Wouldn’t it be better to bury as much of it deep underground as possible and seal it off?
edit – I should add that I do reuse and recycle, and I use as little plastic as I can afford to in the first place. I am just curious about this aspect
In: Earth Science
Landfills are not stable tombs forever because there is a lot of organic matter that naturally contains microorganisms, plus a fair amount of moisture in the buried materials.
Generally for the best packing, everything sent to a landfill is rolled over with a spike-wheeled roller machine that breaks up any bags and packaging to fill voids and level the landfill.
The entire mass becomes damp, the microorganisms start to grow, the pile becomes warm, and produce methane which some large landfills collect and burn off, or use to produce electricity.
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Plastics recycling is difficult because it is very hard to sort the various types, and the fact that colored plastics can “spoil” other plastics that are clear.
Direct unsorted melting and forming usually ends up with an unsightly gray goo of all colors mixed together, and with unstable physical properties as a result of all the various types of plastic also being mixed together, plus also random organic matter such as paper or food waste also mixed in.
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Generally the most effective form of plastic recycling is pyrolysis which applies high heat and pressure to mixed shredded plastics in a low-oxygen pressure cooker, causing the complex atomic polymer chains to break down into loose free atoms.
The heat and pressure is capable of breaking down toxic environmental poisons like dioxin which is a common ingredient in plastic production, and is not broken down when plastic is burned in an open fire in a backyard.
After the heat and pressure are reduced, atomic attraction forces reassert themselves, which then reforms the loose atoms into new and much simpler molecules of petroleum oil, gas, and carbon that is essentially purified coal that can be buried to sequester the carbon.
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