RE: We Created Plastic. We can't do without it. Now, We're Dying in it: A Study of how Degrading Plastic Emits Greenhouse Gases
Production of a large number of the single-use plastics should be stopped...but I seriously doubt that we will stop producing plastics all-together. I'm not really surprised that they produce these gases, but it is interesting. This is part of the natural breakdown process. Similar happens with carbon waste.
What I must adamantly disagree with you on is that recycling technologies are complex. You can sort plastics by hand with the recycling label, or by weight and density after shredding. Shredding plastics can be done with common equipment, like a wood chipper. You can just put the pieces in water to sort them by density. They can then be melted down and reformed easily.
We can also very easily turn them back into oil, with something as simple as a gasifier, which is basically just a wood burning stove with a cooler on the exhaust, that then collects the oil that falls out from the fumes. That oil can then be easily refined by cooking it at high temperatures, in a process very similar to distillation.
These things are not complex. People actually do them in their backyard when they have a need to. We just need to educate people on how they're done, and put people to work cleaning up the plastic that we have littered everywhere.
Technically, the biggest issues that come sup at scale, like at a MRF, is contamination and commingling. There are also market volatility issues, largely driven by acceptable reuse - it's difficult to make a a foodsafe container when there's no way to tell if the milk jug on the line was discarded after use or was reused when someone changed their oil.
Easy in the backyard, very complex at a industrial scales that require profitability, stability, and air pollution control. Analogous to 'you can make energy by burning refuse to power a steam driven generator."
You're right that you absolutely can run into problems when dealing with industrial level. One of the major ones when dealing with trash is contamination. But these are not insurmountable problems. The primary difficulty is education.
We also need to get more recycling plants built more places, even if we start using less plastic, because we still have so much out there.
If you build a gasifier correctly, you shouldn't have any problems with pollution, as it should be collected. Of course, if you don't build it correctly you can get carbon monoxide poisoning.
Well, yes, of course. But such a small statement contains a huge amount of capital expenditure and engineering expertise.
I think that's good. We should just try to do more by making people understand the dangers and the simple ways to get rid of this plastics or recycle them.
Thanks for your comments... Have a nice day