We all know plastics aren’t biodegradable and that’s bad, so why can’t we just use chemical science to break them down ourselves?

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We all know plastics aren’t biodegradable and that’s bad, so why can’t we just use chemical science to break them down ourselves?

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22 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

We can, but the problem is you end up with a soup of toxic chemicals that cant be economically reused. It all comes down to money – it is cheaper to burn or bury the plastics than to resuse them – it may also be greener to bury them as at least the CO2 is locked up for a longer time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Biodegradable plastics exists, but are more expensive and not always suitable
Burning will pull co2 in atmosphere
Burying or landfill is never done properly because of coruption, fraude and money and eventually get into the sea.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What it breaks down into can be worse. When you depolymerize a plastic, you get it’s components. There are some bacteria that can eat plastic but it’s not really for prime-time yet.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well we can break them down it to pellets that can be recycled into other plastic products and I think that’s probably better.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The wonders of plastics is what makes them such a pain in the butt to try to undo: they’re quite stable and freakishly large molecules, so it takes quite a bit of energy to undo them into something you can easily work with. It can be done, sure, but the costs, both in terms of money and actual resources, scale terribly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are some plastics that are biodegradable.
Most of them are only really compostable under certain circumstances though.

We can do a lot of stuff with other plastics too, but it is always about cost and revenue. A high percentage of clean plastic material can be recycled, but it has to be quite clean indeed. And washing/sorting ist costly again, unfortunately.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Recycling depends on the ease of breaking things down so that you can rebuild it back up. Eg., like a lego set, you can break a completed model down to its pieces, and then reuse it to make another lego set.

For aluminum, you shred it to pieces, remove unwanted pieces and melt it back to new aluminum blocks.

For paper, you shred it back into pulp, bleach it, and remake back into post-consumer paper.

Compared to other recyclables, plastic is much more complex. It has lots of different chemicals that make it up, so its much harder to break apart cleanly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why don’t we artificially create a micro organism that can completely get rid of plastic?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cost is the real driving reason. Even if you can recycle plastic effectively, it’s still cheaper to dump it somewhere and make new plastic.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My question is, why can’t we make hemp plastic instead?