I am assuming it adds more carbon and pollution to the atmosphere, but aren’t cars and cargo ships doing the same thing? If that’s the case why can’t we just burn it instead of dumping it in the ocean? Is dumping it into the sea really that much of a better option? Why is it better to pollute the sea with large clumps of plastic?
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We can. And in many places in Europe we do this. We incinerate and we clean the exhaust gasses. The exhaust will be cleaner than that of a modern diesel car. (I.E Amager Bakke in Denmark, or the soon to be complete Korvenmäen jätteenpolttolaitos in Finland. Etc.)
Now incineration is good way to turn plastic waste in to energy. But it isn’t the only way. We can use pyrolysis (Destructive distillation with heat) to turn them back in to monomers and and oligomers. Although it is currently used to turn waste plastic in to variety of solid, gas and liquid fuels, these can then be used in their respective engines. Ship engine would be a prime case for this, since those engines when they are at operational pressure burn anything that is more liquid than asphalt.
But here is a thing tho. Incinerating plastic and cleaning the exhaust takes money, building and running the plant is not cheap. Not many want to do this, especially if they got plenty of land they can pollute carefree. Pyrolysis is a complicated process and to get benefit of it you need to use all the products of it.
We have the technology to safely dispose waste plastic in a way that it will not even have a chance degrade and pollute out environment. But this will not solve the plastic problem, to solve that we need to simply make and use less plastic.
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