Yeah that’s the problem. Plastic solves a logistics problem, not a structural problem.
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
You can have local manufacturing processes so that it doesn't have to get stuck in a truck in Texas for a month.
And there'll still be uses for the long lived plastics. You don't have to use one plastic for everything - like we don't today.
Building a box that can last for centuries when you're only going to use it for 25 minutes and toss it is pretty wild if you think about it.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
A large amount of plastic recycling is burned, but always in secret, because when people find out they freak out, because they mistakenly think that making some new plastic out of it is somehow better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene
and even
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene
are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that. One reason we quit burning trash in many places is the presence of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
[1] Plenty of others contain oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate or nitrogen such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon
In any case incinerators can handle the chlorine - it's so reactive that it's actually very easy to filter.
> You can't really "burn up" heavy metals
There are no heavy metals in plastic, and very little in consumer waste as a whole.
> are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that
But those 3 you listed are the vast majority of the thrown out plastics.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
Your point about building waste is valid, but I think most of that stuff goes in dumpsters and can be directed to a different wasting handling.
We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum.
That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?