycle the pollutants and toxic part and release the rest to the atmosphere. And I saw your post :)

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