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Comment by sergeykish | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 :)

> 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-...

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