alt Hacker NewsAll of this plastic should be shoveled into a plasma gasifier. This performance art is just a grift. Recycling it results in suboptimal downstream products, landfilling it allows for future mismanagement (methane emissions, groundwater contamination). Gasification is cleaner than incineration, and you can burn the syn gas produced to recover some energy for cogeneration. Resulting slag produced is inert and can be safely landfilled.
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It's not really clear to me why it is better to build the required infrastructure, transport things to an incinerator and destroy them than have at least some of them locally recycled into useful stuff and spread some knowledge and experience to more people about materials and techniques involved... It's also not clear why you think the downstream products are suboptimal.
Exactly: plastic is already cheap in the pristine version, the mixed, contaminated is a nonsense product, valid only as a grift, greenwashing prop. Burn it and handle the remains properly.
Is there any (realistic) concern that plasma gasification causes an adverse incentive to generate additional waste vs waste reduction efforts because now localities are, to some degree, dependent on feeding the machine to generate electricity? Do localities with plasma gasifiers end up purchasing waste from elsewhere to maintain waste input stocks? I am not familiar with the economics here.