Posted on 10/09/2019 4:45:07 PM PDT by grundle
Recycling plastic uses up a lot of resources, and after all the hauling around, sorting, and processing of bottles and containers, it often ends up getting thrown away or burned.
MIT business researcher Andrew McAfee says we'd be better off putting our plastic waste into well-managed landfills.
He argues we should spend our "mental budget for thinking about the Earth on more high-impact changes," like carbon taxes on major polluters and nuclear energy.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
*Do you know how many Dinosaurs had to die to make that plastic bag?
Some of the plastics are converted to diesel fuel and home heating oil. I consume some of the diesel oil in my Unimog. A percentage of our home heating oil is from that source too.
The plastic that goes about 10 miles south is shredded and converted into septic system leach field components of the Presby Maze.
Lol, good for her. Shake them up a bit. :)
“Yo could put 100 years of the all the US trash in a landfill 250 square miles in size and 400 feet deep. Thats a tiny area in a country of 3.8 MILLION square miles.”
Like most academics the author is not a realist. No landfill that size and depth is going to be approved anywhere; which is why the landfill industry itself is always looking for new places some state will allow them to make a landfill.
We can use giant landfills to fight climate change.
Put up one on the east and west sides of every major city. Then the sun only cooks these concrete jungles during the mid day hours, since the mountains of trash would block the sunlight during other hours.
I’m sure all the liberals on Manhattan’s east and west sides would give up their views so they could help save the planet by could creating these shoreline landfills along the Hudson and East rivers, right?
Think how much temps could be lowered if these urban solar heat centers became valleys between two landfills that were shaded for most of the day!
Seesh, the solution is at hand, even coming from what is probably a true scientist, and then someone wants to through a wrench in the works.
Plastics can be turned into oil using thermal depolymerization/hydrothermal liquefaction. In some processes it doesn’t even matter if they are contaminated with food or other substances as other organic materials get broken down and other stuff separates during the process.
Of course the left hates it because people could use the oil as fuel and actually eliminating the plastic waste would take away one of their pet issues.
They’ll just ban plastic now. Pagans need to protect their Gaia.
https://commonsensehome.com/how-to-make-a-burn-barrel/
HOW TO MAKE A BURN BARREL – BURN SAFE WITH LESS SMOKE
I took it we need to focus on more nuclear energy??
Sadly, here in FL it doesn't. It really has a low tolerance to UV. My neighborhood replaced our docks with it a few years ago and it already needs to be replaced.
“.. like carbon taxes on major polluters and nuclear energy.”
Yep, double down on stupid.
Our household has worked hard to remove as much use of plastic from our lives as possible. The little bit we do use, we burn with all our paper based trash.
I wasn't aware of this. Just did some reading. Process looks simple enough but requires temps of 300c+. I couldn't find anywhere that indicated the extracted fuel exceeded the process demand. Even if it was a net zero I'd be in favor.
Call me a tree-hugger but I think micro plastics are are far greater threat to the planet than anything else we manifest.
I thought someone had developed a pretty good system for recycling by melting it all in a vat. The theory is that you can melt many different kinds of recyclables in the same superheated tank, and the nature of the materials would self-sort themselves. Think of how oil and water won’t mix. Maybe this method was never developed after all?
On the same subject, since plastics are derived from petroleum, what kind of energy does burning it release? Is it usable energy? It seems so odd that we can’t get something useful out of old plastic. Our local landfill utilizes the degradation of the trash within, which releases methane, and uses that methane to power the local county jail. No joke, look into the Elkhart County Jail in Indiana if you need proof.
Yep, all this sorting of garbage is mostly busy work to make people feel better.
The wikipedia page on thermal depolymerization claims about a 6x return on the process energy when the waste source is turkey offal, and suggests that it could be higher for plastics.
Three died, way back in 1961. But I think they're the only ones.
Putting plastics into landfills doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s better than where it ends up now when sent overseas.
What really bothers me is plastics that end up in the oceans and most of that comes from Asian countries that use their rivers as dumpsters so it all flows out to sea. It doesn’t matter what we do until that behavior is stopped.
Here’s a little video about where Canadian plastics go and the look on a recyclers face when she realizes it’s all a scam.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis
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