Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwa | Hacker News Reader

In fuel pellet form, isn’t it a more-or-less direct substitute for oil or coal that would have been burned anyway? So until the grid fully eliminates other petroleum products from the mix, isn’t this more or less a similar carbon cost, with the added benefit of less landfill impact?

What’s wrong with recycling the plastic into energy?

View on HN

How energy-positive is incinerating the plastic when it needs dedicated collection, sorting, processing into pellets, and specialized incineration to scrub waste gasses, compared to collecting natural gas and burning it?

The difference is what determines whether burying or burning the plastic is better from a C02 emission standpoint.

Also, if we don't have enough plastic to completely offset the need for natural gas energy production, then the biggest cost of natural gas- the drilling and transporting- isn't a part of the equation.

On the other hand, dumping garbage isn't free, either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44

Natural gas wells go dry eventually, and new sites need to be developed. Slowing down the consumption is still a win on reducing the environment disruption of both land filling, and running new facilities to get to new natural gas deposits.

For a CO2 emission stand point, there is still a lot of trucking of waste if it is getting land filled, plus land filling needs to burn a lot of diesel for creating and operating landfills. Burning plastic also likely more energy positive than going through the washing cycle to get food residue off containers to get them clean enough to use. You can just burn the food residue.

Most definitions of “recycle” are from the recycling of glass, aluminium, paper etc - they involve the material being reused in approximately the same form.

Being “burned” is how most English speakers would describe being “recycled into energy”

Burning is the how, but turning it into useful energy is the what. When I think of burning waste, I think of burn pits: making the stuff go away, but not making anything new with it. This seems different from that (and even a clean, high-temperature incinerator, one that fully combusts everything, is a different beast from a smoggy sooty open burn).

Of course glass, aluminum, and paper aren’t made of lightly-modified oil: they’re not all that useful as far as producing energy, nor can they substitute for new extraction of an energy resource.

I guess you could process paper into pulp pellets for fuel, and by instead turning paper into slightly-crappier paper you cut out a highly intensive transformation from timber to paper. But for plastics, isn’t the transformation from oil to plastic relatively minor?

Why is it especially virtuous for the end recycled product to be a structural product as opposed to a fuel product? Especially when it’s substituting for existing petroleum-based production, and unlikely ever to drive demand of its own? And why would burying it in the ground compare favorably to either?

When people think of burning, they think of a trash / leaf pile in a yard, not an arc reactor or modern turbinrengine; but that doesn't mean we don't fly jet engines or run power plants

This seems like a plausible argument, but you can extend it to any source of fossil fuels. What's wrong with providing oil from my oil well, since it's a substitute for oil or coal from another provider that would have been burnt anyway?

At the margin, some of it must be competing with renewables. Additional supply of fossil fuels - cheap, or even negatively priced - must drive down the price of energy and make investment in renewables less attractive.

Incinerating plastics is only good if landfill is bad. Landfill really seems like it could be made cheap and safe: a landfill of a single cubic mile would last the US for 20 years.

>What’s wrong with recycling the plastic into energy?

Anything that vents ancient buried carbon into the atmosphere is wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com