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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In Sweden we do a lot of energy recovery by incinerating trash such as plastic. The main use of the heat is for district heating. I think about 70% of households are connected to a district heating network. Not all heat in them are from trash incineration (other sources like bio fuels, heat from industry, or plain coal also happens).
While at least plastic doesnt end up in a landfill, it still leads to lots of single use fossil sourced plastic and co2 emissions. So we also have some cutting edge plastic sorting facilities starting up for recycle its use. So I would disagree that it is generally unsuccessful to recycle. The problem is more that the oil industry creates lots of cheap material to produce plastics from as a cheap waste product from refining fossil oil for fuel. So economy of sorting is not that great as it is for metals. Anyway, this is the sorting facility own presentation.
https://www.svenskplastatervinning.se/en/site-zero/
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