Breaking free of plastic pollution

I am once again asking you to consider plasma gasification. Here is my standard comment, copied again:<p>---<p>Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plasma_gasification" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plasma_gasification</a><p>As far as I can tell, the only real &quot;disadvantages&quot; if you can call them that, are:<p>1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere<p>2. need to clean it from time to time<p>3. not necessarily a profitable business<p>Other than that, it can handle just about anything that&#x27;s not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.<p>Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it&#x27;s hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.<p>In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.<p>---<p>ADDENDUM:<p>* This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are &quot;syngas&quot;, which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.

There is clearly a problem, but the remedies proposed in this article are absurd and completely ignore the cause of the problem.<p>Plastics are incredibly useful, fabulously performant, and astoundingly cheap. It is no wonder they are ubiquitous.<p>If you are poor anywhere in the developed world, you are surely wearing plastic cloths &amp; shoes, eating food packaged in plastic, and drinking water provided via plastic pipes and vessels. What&#x27;s more, you likely don&#x27;t have a meaningful choice in the matter. If you are not poor, this probably still holds true.<p>It is frustrating that there is not a good and clear path forward to resolve this issue... and many other issues of the Anthropocene. We need to do better thinking about how we can help our ecosystems remain viable despite these upheavals.

Its hard to explain how bad this problem is getting to people that don&#x27;t live near the sea. If you&#x27;re downcurrent anywhere in the world, your beaches are basically full of trash that gets replenished on a daily basis<p>It really pisses me off

How does recycling reduce plastic pollution? It&#x27;s degrading and destroying the same plastic over and over. You&#x27;re taking the high-quality plastic that would have sat in a landfill, making it into a lower-quality plastic and then sending it back out in the world. And then eventually... yep, the landfill, in the best-case scenario.<p>Recycling just increases the chance that it&#x27;s going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.

Up to 30% of ocean microplastics appear to be coming from car tires. Yes, buy less shit. But also, shift your life away from cars towards public transit systems, and active transport (bicycle, walk, etc)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;science-environment-39042655" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;science-environment-39042655</a>

At this point whenever I&#x27;m on a walk I clean up any plastic litter I spot and dispose of it. I live not too far from some creeks and retention ponds along a local flood plain where I know my neighborhood&#x27;s storm drains are headed. Seeing so much plastic litter and other pollutants spoil a habitat that once supported a very vibrant ecosystem was sad to watch, and I&#x27;m doing whatever small things I can to help. But we need systemic change to deal with plastic pollution.<p>(The fish died from lawn runoff causing algae blooms as well - please be aware that if you live somewhere where it rains, then over fertilizing pollutes.)

One way to make unknown waste mixtures safe:<p>* Burn it hot.<p>* Take the exhaust from the burnt waste and fractionally distill it to extract the Nitrogen, CO2, water and other safe gasses.<p>* Take the ash and extract things that are worth money (metals), then vitrify the rest (turn it into glass)<p>* Take everything else and stick it back into the input, letting it go round again and becoming something safe this time.<p>1 ton of household waste probably only makes 5kg of vitrified glass - turns out nearly everything in your house is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.<p>I suspect the energy in all the waste makes this process &quot;free&quot; from an energy standpoint. But obviously the capital cost of a plant big enough for the worlds waste is huge, and unless laws are written to ban landfills and regular incineration, it would never make financial sense.

Not disagreeing that plastic is a concern, but calling it one of the biggest threats? I recall it is negligible compared to climate change and expanding land use, which can be addressed by reducing meat, flying, consumption, and increasing regulation, carbon tax, and all the other good things that various NGOs have advocated for years.

The recommendations at the end of the article to change individual behavior are a distraction but thankfully the author provided links to three organizations that are dedicated to real policy changes. I clicked through all and found 5gyres.org to be the most promising.

Long rant about &quot;plastics bad&quot; and then:<p>&gt; Avoid bringing in all new plastics and single-use plastics into your home and recycle what you have.<p>He either lives in a buble or didn&#x27;t do any research. There is no recycling of plastic. Almost everything is single-use plastic: clothes, bottles, shopping bags. A lot of things are made from plastic which cannot be recycled: TVs, phones, furniture, shoes, clothes, housing insulation, a big part of cars, buses, trains.

Seems like this is missing &quot;support regulation to make landfills secure against leaks.&quot; We shouldn&#x27;t just accept that they&#x27;re going to leak.

It’s hard to know what is practically recyclable even ignoring the variation in municipalities. A good resource for product makers from the actual recyclers that’s a little more direct: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plasticsrecycling.org&#x2F;apr-design-guide" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plasticsrecycling.org&#x2F;apr-design-guide</a>

its not my area of my expertise but i keep thinking about this problem and comes to conclusion some kind of incineration facility in each county&#x2F;zone is only alternative. Off course u would not release that dirty smoke to air and capturing and filtration technology should get a lot better.

Is there a way for everyday citizens to walk around and collect ambient plastics?

I don’t know why all the attention is on climate change and not on the consequences of microplastics everywhere.<p>Such an important issue, yet no world summit, no word about the topic when we talk about environmental issues.<p>Change is due !