Here’s what I know: 1) Plastic burns. 2) Heat can be used to generate energy with steam turbines, which I’m pretty sure is how nuclear power plants and fossil fuel plants work. 3) A specialized power plant can focus on increasing efficiency and decreasing pollution. 4) Plastic recycling is really hard and has been generally unsuccessful.
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It’s too inefficient to pay for itself. The infrastructure needed to collect and process sufficient volumes of manufactured plastic from disparate sources in order to feed efficient thermal power generation is far greater than for raw fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which are collected, stored and transported in huge volumes all at once.
Furthermore, plastic’s only beneficial quality is that it traps in a solid form carbon from fossilized sources. Incinerating plastic releases this carbon into the atmosphere, instead of putting it back where it really belongs: underground.
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