A plastic bag’s 2000-mile journey
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Burning plastic is clearly dirty, but with sufficient heat and airborne pollutant scrubbers I doubt it's any worse than coal.
It depends on which plastic exactly (which is one of the reasons the whole "plastic=bad" mentality irritates me in the same way as stereotyping), but a regular plastic bag is going to be almost pure polyethylene --- essentially a very long-chain wax --- and combustion of that will definitely be cleaner than coal. At the other end are the halogenated polymers like PVC and PTFE whose combustion products are definitely much worse than coal.
With a properly made incinerator (which isn't hard to do) burning plastic is cleaner than burning oil or coal. A bit of filtration will catch the halogens in case they slip in.
PVC... man, PVC is in a lot of things. Surprisingly many things. The monomer/polymer itself isn't that awful, but some of the plasticizers truly scare me. And I'm often favorably inclined towards the chemical industry!
I keep wondering if there is a way to make a "stomach" that can dissolve plastic/make energy with it, whether directly or as an electrolyte base (add zinc/copper)
I am aware of the bacteria that can eat plastic but too slow
I've been noticing threads that I swear I read days ago on the front page and their dates are from today.
It's really confusing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool May be involved.
Also actually that covers a huge portion of plastics considered "strong enough" ironically perhaps, this may turn out to be a huge nightmare but we won't be here to see it, so
Isn't plastic's source the byproduct of fossil fuel generation, and therefore there are still economic incentive to use it somehow, as long as we keep extracting oil?
"Recycling doesn't work" is pro-corporate click bait.
"Recycling regulation only makes things worse" is even more so.
"Corporations try to wriggle out of every regulation and are basically sociopathic so you need to rule them with an iron fist of democratic oversight" seems more accurate but less likely to make it into a corporate press designed from inception to deliver the opposite message.
"Recycling is great" is also pro-corporate, supporting and promoting the guilt-free use of plastics instead of dealing with the problems of plastics.
Old "recycling doesn't work" articles used to feature quotes from the very same industry groups that are now being accused of inventing recycling to fool consumers.