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The Forum > Article Comments > Plastic is for burning! > Comments

Plastic is for burning! : Comments

By Ken Calvert, published 5/2/2019

Wastes to energy incineration is the choice of an increasing number of our world's cities, especially where land is in short supply. Our world needs plastic.

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Why should anyone (especially elected politicians) expect householders to waste time (and money - your time has a cost) sorting and disposing of any "recyclable" material to make greater profits for recyclers? And the nett benefit of recycling is minimal after the environmental costs of recycling are taken into account.

If your recycling bin is not big enough for all of the useless recyclables, you can upgrade to a larger bin. At your cost, of course. If recyclables are really worth recycling, why would you not expect the recycler to pay for it out of the profits?

Brian of Buderim misses the point. If you want to buy a product (a) the cost of packaging and recycling is/ought to be in the retail price you pay, yet local councils enter waste collection contracts which add an additional cost (b) how are you going to take home - let's say milk or fly spray - if there's no packaging provided?
Posted by calwest, Tuesday, 5 February 2019 2:00:38 PM
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The recycling industry is an "industry" after all and they are looking for money. It should the manufacturing industry who would look into ways to solve the problem of waste. This is where all things start. Bashar H. Malkawi
Posted by Bashar H. Malkawi, Tuesday, 5 February 2019 2:02:18 PM
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Alan B, baled plastic used to replace coal in steel-making? I had always thought that the reason that coking coal was used was because the coke was strong enough to NOT collapse and by staying up to allow the hot gases to circulate more thoroughly. Mind blowing! Can you give all of us here a reference?

I can imagine the other problem, that of all the toxic combustion products, would be minimised by the heat and the spread of oxygen ensuring complete combustion.
Posted by Brian of Buderim, Tuesday, 5 February 2019 2:19:34 PM
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Steelmaking is a chemical process that incorporates heat. Most iron ore is oxidised so the heat just uses up the O2. Plastic is after all just another combustible hydrocarbon and adding it to the crucible simply adds the carbon all steel needs to become steel.

Moreover, I'm not thinking blast furnaces and two-step steel making, but arc furnaces and a single step.

It's said wherever lighting strikes the ground the point hit is turned to glass or molten rock by heat greater than the sun and the reason why ar furnaces are preferred.

Talking of metal and ore. Did you know the richest ton for ton source of precious and semi-precious metal is E-waste! No orebody ever discovered is richer.

Recycling is as simple as grinding E-waste up then using traditional smelting to refine and separate the precious metal all of which melt at different temps.

And mostly different enough to separate the molten metals from the others, separated later and in their turn. Others with close melting points are separated by chemical leaching then precipitated back as the metal.

Yes, there are some contaminants in recycled plastic, none of which are a bother when that plastic is pressed into bales and used in place of coal in steel smelting. And completely cooked out during the melt!

Before plastic, we used glass and refilled them time and again. Part of which included a thorough clean. Biscuits etc were stored in airtight glass and sold by the pound or ounce. And taken home in paper bags

Nobody yet has complained of drinking at the pub from glassware a few dozen strangers used already. We can make almost unbreakable glass and maybe we could go back to the glass of yesteryear for the liquid products?

And make paper from straw or bamboo or some such. Carbon fibre also beckons as a reusable material as does bulletproof graphene. Usable just one atom thick.
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 5 February 2019 4:12:15 PM
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I had an iced coffee at a trendy coffee shop and was given a metal straw. Presumably it took plenty of hot water and detergent before it went to the next customer.

We want carbon that came out of the ground as coal, oil or gas to go back there not the atmosphere. If the plastic cannot be re-used then it should go into landfill. If the plastic is made from biomass carbon then it was already above ground. When burned or decayed it is absorbed by plants for the next cycle. No new carbon is then added to the atmosphere. Trouble is I doubt we can ever make enough bioplastic to replace food packaging. Time to bring our old glass jars to the supermarket to fill with groceries.

Hydrogen could be used in lieu of carbon fuel to smelt steel, only 100X more expensive or whatever. All these problems would be easier to solve for 1.5 bn people not 7.5.
Posted by Taswegian, Tuesday, 5 February 2019 4:13:59 PM
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Thanks, Alan B. I was, as you pointed out, fixed on blast furnaces and had not considered other ways of making iron.

Sort of on this topic. Why does the driest continent in the world (after Antarctica) permit the storage of mega-litres of water to grow cotton, requiring in the process much in the way of pesticides and herbicides?

Why can't we just grow low-THC hemp as we did in WW2? Much less water needed, much less to almost nil pesticides and herbicides? Much less fussing over to get the fields laser flat!
Posted by Brian of Buderim, Tuesday, 5 February 2019 5:36:44 PM
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