How come plastic waste isn’t being burned for energy in specialized power plants?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Some trash incinerators do double as generation stations.

Waste incinerators aren’t particularly cost efficient for power generation because they need extensive scrubber systems to get all the nasty shit out of the exhaust.

Try all you like, but the waste streams are never truly sorted particularly well and all sorts of toxic chemicals and heavy metals get in to the incinerators.

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