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UK 'Faces Build-up of Plastic Waste' (bbc.com)
The UK's recycling industry says it doesn't know how to cope with a Chinese ban on imports of plastic waste. From a report: Britain has been shipping up to 500,000 tonnes of plastic for recycling in China every year, but now the trade has been stopped. At the moment the UK cannot deal with much of that waste, says the UK Recycling Association. Its chief executive, Simon Ellin, told the BBC he had no idea how the problem would be solved in the short term. "It's a huge blow for us... a game-changer for our industry," he said. "We've relied on China so long for our waste... 55% of paper, 25% plus of plastics. "We simply don't have the markets in the UK. It's going to mean big changes in our industry." China has introduced the ban from this month on "foreign garbage" as part of a move to upgrade its industries.
I assume you don't know that plastic is more valuable than steel. Still want to burn it?
Huh? Yes there is. It is economically cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to process from ore.
(Its ore is the oxide, the usual way to reduce it to metal involves a lot of electricity. It's do-able, sure, but cheaper to just melt already metallic aluminum.)
THAT's why it's done so much--there's a clear profit motive!
If you don't get it hot enough, it produces large amounts of Doixins which are not nice at all.
Burning PVC can produce dioxin.
Burning polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene produces CO2 and water.
Sort out the vinyl, and almost everything else will burn clean.
You can burn the vinyl too if you keep the temperature high, and/or mix in some powdered limestone to suck the chlorine out of the flue gas. If you are mixing the plastic with coal, then you will need the limestone anyway to scrub out the sulfates.
Add to that: there's almost no point in recycling aluminum. It's extremely plentiful on earth and landfills aren't actually a problem
Piling on because it's important - aluminum absolutely should be recycled. Turning bauxite (oxidized aluminum) into metal is far more expensive than simply melting and reforming aluminum. Same with steel and glass.
Plastic is very different. It can't be melted back to a liquid, so reuse of the raw material is limited.
Cardboard is another good candidate for recycling, and even paper. Anything that can be recycled should be recycled. Plastic? Burn it.
Do you have ESP?
The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.
Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Study retracted.
We burn plastic here in Eastern Pennsylvania because it's basically worthless, but I'm not sure why they don't just open it up to all types of plastic instead of just HDPE and PET.
Probably because those are easiest for the scrubbers to handle. PVC for example releases dioxin when burned. At high enough temperatures it's destroyed, but those temps are very high and they are difficult to guarantee throughout a combustion chamber at atmospheric pressure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"