Recycling Plastic

[Anonymous No.16541557]

What is it about the chemical/physical makeup of plastics that make recycling it for cheap so difficult? I know you can melt glass and metals down and paper can be made into pulp, but what is it about plastic that makes it so hard to recycle?

[Anonymous No.16541573]

>but what is it about plastic that makes it so hard to recycle?
nothing, it's just much more expensive and energy inefficient than make new.

[Anonymous No.16541578]

>>16541573
But what makes it so expensive and energy inefficient?

[Anonymous No.16541583]

>>16541578
plastics are just a byproduct of refining crude oil so it's basically free. final plastic products are highly space inefficient, you will lose lots of money on transport and handling it. there's lots of types of plastics, separating them will require some expensive machines. there's probably some degradation when melting it again so you have to sell it for cheap to be used only in cheap low quality products.

[Anonymous No.16541660]

plastics should be reserved for essential applications where no other material will do

[Anonymous No.16541703]

>>16541557
You can't "melt" plastic the same way you can melt metal and glass. If you melt metal down it's still metal and when it cools down it will still be metal. If you heat plastic it stops being plastic and turns into hydrocarbon goo or evaporates into the air. You lose the qualities that are most interesting with the material if you melt or shred it. More apt comparison would be trying to recycle wood by melting it. It just doesn't work like that.

It's also not that difficult to recycle,it is in fact done all the time. It's just that it's worthless to do so. By design most plastic objects are small and light and come in weird shapes, usually in consumer applications instead of industrial, those are after all the best use cases for plastics. But that in off itself means it's difficult and expensive to recycle because now you have to drive around with trucks gathering few grams of plastic here and few grams there to come up with any significant quantity, meanwhile a refineries shits this stuff out basically for free all without any of the drawbacks of actually trying to use recycled plastic as per the first point about it being destroyed and degraded in the process. Then you gotta carefully sort the dozens of different plastics and wash and separate and sort and process away all the impurities that the plastics inevitably have. It's just a very low margin business.

[Anonymous No.16541733]

>>16541703
OK, I see. So it's much cheaper to burn them, but why aren't we championing burning plastic and carefully collecting and using the byproducts of burning plastic for useful stuff? I heard a byproduct of burning plastic is HCl, and that's useful.

[Anonymous No.16541773]

>>16541733
>byproducts of burning plastic
Most plastic are just a hydrocarbon, it doesn't have byproducts except the additives that may or may not be in any given plastic or contaminated plastic.

>but why aren't we championing burning plastic
The 2nd point still applies. To operate profitably you still have to collect and separate it from all the stuff you can't burn which depending on how much you can incentivize the people to do this work for free for you or even convince them to pay you to do this work for free for you may be a process that simply doesn't pay out in terms of money or even net energy.
Second plastics aren't clean, not just in terms of all the scraps and paints and colors that they have but also additives that are deliberately in the plastics. These can be toxic or harmful to the environment, humans or the plant that processes or burns them like the various chlorides. Acid as a byproduct of burning something for instance means you now have corroding chimney and other pipes + acid rain to deal with, it doesn't come out like wood ash after burning for you to neatly collect. So you can't "just burn" them, you need to separate and only burn certain plastics while discarding or treating others.

Of course again plastics are often used as a fuel for incinerators and one of those is the #2 destination for any "recycled" plastic right after landfills.

[Anonymous No.16543340]

>>16541660
honestly they should, frankly there's not much point in burning more oil in order to remelt plastic in order to recycle it

[Anonymous No.16544139]

>>16541557
>What is it about the chemical/physical makeup of plastics that make recycling it for cheap so difficult?
Plastic is made of molecules made of chains of simpler molecules called monomers, i think. When they chain they form a polymer. The polymers are like threads, long and enmeshed with other threads. Rubber is similar. Paper is similar (made of threads) and clothing obviously is also made of threads, visible to the naked eye.
Asking why is hard to recycle plastic is like asking why it is hard to recycle fabric. When you melt the plastic you shred these threads, when they cool down the new plastic has shorter threads and behaves different, mechanically.
Perhaps theres a way to disintegrate plastic into its fundamental monomers and reform it into long threads from there. It would be harder than just melting it. For instance you'd have to turn polyethylene into ethylene, which is a gas. Should not be a problem for a chemical plant desu

[Anonymous No.16544149]

>>16541557
>what makes it so hard
It's burnable, and they dope it with shit that shouldn't be burned. The easiest way out was always to burn it, and they closed that option to themselves.

[Anonymous No.16544186]

>>16541557
Its unironically better to just burn them in a furnace for power.
https://lightonconspiracies.com/this-revolutionary-blast-furnace-vaporizes-trash-and-turns-it-into-clean-energy-without-any-emissions/

They won't because Energy is a cartel that fixes prices and they never once gave a shit about price reduction.

[Anonymous No.16544207]

>>16541583
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadian-cities-report-rise-in-homelessness-and-in-tent-fires-as-winter-sets-in-1.6687281

So actually there is a basis of parking outside a bottle depot with a bottle to diesel converter and getting the homeless to stop flaring off the propane tanks

[Anonymous No.16544278]

>>16544139
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/could-new-process-finally-turn-polyethylene-bags-plastics-something-useful
Like this
>But a new process developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could change all that. The process uses catalysts to break the long polyethylene (PE) polymers into uniform chunks — the three-carbon molecule propylene — that are the feedstocks for making other types of high-value plastic, such as polypropylene.

[Anonymous No.16547459]

>>16541578
Most plastic is just C, H, and O but some is fluorinated (like PTFE) or chlorinated (like PVC) and mixing it all together becomes a chemical mess that is also toxic.
Burning it is probably the most efficient thing if you can get the halogens out, but politically it is less acceptable then burning lignite. It is politics so it doesn't have to make sense.

[Anonymous No.16547465]

Theres a guy on a tropical island that takes plastic waste and converts it to diesel fuel so they can make coconut soap.

[Anonymous No.16547514]

>make bacteria that eats plastic
>set it free
>plastic starts to disappear from nature
>but suddenly things start to fall apart in cities

[Anonymous No.16547604]

>>16547514
About half the fibres in clothing is synthetic, in cases like spandex tights it is 100 precent. This could be interesting.

[Anonymous No.16547699]

>>16541773
>>16541557
is burned plastic efficient as a fuel? tehcnically it is used in some energy generation facilities, and there is also the option to heat it and turn it into a diesel-like fuel. pyrolisys is around 45-50% energy efficient, which is decent enough if you ask me, the rest of the composition evaporates and can be captured or is turned in a coal-like hard carbon-material.

I am not a chemist, so I am just talking based on what I remember from watching a report on plastic waste paralysis, but watchint it got me thinking that maybe all waste (plastic, organic and anything that is not mineral and inorganic) sohuld just be shredded and heated until it becomes a sort of liquid fuel, with some solid residues that can be used as solid fuel.

like I said, I am no chemist, but it such a thing were possible, with the addition of various catalyzers and residual oil products such as fuels and oils, I don't see why it would not a better outcome that trying and failing to recycle everything, living with open air landfills.

if such a thing were possible, I would advocate for the building of installations where all waste and residues are combined to create fuels. it's a good thing that those fuels will be useable with current technology.

[Anonymous No.16547743]

>>16541557
Plastic is a messy material at a molecular level. It's not like aluminium or iron where you can melt it and get the metal back. Plastic is made of a complicated solid-ish mess of carbon and other shit. If you heat it up it will eventually burn or turn into a gooey mess that can't be used for anything. Plastic is synthesised from relatively simple chemicals, but there's no way to transform it back into those chemicals (well, no way that isn't incredibly expensive). If your plastic is very pure and all of the same type, it may be possible to form it into new shapes and perhaps modify it somewhat through heating and chemical treatment, but the recycled plastic won't even resemble what you started with, and probably won't be suitable for further recycling. Aluminium and shit can be recycled indefinitely.