I keep reading about how most plastic can’t be recycled and goes to the landfills instead.
With our technology, why can’t we melt it down, using some sort of scrubbers/filters to capture the emissions, and add it to asphalt or other industrial uses?
At the very least it seems like we could reuse that plastic for non food items that are typically used once and tossed.
In: 9
This would add a lot of micro plastic to the environment. Asphalt is a wear item. Also, asphalt is very recyclable with the current formulation, so adding plastic to it would probably ruin that.
I can’t think of a cheaper and more efficient way to get micro plastic particles into the air and water than by putting pieces of plastic into the roadway. It’s almost too perfect!
Ya lets just put more plastic into the environment. What kind of a half baked idea is this?
Melting plastic down is a messy process at the best of times. When you’ve got a truckload of assorted plastics with other detritus mixed in, you’d get a slushy mess that started breaking down and charring before it melted properly. Once it starts burning, you definitely won’t be getting a useful liquid out.
If you’re going to make a facility capable of coping with burned plastic, just make a power plant that runs off of the stuff. It’s already been done.
Using plastic as an aggregate, so adding it shredded but otherwise more-or-less unaltered, would be way more doable.
It’s not the most plastic can’t be recycled it’s that it’s not. It’s not even particularly expensive or difficult to do in those cases it’s just slightly cheaper not to so it doesn’t happen.
https://www.uta.edu/news/news-releases/2023/02/06/hossain-plastic-roads
They’re already working on it
Adding it to asphalt would be nonsensical. The material can easily be recycled, this is actually somewhat common practice in the US for example, altho for some fucked reason illegal in germany lol. Adding plastic would objectively lower the quality and recyclability
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When I still lived in the UK we used to separate recycled glass by colour, not sure if they still do that 20 years later. I heard that the UK imported far more green glass than it could use (not producing much wine and brown being more common for our beer bottles) so green glass would commonly be crushed and mixed in as an aggregate for our tarmac/asphalt.
edit: heres a reference https://www.glassonline.com/uk-recycled-glass-used-in-road-building/
Plastfault! I wrote a hypothetical ad pitch for this product in my marketing class in college. It has some flex to it, so it can heave in the winter and return to shape in warmer temps.
My teacher thought it was a crazy idea and didn’t like it. A good idea from a different student in her opinion? Lip gloss that can help you lose weight. A little bit of me died that day.
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