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.
In: 9
This common in Finland. It requires a big efficient powerplant with proper gas scrubbers etc. We use it for district heating. And even after burning a lot of plastic remains in the ash. Disposing of the ashes must be done in a way that prevents that residue from becoming micro plastics and leeching in to the environment.
Although, micro plastic is already everywhere. We have a lot of district heating plants that burn peat and wood. Even the ash from those plants contains considerable amounts of micro plastics. Trees pull it up from ground water.
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.
The slag from coal plants is used to make caffeine for soda drinks and gypsum for drywall. If they burned garbage they wouldn’t be able to sell the byproducts anymore. Some trash incinerators are used to make steam but it’s a very small percentage
[https://www.alfaenergysolutions.com/home/plasma-arc-gasification](https://www.alfaenergysolutions.com/home/plasma-arc-gasification)
Plasma arc & Gasification
Burning would be bad.. but a pyrolizer to break down the hydrocarbon chains (in plastic) would produce usable raw fuel. It would do this by “cooking” without combustion, the heat breaks down the components of the plastic, back in to the hydrocarbons from the fuel they used.
Latest Answers