| General > General Technical Chat |
| How to recycle plastics |
| << < (3/5) > >> |
| abquke:
Relabel "landfill" as "carbon sequestration". Problem solved. |
| langwadt:
--- Quote from: strawberry on August 03, 2022, 11:49:43 am ---oil refinery wont pileup its excess produced plastics energy recovery is waste of fantastic material (corn based plastics are not as durable) landfill is technically a large resource storage (except that ground water contamination part) mark standard plastic material types with UV/IR ink -- do optical sorting -- chop -- wash -- dry -- melt but noone would buy it if there is new quality material available or some fish net scraps --- End quote --- reusing plastic cost a lot of resourcesfor an inferior end product, glass and metal are recycled because it saves resources and the end product is just as good |
| Ranayna:
--- Quote from: abquke on August 03, 2022, 12:22:04 pm ---Relabel "landfill" as "carbon sequestration". Problem solved. --- End quote --- That would only make any sense if the plastic that ends up in the landfill has been made from some organic material that was not sequestered eons ago. |
| AndyBeez:
Picture this... 500kg of VHS video tapes. That is what my last company had as surplus media in one store room alone. As studious studio employees, we tried to get them recycled. Easy? Not one UK e-waste company would touch them. The issue is a typical video cassette contains at least six different types of plastic, often welded together. Plus there are metal screws, rollers and springs. Finally the video tape medium is rich in nasty phenols and pcbs. The advice we received from our local council's business waste officer was to send them all into landfill. This was safer than burning them which requires a special hazmat license. Even disassembled, a video tape is uneconomic to reclaim. How many tonnes of unused video tapes are there around the world? Maybe we should have shipped them all back to JVC/Panasonic/Sony in Japan? |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on August 03, 2022, 02:19:13 pm ---Picture this... 500kg of VHS video tapes. That is what my last company had as surplus media in one store room alone. As studious studio employees, we tried to get them recycled. Easy? Not one UK e-waste company would touch them. The issue is a typical video cassette contains at least six different types of plastic, often welded together. Plus there are metal screws, rollers and springs. Finally the video tape medium is rich in nasty phenols and pcbs. The advice we received from our local council's business waste officer was to send them all into landfill. This was safer than burning them which requires a special hazmat license. Even disassembled, a video tape is uneconomic to reclaim. How many tonnes of unused video tapes are there around the world? --- End quote --- Thermal depolymerisation could be used to turn them back into crude oil. In theory it should work with any organic material, including dead bodies, but it's probably only economical to do so with plastic. --- Quote from: langwadt on August 02, 2022, 11:26:05 pm ---as long as we are burning fossil fuel to make heat and electricity, just incinerate the plastic to make heat/electricity, it is basically oil anyway --- End quote --- Gassification is another potential useful way to get energy from waste. The plastic and dry organic material is partially combusted to make carbon-monoxide, hydrogen and methane, which can power an internal combustion engine or turbine. This is more efficient that just burning them to create steam and it's easier to filter the fuel gas to remove the tar, than the flue gas. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |