Plastic should be burned to make electricity.
It can be made into diesel......................
Makes no sense to bury combustible items that can be incinerated to make steam to drive turbines to make electricity.
Recycling plastics and paper has always been a big scam. I was the Public Works Director in county that operated a reginal landfill, which of course has a recycling program. My staff & I knew it was a loser, but the public wanted it to feel good about themselves. It wasn’t until the bottom fell out completely when the Chinese publicly announced it would no longer accept plastic. Once that happened the County Commissioners canned the recycle program.
That being said, why is it that we can recycle metal products to make new metal product, but plastic cannot be recycled to make new plastic products? We’ve all seen someone throw a plastic bottle into a fire and watch it melt.
The other possibility is to heat it until it outgasses, then recover the gasses and use them to synthesize new polymers.
Then you don’t have to worry about depolymerization which can happen if you shoot the polymer through a screw extruder too many times.
I’m not a chemical engineer so I don’t know the details but we covered this in packaging engineering.
That is exactly where my trash and most plastic goes in southern NH and eastern MA. Mine goes to Wheelabrator Technologies in NH. They burn the trash, make steam, turn a turbine, sell electricity back to the grid. This is because most landfill space here has been used up. So, they save that for construction debris and other things that can no be burned.
However, cardboard, tin cans(steel), aluminum and glass all is recyclable because the cost/ton to get rid of that is cheaper than the cost to haul it to where they burn it. In fact you get PAID for ALUMINUM and STEEL, depending on the value of scrap. At times ALUMINUM is worth a lot of money. About ten years ago a compacted 25’ dumpster of aluminum was worth $25K.
FYI, we do not have a bottle(deposit $.05) on bottles and cans like all the other northeastern states.
right? i always wondered why it couldn’t be used in pavement...
Plastic is oil.