Another question is what to do with all the existing plastic. From what I understand there’s not really anything other than high temperature burning that will safely get rid of it without turning it to micro plastic eventually
The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere.
I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world and put it in one place it would be a kilometer cubed, or something like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/world/asia/indias-plague-...
The US alone produces near 300 million tons per year, and a kilometer cube of water weights 1,000 million tons.
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
So if we go by that stat (300 million tons per year) we need 0.3km^3 per year for the United States to store all of its waste. So let’s say we have a hundred years worth, that’s 30km^3. Could we dig a hole 30km^3 somewhere? Not really, we can’t dig that deep generally. If we made this hole (or structure, it could have walls and a net over possibly) 100km by 100km it would need to be 2.7km deep/high to store 100 years of garbage.
It would be difficult to do this, and would probably need more area to be feasible, but I would think it would be less of a mess environmentally to try to contain the problem to a few sites like this rather than having smaller poorly contained dumps all over the world.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...