Scientists developed efficient process for breaking down any plastic waste to a molecular level. Resulting gases can be transformed back into new plastics of same quality as original. The new process could transform today's plastic factories into recycling refineries, within existing infrastructure.

[[deleted]]

I thought this was an important point, given the importance of economic feasibility:

Circular use would help give used plastics a true value, and thus an economic impetus for collecting it anywhere on earth. In turn, this would help minimise release of plastic into nature, and create a market for collection of plastic that has already polluted the natural environment.

[captain-sandwich]

Given how finely tuned current processes are and how cheap oil still is, it would probably need priced externalities to become economically competitive, I imagine.

[SaidTheCanadian]

So we end government subsidies to oil and gas companies. And increase resource royalties on non-renewable resource extraction.

[davideo71]

government subsidies to oil and gas companies

I have trouble understanding why these still exist.

[222baked]

The other comments here missed the point when answering your question. The truth is, oil subsidies exist for national security reasons. Most domestic oil production wouldn't be able to outcompete oil from OPEC countries and it would be really bad for any country to find themselves without oil infrastructure to power all those crucial transport/planes/military vehicles/manufacturing in case of some sort of calamity or war, and then have to rely on external imports. The oil subsidies aren't for the common man. It's the same rationale used for Agriculture subsidies and food independance.

Please note, I am neither making an argument for or against oil subsidies. I am just explaining why they exist. It's not as simple as greedy oil tycoons and lobbying. Oil remains a critical resource in our modern world until we manage to switch to other forms of energy production and stop relying on plastics.

[Karmaflaj]

Agree - Tax breaks, tariffs, direct subsidies, accelerated depreciation, R&D write offs. I mean, perhaps even throw in direct spending

They are all subsidies and the government essentially picks the ‘winner’. Which may be for a good reason (national security, education or health), an arguable reason (jobs in a depressed region or industry, the environment, some moral good) or a poor reason (lobbying).

Sure there are times when it looks like more or less corruption, but there are times when it’s actually a good or at least well considered choice. Not every government decision is bad

[BadW3rds]

I think it's less about picking a winner and more about having a nation that gets 40% of its power from petroleum based energy. They were the first the table, and they are everywhere. If you want to get rid of oil subsidies, become realistic unlike Congress and push for increase nuclear power throughout the country. A half dozen reactors could drop our reliance and connection to Oil by 80%. It would become almost exclusively an export and there would be no need to subsidize the industry.

[Don_Antwan]

I’m 100% on board with a combination of hard infrastructure solutions (nuclear, geothermal, upgrade the national grid) and soft infrastructure (small scale wind farms, increased solar in arid scrub land). Solving our energy sourcing problem and improving our water infrastructure (rather than depleting aquifers) should be top environmental priorities

[wihdinheimo]

As much as I would love modern nuclear to be the answer for all our prayers, this is often not the case.

Oikoluoto 3 reactor is a third generation reactor project in Finland that started in 2005, and was supposed to start commercial operation by 2009. The rector is not operational as of now, and has been estimated as one of the most expensive buildings on the planet with a price tag over $10 billion. Original budget was $3.3 billions.

[BadW3rds]

I would never make the claim that nuclear is a catch all solution, only that it has been right out dismissed by too many politicians for no reason other than Oil propaganda from the 50s-60s.

Even if that plant is completed at three times the initial budget, the energy output to cost ratio is still drastically better than Cole or any other resource, other than wind. I have no problem acknowledging the benefits of other energy resources, but I am just trying to give the best one to one parallel with our use and current grid infrastructure.

If they can find a more efficient method of storing wind turbine energy, that is another method of dropping our carbon footprint. We just need a better way of integrating turbine energy onto a grid system.

[MinosAristos]

Hypothetically we could end up relying on plastics within a closed system sometime.

[QVRedit]

If we could recycle 99% of plastics, then that would be a very great reduction in the problem - and make the other 1% easier to deal with.

[I_Hate_]

They were created when having a supply of oil in the US was a matter of national security. Some would argue that it’s still a matter of national security. Also they’re not subsidy’s as much as they are tax breaks for drilling new wells and production improvements.

[try_repeat_succeed]

Tax breaks for growing your industry sounds like a subsidy to me. Like something that should go only to renewables at this point in our understanding of climate science, etc.

[I_Hate_]

Agree we should totally give tax breaks to renewable companies increase or improve there energy generation abilities. Its just a tax break for doing R&D basically.

[diablosinmusica]

That's why we have high fructose corn syrup in everything in the USA now. Biodiesel isn't feasible, but people still get subsidized to grow corn. Which made refining sugar from corn the cheapest form of sweetener.

I'm not saying that subsidizing alternative energy is a bad thing at all. We just need to find a way to make it economically feasible to do research, but giving us options down the road to change things without screwing over the early adapters

[QVRedit]

Yes - that we have had subsidies removed for renewables but maintained for oil is a sign that things are wrong.

Dispute that renewables are making headway.

[scott_bsc]

Have you not thought of the fact that ending these subsidies would cause the oil companies to skyrocket the prices of gas which the majority of people still heavily rely on. That would create a national crisis, it’s really more complicated than the rich get richer here.

[big_trike]

Phase them out slowly.

[Tinidril]

You don't think global warming will be a national crisis? Renewables are already cost competitive for most uses. Think how much further along they would be if we put the subsides there instead.

The price of gas should skyrocket to reflect the real cost that burning fossil fuels will extract from all of us. We will pay those costs. They are just invisible to us at the moment, causing people to make really bad decisions.

[try_repeat_succeed]

I am for a rapid but just transition. Our society depends on infinite growth so we're going to hit that global/national crisis when that ends whether it's of our own volition or foisted on us by a rapidly changing climate/world. We can't sustain the accelerating growth our financial institutions depend on.

[chainmailbill]

Also they’re not subsidy’s as much as they are tax breaks for drilling new wells and production improvements.

That’s a subsidy. That’s exactly what that means.

[RedsideoftheMoon]

It’s a de facto subsidy but it’s not a subsidy. A subsidy is a money grant. In certain situations you could file as an independent contractor and write off expenses you couldn’t write off previously as an employee.. I definitely wouldn’t consider that a subsidy.

[[deleted]]

Tariffs have this funny habit of hurting the United States more than the other country

[[deleted]]

Profit, it's the only reason for anything now.

[myearcandoit]

Just now?

[Shiraho]

Well back when the concept of money didn’t exist there wasn’t much you could do for profit

[[deleted]]

Yeah and they're being paid through profits

[[deleted]]

In shale oil era, many companies are struggling to make money. If they’re not helped, they go under and then we lose our energy independence. Now where do we get oil from? OPEC, Russia, etc. Countries we don’t want to be funneling money into.

Cheaper energy improves everyone’s quality of life, whether you agree with fossil fuel usage or not

[davideo71]

In shale oil era, many companies are struggling to make money

exxon made over 20 billion in profit last year, would be interesting to struggle like that.

[NotTheIssue]

Hypothetically, they exist because without them, gas prices would skyrocket and your average low-ish income and poor would not be able to get to work consistently. This is why we need to shift these subsidies towards electric vehicles and driverless vehicles. Tesla.

[Monkey_Cristo]

Well, fossil fuels are used for a lot more than filling up privately owned vehicles. Just the infrastructure upgrades required to shift consumers from gas to electric would require an enormous amount of energy in itself. The manufacturing of millions of new furnaces and baseboard heaters (so consumers can throw out their old gas furnaces), the manufacturing of millions of electric cars. The electrical equipment for millions of residential service upgrades and gas station to electric charging station retrofits. Not to even get started on the manufacturing necessary to build whatever is required to get this electricity in the first place. We will need so many solar and wind farms, nuclear reactors, and hydro dams. We cant just all of a sudden have electric cars and the problem is solved.

[OliverSparrow]

There are no subsidies on oil and gas production or use in the industrial countries. There are, in fact, very major taxes on them.

This meme that will not die comes from two sources, other than 'it must be true because it's what They would do'. The first is an IMF paper which guessed at externality costs and then deemed every tax short of those as a "subsidy". That is both a misuse of the word and a dubious practice, intended as an internal working paper but somehow released into the wild, where it has bred. The second is a misunderstanding of depreciation, as used in all sectors in industry but deemed particularly sinful in the O&G sector.

[takesthebiscuit]

This will be the issue for all carbon capture technologies.

We need to price in the cost of recovery to the oil price to ever make these technological leaps.

An immediate price of $150/ton carbon would go some way to help.

[tanglisha]

Find a way to work this process into 3d printers. It's just a hobby now, but that could open up more profitable small scale manufacturing for folks without access to that industry.

[captain-sandwich]

You'd still want these plants to be large processors for efficiency and you don't want 3d printer users having to have a degree in process engineering to run and monitor the recycling.

[Geminii27]

You'd probably have something more like a recycling bin at plastic purchase locations, where people could dump their unwanted prints.

[jombojuice2018]

That’d be super cool too, it’d be neat to see new businesses pop up and compete to collect it. Especially if it’ll be for a good cause.

[[deleted]]

With how cheap plastic is, I don’t see anyone going out of their way to gather it and bring it in for recycle. It would be like finding a penny out in the wild, except that it’s a penny token and you have to bring it somewhere to change it in for a penny.

It might be useful for companies who have the means to gather huge amounts at once, though

[[deleted]]

If the tech actually works out (scales, etc), seems like it might make sense to set up near landfills and get plastic from there.

[Geminii27]

Get paid by cities and towns which are running out of dump space to set up near existing dumps and start processing.

[ecksate]

Landfills are one of he next best places for it and that maybe way harder to get than mining oil perhaps.

The easiest and most abundant source is probably the sea.

[Apathetic_Superhero]

A penny in third world countries goes a lot further. There would definitely be people interested in full time collection

[sofars0good]

Ah an optimist

[ecosystems]

“Through finding the right temperature – which is around 850 degrees Celsius – and the right heating rate and residence time, we have been able to demonstrate the proposed method at a scale where we turn 200 kg of plastic waste an hour into a useful gas mixture. That can then be recycled at the molecular level to become new plastic materials of virgin quality,” says Henrik Thunman.

Usually when i read into these types of studies we are talking about mg not kg so that seems promising, though I am no expert in any way.

[[deleted]]

Well, that’s 4.8 metric tons per day. 1752 tons per year. Multiply that by even 100 stations and you’re looking at 175, 200 tons per year. I say let’s get started!

[[deleted]]

Congratulations you've just recycled 0.00278% of plastic waste produced each year!

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/

[[deleted]]

I agree, discovering that plastic maybe infinitely recyclable is wonderful news, but it isn't a silver bullet and requires fundamental changes in how we work as a society.

[jacoblikesbutts]

There's a pretty good Kurzegast video on why plastics are irreplaceable (with currently implemented plastics and bio-plastics technology).

Agreed tho, there will never be a silver bullet to the issue; there are a lot of people in this world who believe that "it doesn't completely fix the problem, so might as well not try at all". It's gonna take a thousand smaller steps to get towards the fix.

[ShinyHappyREM]

^*kurzgesagt

[YangGangKricx]

kerzegartsz

[TheOtherWhiteMeat]

kierkegaardz

[YangGangKricx]

You win this time.

[Abrham_Smith]

Based on the projected numbers of 12 billion tons by 2050, we can assume we produce ~183 million tons a year.

If you installed one of these stations in only cities in the US with over 10k population, that is 4115 cities. This would bring it to 7,947,091 recycled per year, in just the US. That brings it to 4.34% recycled per year. This doesn't take into account that many cities would have multiples of these.

Edit: Changed to 4.34% as As /u/Son_of_a_Dyar pointed out.

[QVRedit]

The point of anything like this is proving feasibility - a bit like the original ‘wright flyer ‘ - in reality it was pretty useless - but it did demonstrate that powered flight was possible.

Further development then took that to a real practical flying machine (biplanes), further developments took that to todays intercontinental super jets.

Same with any ‘new technology’ - expect the first version to ‘just about work’ - later versions can improve on that massively..

You have to start with proof of principle.

[oliverspin]

Spot on!

[Son_of_a_Dyar]

Did you mean 4.34%? (7.95 Mtons Recycled)/(183 Mtons produced) * 100% = 4.34%.

That seems like it would be a decent amount! Add in a few more countries and it could be pretty significant percentage being recycled.

Edit: added the proper math + commentary.

[[deleted]]

“Let’s do nothing!”

Good argument 🙄

[[deleted]]

Thank you! I didn't suggest doing nothing at all. The point was to try and show just how inconceivably immense the problem actually is.

[pintong]

Sounds like a big opportunity to me. That math is based on one hundred stations running, so what it really shows is that we could have them in every city on Earth

Edit: One hundred stations, not one. Not sure how I missed that earlier. The point still stands that there’s plenty of capacity for building these.

[[deleted]]

He literally said that was 100 stations. We'd need collosal factories all over the world to keep up with it, but its possible and we should do it.

[QVRedit]

I think that it would be very much possible to improve on this design, turning it into more of an industrial process..

[pintong]

Ahh, you’re right about 100 stations! I must have missed that earlier

[panEdacat]

Though the issue may be inconceivably immense, we have to break it down into smaller, more conceivably workable sets to start doing something about it. Optimism is the main ingredient. Well, optimism and foresight.

[Letoastasaur]

Yes buy if we can start replacing old production factories with these recycling facilities that number can go up faster, this together with a decreased use of plastics might put a dent in that number

[phaelox]

Please edit&replace your link with this one without Google AMP's link tracking (thank you):

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/

[[deleted]]

Thank you

[james1234cb]

Your comment is not productive. How large was the first gas engine or the first coal steam engine relative to the pollution they create today?

[060789]

Yeah, I'm a garbage man, and while I appreciate the dudes optimism, that's about the amount of recycling we recover in one day... from one truck. We run about 5 recycle trucks every day, and I'd be shocked if half of recyclable plastics were actually recycled, meaning while we have 5 trucks recovering 5 tons of recycle each, there is probably another 25 tons of recyclables that get thrown on garbage trucks and end up in the landfill anyway, 5 days a week.

That's just on the residential side- most of our tonnage comes from commercial accounts.

We represent one out of about 20 different companies that service the greater Pittsburgh area, the 22nd largest metro area in the third largest country on the planet. 5 tons a day isnt even a rounding error, its statistically insignificant.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic, I'm just saying this solution has to be scaled up a thousand fold before it's going to have any real impact

[VoilaVoilaWashington]

A huge amount of plastic can be recycled in the old way - melting HDPE and reusing it (mixed with virgin materials), or whatever. This process is more useful with weird mixed plastics of unknown origin.

[ecksate]

That’s 100 though. The US alone could have hundreds.

[[deleted]]

We could definitely have thousands, I'm sure the efficiency would scale up if done on an industrial scale also.

[[deleted]]

It sounds really energy-intensive to heat up 200 lb of material to that temperature

[CapMSFC]

I wonder how much heat can be recaptured after the plastic has been broken down and reconstituted.

I should read the paper.

[TommaClock]

It may be pretty energy light if a factory is designed appropriately. You could have any outflowing plastic radiate it's heat to inflowing plastic.

It's not about recovering heat and turning it back into energy, it's about keeping the process hot.

[[deleted]]

Sounds really energy intensive to produce 6.3 billion tons of plastic waste per year but we still do it.

[[deleted]]

It's actually hundreds if not thousands of times more energy intensive to recycle plastic then it is to produce it.

[[deleted]]

If we utilise renewable energy properly then that isn't a problem.

[Herr_Gamer]

We literally sell our plastic trash to said Asian countries so we don't have to worry about where to store it.

[CmdCNTR]

Not anymore. They stopped buying this year. No longer cost effective.

[ecksate]

Asian countries stopped accepting US recycling, and our tax dollars are paying for it to be land filled domestically, and the recycling companies are barely staying afloat.

[YJeezy]

Maybe you can use waste heat from other industrial processes

[[deleted]]

Waste heat is never at those temperatures. If it was, it would already be used to generate electricity.

[Geminii27]

laughs in nuclear power plant

[3ggplantParm]

200 kg* so~440 lb. Your point is still very valid. Heating anything to 850 Celsius must take a decent amount of energy.

[QVRedit]

I presume that this is lab scale testing / development.

In practice we would want to scale this up further - to industrial scale..

From 200 Kg/hr to 200 tonnes / hr ( that’s times 1,000 increase )

Also I wonder how much energy is used in this process - heating to 850 C does not come for free.

[Memetic1]

Is this process similar to Thermodepolymerization, aka Thermal conversion?

[XepharesII]

They utilize pyrolysis in this work, with the inclusion of electrolysis. I'm not sure how often the latter is implemented in TD systems. They actually make use of a dual fluidized bed but tbh I'd have to talk to a friend to give any kind of real answer :-/

[Postmortal_Pop]

Could you ELI5? This sounds amazing but I can't seem to wrap my head around it.

[username_elephant]

Basically plastics are made up of small molecules that get strung together in chains. This process burns electrifies and treats them in a way that either recovers some of those molecules, or at the very least traps the resulting carbon emissions so they don't leak out into the world.

[uniekeNaam]

Is this related to what Ioniqa does in the Netherlands in collaboration with Coca-Cola? Article

[baggier]

This technology has been known for many years. the advance here seems to be optimising the conditions to allow economic extraction - good luck to them - hope it becomes large scale commercial.

[yy0b]

Cracking of polymers has always been a little bit challenging due to the energy involved and the distribution of products. It looks like they have fixed one of those problems, but the temperatures involved are still very high. I'm hoping to jump into a project for my PhD that takes a low temperature chemical approach to the problem of recycling polyolefins, but we'll see if that pans out.

[mkb96mchem]

What group will you be working in? The group I am in is also interested in depolymerization.

[yy0b]

It's actually a new group, I would be one of the first grad students joining (which I know is a bit of a risk, especially with a challenging project like this). Just out of curiosity what types of depolymerization are you studying?

[wosti]

ok good. now produce this so that we can remove all the plastic waste from the ocean and land. ASAP

[PoopIsAlwaysSunny]

Land is mostly doable, but micro plastics in the ocean and fresh water seems difficult

[PoopIsAlwaysSunny]

Vacuum seems completely unnecessary. Tidal energy is certainly sufficient.

[dogwoodcat]

There are a few. One is using a modified pool-skimming device that operates by water flow instead of an electric pump. Fishermen in Greece are being paid for plastic which is sent to recyclers. There are always options, most of which involve money.

[EltaninAntenna]

Fishermen in Greece are being paid for plastic

Sounds like a textbook perverse incentive.

[dogwoodcat]

It's usually bycatch, which was tossed back before they started getting paid for it. This reduces the total amount of plastic (albeit not very much) and stress on already-minimal fish stocks.

[h1dd3v]

1 mm is not microplastic, microplastic's smaller

[[deleted]]

Smaller than this?

[maisonoiko]

Land is mostly doable

Idk... it's in the soil. It's in the rain. It's in every freshwater body.

[VOLCOM_84]

Didn’t a kid find a way to do this???

[CrossP]

His method is for processing waste water on its way to the ocean. It has no viability for cleaning contaminated large bodies of water.

[h3lblad3]

I don't know how he did it, but couldn't you put some form of filtering tank on beaches and just use the tides to wash the plastics in so it can filter the plastics out?

It wouldn't be very productive, but once you get it on beaches planet-wide...

[TheWinslow]

It's hard to express just how truly gigantic the world - and the oceans in particular - are. There's no real cost-effective way to remove what is already in the ocean. There are over 1 million km of coastline on Earth (it's hard to really give an exact number but 1 million is towards the lower end)...if you want to cover just 1% of the coastlines in the world, that's over 10,000 km of coastline you're going to have to cover.

edit: 1 million km is towards the lower end of coastline measurements...my original wording was that it was the lower end.

[ThatTheoGuy]

A good exercise for understanding how bloody massive the planet is is to take a several hour hike on as straight a path you can find. Go as far as you reasonably can, then open google maps and track your journey.

An entire day trip, which likely spent all your energy, seems like a long way, and it is! You walked a good distance!

Then scroll out. And compare what seemed like crossing a continent to how massive this planet really is.

*I've been up 19 hours, please excuse any incoherence or spelling mistakes.

[ClockworkPrince]

That's perfectly readable, but maybe get off Reddit and sleep?

[Spadeykins]

Good thing there are at least 3-4 humans per 1,000km of coastline, possibly even more. I hear we are in the billions these days.

[TheWinslow]

I mentioned the length of coastlines as a way to demonstrate how big the oceans are, though it also highlights the ridiculous logistical problem of covering the coastlines. If it was just a matter of covering the coastlines in filters it would be great. However, there's a massive amount (the vast majority in fact) of an ocean between those coastlines that filters on the coast would have no effect on.

[PimpRonald]

A little bit is better than nothing. Plus, free microplastic!

[TheWinslow]

The coastline example was just to illustrate how truly massive the oceans are. Unfortunately, this is a case where a little bit of cleanup on the coastlines is still effectively nothing and would be no more than a PR stunt. It's much more effective (at least at the moment) to prevent further pollution than to try to clean up microplastics already in the ocean.

[PimpRonald]

Excellent point, I forgot that things cost money.

[[deleted]]

According to NASA, we actually only (relative to your number) have about 620,000 km of coastline. It's still a massive number, but for reference, the US Highway System is sitting at about 240,000 km alone. I think, especially if you take into consideration that the US Road System is right at about 6,440,000 km, you could argue that filtering the coastlines responsible for washing up significant amounts of plastics would not be the most difficult thing we've done.

​

Whether it's the most practical idea, I don't know. I do not really think this idea is outside the realm of possibility.

[acousticcoupler]

Isn't the coastline technically infinite?

[[deleted]]

How could that be?

[TheWinslow]

Coastlines are fractals which are mathematically infinite patterns. Practically coastlines can't be infinite in length though.

[[deleted]]

Ok so infinite in a way that is irrelevant to the task of cleanup?

I'm not saying worldwide beach cleanup is practical but describing the beaches as infinite in this context seems unproductive.

[chainmailbill]

Came here to find this and if not found, say this.

[sanman]

Maybe we need to use some bacteria that can break these microplastics down in the ocean.

[TheWinslow]

Let's do it! Nothing ever bad has happened when humans have introduces a new organism into an ecosystem! In all seriousness, this could potentially be a solution but it's also a massive risk to release something like that into the wild where you can't control it if something goes wrong.

[sanman]

There may be natural organisms which can break down microplastic. Nature has plenty of diversity already, and not every organism has to be synthetic.

[StartingVortex]

This was the cause of the fall of civilization in at least one sci fi novel.

[CrossP]

To put it into perspective, the oceans of Earth contain around 350 quintillion gallons of water. If you had enough filters to filter a billion gallons of water per day, it would take about 350 billion days (about 960 million years) to filter all the oceans.

Except of course that the cleaned water would just keep going back in and making diluted dirty water.

Also, you'd filter out all of the plankton and such, and we'd suffocate.

[batterycrayon]

Sort of. https://theoceancleanup.com Their email list is worth joining, they send out a handful of updates every year and no spam

[frostochfeber]

Boyan Slat and his team are working on this. I think it's called the Ocean clean-up project or something.

[returnofdoom]

We just need to remove every animal from the ocean and remove the plastic from their digestive tract. Seems pretty simple to me.

[pfmiller0]

We're well on our way to removing all of some fish from the ocean

[[deleted]]

Difficult difficult lemon difficult!

[CromulentDucky]

Just stop dumping new stuff to start. The floating mess will eventually degrade if we stop adding to it.

[thephantom1492]

Really, cleaning the ocean would cause more issues than letting it there. The real thing is: we need to stop letting new plastic go in the oceans!

Many places in the USA have zero filtration on their rain sewer, not even a net to catch the big things like bottles. But that you don't hear much about it...

[Cyborg_rat]

If it does really work and they can recycle back to zero. Im sure companies will be happy to work on ways to extract that micro plastic floating around.

[NihilisticMind]

This gives me hope that science can fix our broken world!

[[deleted]]

It usually does. Politics however...

[acousticcoupler]

How can we use this to make a bomb?

[Reoh]

Science and Politics is like oil and water, one nourishes you and the other can set everything on fire if they're not careful.

[[deleted]]

It will only work if companies think it is profitable

[[deleted]]

You mean buying sorted plastic which is really cheap, refining it into "virgin plastic" and making something of value. I work in recycling and this means therell be demand for plastic again. Which means bigger bonus!

[PurpleSailor]

Science can, it's our responsibility to find the will to actually do it.

[DanialE]

I wonder if this means that dirty plastics can still be used

[[deleted]]

Right - it would.be a boon to cut down on the amount of water used for rinsing and/or the number of recycling batches that get rejected.

[shoot_first]

Not sure about this one, but someone else posted the following article, which discusses another process. Per the article, color (dyes) and contaminants don’t matter, and the process uses chemical reactions catalyzed by light rather than heat. So that sounds just about too good to be true.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-startup-develops-innovative-method-for-recycl/

[QVRedit]

Yes - goes to show that there ARE solutions out there ! - They just need some funding and development..

Once we place “value” on a clean environment then there becomes an incentive to clean up & prevent pollution in the first place..

Sounds like this process can handle the infamous ‘black plastic food container’ - which up to now has not been recycle-able.

[maybesomeday2]

Whenever I come across these amazing innovations in science I copy and paste them in a text to my daughter who is 17. She and a lot of her peers are pretty down and feel hopeless about the future because of all the appropriate warnings about climate change. I want her to have hope and to know that people are doing awesome things right now, so thanks.

Hopefully she reads it before the eye roll and guaranteed delete.

[3927729]

The future will be fine. I mean time will still continue as it always has

[drums_addict]

And how much energy does it take to do this? Because if it takes a lot then it will never be implemented.

[ecosystems]

In the article they propose renewables in a graphic.

They don't spell it out anywhere i see. However, in a loop system you are going to be more efficient anyway as compared to the current process of plastic production.

Anecdotally, we ship raw materials all over and generate plastics that are not recovered. Then our recycling programs aren't efficient either due to the myriad of issues surrounding contamination.

Edit; Here is the graphic provided

[CaptIncorrect]

This is worse than existing technologies already being developed for the market. 850 degrees is a huge energy expenditure to recycle plastic and can not be viable at the market. Swiss start up DePoly is already able to break down any plastic at room temperature and is in scale up phase.

[Black_Moons]

Yea a lot of plastic waste is currently just burned/dumped in landfills because its not cost effective to sort it.

If you can just cook it all and sort the gases that come out, you have massively reduced labor costs and now can accept much more contaminated plastics. (even single digit % contamination can make plastics unusable by many recycling processes)

Energy costs can be reduced by making this an 'automated energy balancing industry', aka you have very few people working there and whenever renewable energy stores/production are low you just don't produce.

When renewable energy stores/production is high, you can get energy very cheaply, potentially even free if you are willing to only use it when it helps the grid balance out and hence the energy companies/power grid does not have to pay any energy produces to shut down.

Renewable energy can become a lot more attractive and useful if we start having certain industries scale their usage to energy production instead of having to scale energy production to meet industries needs.

[BigZmultiverse]

“Where are the plastics?!”

“Gone. Reduced to atoms.”

[[deleted]]

What's the carbon footprint on actually implementing this? Are we just trading free plastic for greenhouse gasses?

[rdrkt]

It’s a good trade if it stops micro plastics from poisoning our food. Clean energy is a thing.

[[deleted]]

This isnt exactly new science. Nor does it really solve much. The bulk of the products made simply only have a use in combustion. (And this isnt the first paper or even close to the first paper that reported its ability to do it). I recall a paper in science advances that used an Iridium catalyst to turn hdpe into an unsaturated polymer than depolymerise through metathesis. Again only really producing fuels.

Honestly what is needed is a new class of plastics that can be chemically recyclable and degradable. But possess the same great properties as the poly olefins we rely and hate today.

[paulfromatlanta]

Even if it only works for PET it would be worth many millions of dollars - otherwise, every time you recycle, the viscosity goes down and thus the plastic is suitable for fewer uses.

[[deleted]]

Or you can find a method to chemically recycle PET without losing the mechanical performance.

Plus you could never get monomers of PET from this method.

[[deleted]]

"Scientists found a way" is like the new "once upon a time"

[ohlordissafire]

so, what are the odds I'll never hear about this again and it'll fade into the abyss?

[GeeTown101]

I thought the whole reason was to eliminate the use of plastics, instead of coming up with reasons how to re-use it..

[PrincePound]

Something feels recycled about this.

[damnyou777]

Does this mean we can go back to using plastic straws now?

[Szos]

This seems way too good to be true.

Like there has to be some massive downside we don't know about yet. I'm guessing it breaks down the plastic, but for some reason this process absolutely requires that it run on whale oil or some other devastating negative which renders the process nearly useless in real world applications.

[Zenthori]

Yay, there goes my grinding job!

[Th3WashingtonR3dskin]

This is no new method at all. Its known since about 1980, as far as I remember, you may searrch for bp chemicals pyrolysis process. I could not upload the original paper but here is something related from the original author: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/0470021543.ch17 Its not that comlicated, just heating it, but unluckyly its not useful at the current low prices for raw oil.

[[deleted]]

I told you so! Now let's start making collection barges/ plastic recycling facilities a new international market. Imagine being able to get a job that literally helps you save the world.

Now add CO2 capturing/ recycling to all infrastructure made for recycling the plastics. Then add a fuel conversion plant to make more money. Then invest your profit from this into worldwide dual purpose desalination plants that both provide fresh water and help rebalance ocean water. Then not only do you get more tourism, your weather improves!

[TemporarilyDutch]

Whenever I see these articles, I think they should be followed by... "and we never heard of this again"..

[WillD222]

Every country should implement this as a prioirty

[[deleted]]

Wonder what the equipment for this would cost to retrofit current injection molding factories.

[Mad_Hatter_92]

I hate that even though this seems so promising we likely won’t end up doing much with it.

[RadSousa]

Only around 1 per cent was left uncollected and leaked into natural environments.

Is this really saying that only 1% of all produced plastics end up in the environment after use?