There was a post exactly like this 7 years ago that was archived. Plastics, organic matter, metals they were all taken from the earth. There’s already technology for almost all complicated things. Why not for absolute zero waste? Like the problem with plastics is the decomposition rate, why not hasten the decomposition by grinding them up to powder so that they can be mixed with soil. Instead of ugly and dangerous dumpsites like mountains of trash.
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The main feature of plastics is also what makes them so harmful. Plastic polymers are chemically resilient.
Grinding up plastic into smaller pieces does not cause it to break down chemically. It only makes the pieces smaller (we call these microplastics). The problem is that when the particles are small enough, microplastic particles interfere with the physiological processes of both plants and animals. In the case of plastics, “out of site, out of mind” is just about the worst possible approach to mitigating their effect on the natural environment.
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