Well, they used a "simple, inexpensive catalyst" and then HEATED the plastic/catalyst mysture. Nowhere in the article it gives you an estimate of the final cost of the process.
> Catalytic amounts of AC/MoO2 selectively convert waste PET into its monomer, terephthalic acid (TPA), within 4 h at 265 °C with yields as high as 94% under 1 atm air.
I'm not a chemist so don't know if you can find a way to calculate the cost, but the authors claim that it's cheaper than current methods.
The bigger deal imo is that it recovers PET monomers from mixed plastics, which means avoiding manufacturing more plastic.
I think most recycling methods for PET require melting anyway.
The thing is BTX chemicals and other precursors of mass produced plastics cost about 50 cents a pound which makes it hard for any kind of recycling process to be competitive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(chemistry)
We've had almost a century of subsidization of the oil industry. The gov't needs to play a bigger similar role if the recycling industry is ever gonna be able to compete
We need a tax on the full lifecycle cost of plastics so we can stop treating waste as an economic externality
It would be cheaper to just ban stuff like polyester fleece than to try to clean it up after.
This approach closes the loop in a way which encourages manufacturers to re-engineer their products to be less expensive to recycle.
If some celebrity wants to single-handedly fund the development of a microplastics recovery technology as part of a red carpet fashion item, I'm OK with that.
Vs selectively picking products which have easy alternatives and providing phase out periods which match the difficulty of replacing them. If you tell the public you are going to make car tires cost millions of dollars, you'll be voted out. If you tell them that plastic confetti will be replaced with paper confetti in 12 months you'll make real progress.
This doesn't prevent innovation. Scientists will still do research, develop new recycling tech and processes.
There are definitely reasons to subsidize some products - medical devices, for instance - as you say, things without readily available alternatives. I'm not writing a detailed transition plan here, just pointing out observations.
We are subsidizing these materials with our health and our environment. And it affects certain people more than others—usually people who have the least say in it
A 100% linen shirt currently costs around $40 and, when cared for properly, can last a lifetime. Rubber bands made out of natural rubber are much stronger and will last at least 10x as long as plastic ones and are about the same price. I could go on, but the alternatives exist and are already often much cheaper in the long run.
You're just over rationalizing it with 101-level economics ;).
Also no need for the patronizing comment. Economic externalities are a valid criticism of market failures and you haven't provided the more convincing, "advanced economics" jargon-laden analysis you're pretending to harbor
So just a blanket "Charge everything based on it's cleanup costs" doesn't work.
Maybe in the future you laser-atomize every spec that floats past the actor inside an 8ft cube. Who knows?
I don't think it'd be practical to switch overnight - much of our societal infrastructure needs re-engineering for sustainability which will take time - perhaps a gradually increasing percentage of externalized costs can be integrated over time. It'd be real progress toward a Venus Project style resource based economy.
In theory, I agree with you, but trying to internalize these cost is itself extremely costly. That's why the criticism about econ-101 level reasoning: it's a convincing idea in theory that isn't tractable at all in practice and can only end up with a bureaucratic nightmare.
The EU has many such rules that are designed around economics first principle like that, in order to build an “efficient market”, and they are all extremely burdensome and at the same time ineffective (see EU-ETS, the single Electricity market, CBAM, etc.)
In the realm of policies, tractability is always preferable to theoretical elegance.
Mechanical recycling or any flavor of chemical recycling (pyrolysis, hydrolysis, etc.) all suffer from the same hurdle. If the target product of the recycling process is a TPA-derived plastic (be it for clothing or soda bottles), then mechanical recycling is usually cheaper, since it produces a product that only needs to be reshaped and remolded to give shirts or jugs. Chemical recycling converts PET into its constitutive monomers, and to (re)produce a TPA-derived plastic from the monomers requires a not inexpensive (re)polymerization step, in addition to reshaping and remolding.
Chemists, even highly regarded ones like Tobin Marks, are less interested in "solving" the PET recycling issue and more interested in the fundamental chemistry involved in chemical recycling. Issues of Green Chemistry (or blurbs in phys.org) are not the appropriate reading materials to get insight into costs, scale-up, etc.. Very few, if any, academic journals are focused on such matters, and rightly so, in my opinion.
Finding it also odd that biodegradable plastics and safer alternatives are going quiet. As if the new scheme is to keep fossil fuel companies rolling, with the promise that one day a solution to get rid of incalculable mountains of plastic will be found. Don't worry, feel free to plastic pollute, because one day there will be a solution.
[1] https://www.unep.org/plastic-pollution
[2] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ocean_plastics...
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/microplas...
[4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/microplas...
[5] https://scitechdaily.com/startling-discovery-scientists-find...
They tend not to be a good solution to anything.
There are a couple of ways of making degradable plastic. One is to add something to their manufacture so they break down into shorter chains which their supporters tell you will then further break down. These are generally referred to as OXO degradable.
Another is to use bio based plastics such as PLA or cellulose. These both have poor performance compares to oil based plastics.
All of these also require industrial composting where they add no nutrition to the compost, effectively just bulking it out. They [generally] do not break down when littered or even placed in a domestic compost heap.
There is also a problem because these plastics are virtually impossible to sort from recyclable plastics so if they get in each other waste stream the whole batch can be rendered contaminated and useless.
Kind of like fresh air exchange into a heated house where new air in gets heated exchanging with old air out
All industrial processes recycle heat extensively. Heck even distillation based desalination isn't that inefficient because you do in fact recover the heat.
Actually, the tap water is optional.
And instead of monomers, the end product is carbon - which is even more recyclable!