Turns out even the most “advanced” modes of plastics recycling are bullshit, just as 40+years of plastics recycling efforts before them.
I didn’t read the article.
From a technical viewpoint, all types of plastics can be recycled; it just costs a lot of energy. So instead of supplying this energy through fossil fuels to re-cycle old plastics, they just used the fossil fuels directly to make new plastics.
In the future however, when there’s abundant amounts of cheap solar energy, it will make sense to re-cycle plastics.
Polymer recycling is bullshit PR campaign.
As someone who’s been recycling since the early 1980s, the whole thing is heartbreaking.
In Europe, big oil companies are teaming up with waste companies to source waste plastics. Traditional mechanical recyclers are already doing bad, because the same big oil is flooding the market with cheap virgin plastics. Chemical recycling is basically a big (marketing big, not actual big) green washing scam.
