Oddbean

The plastics industry has been telling people and politicians for years that "plastic can be recycled", and we trusted them, so we kept up using plastic for every damn thing in society, from food and candy wrappings, to shopping bags. In the mean time, many tens of thousands of faithful recycling people have dutifully been operating plastics collection and reclamation initiatives all over the planet for years, accumulating huge stores of packed wrapping and crushed bottles; megatonnes of disposed, soiled plastic has ended up in storage, waiting to get recycled. There's just a bit of a problem. The plastic industry lied to us all. "Plastic" is a concept that covers so many different kinds of plasticS that are chemically different from each other, and cannot currently realistically be mixed together if you were to try to reclaim the constituent materials. We probably won't have the technology to micro-sort plastics and plastic tearings and fragments effectively for at least a decade. Same goes for chemical processes that can handle contamination of one plastic recycling feedstock with traces from other kinds of plastic. (I could be wrong here but I haven't heard of any such chemical process.) They did find a fungi at the bottom of a German lake recently that seems to eat away at pladtics when there's no other food sources available, but it's unknown if that can be used to break down plastic waste any time soon. So, unless we are to keep storing currently un-recyclavle plastics for some more decades in the hope that the technology to recycle it arises and is brought online quickly, we have only one thing to do with the pile of plastic that's the size of half of Manhattan: Shred it; granulate it and mix it into particulate coal-feed power plants fuel to burn it together with the coal. Only in the coal plants are temperatures in the combustion chamber high enough to destroy (oxygenate) the chlorinated and flouridated compounds that would otherwise crate nasty, noxious fumes. It'll probably still need additional smoke-flue treatment though. So what can we learn from this? Large industries and industrial special interests organisations are lying to us often, and they'll keep up their lies for decades without vatting an eye, to assure their own livelyhood, no matter the cost to the rest of society. So, if you, like me, have dutifully been sorting your household waste by category, and properly disposing of it for years on end, then the plastics industry has taken you for a gullible fool. #environment #rebellion