Is it a matter of the technology not existing? I understand it’s a grossly oversimplified model and I am neither an engineer nor a chemist, but I can’t imagine that we couldn’t simply set up a furnace that vents down a cooling pipe into a container or facility that captures the gasses and toxic particulate/waste for either further processing, reuse in industry, or just to stockpile.
In: Earth Science
Transporting all the trash to one central location would use a ton of energy. Storing the exhaust gases is also difficult; without sorting what is being burned, the exhaust gas will be a huge mishmash of potentially toxic gases, potential greenhouse gases, corrosives gases, etc. That kind of mixed waste stream can be very difficult to deal with because making storage containers that are resistant to every possible waste product is complicated and expensive. Not to mention the hazards/risks associated with a leak; now you’ve liberated all those gases of unknown composition/hazard into the countryside.
The same problems apply to reprocessing; without a good idea of what the composition of the gases are, you can’t design an effective recapture/reprocessing facility. A process that can capture one compound might be fouled/disrupted by another compound. And not all of those products will be useful, so you’d need to create tons of storage for the non-useful products.
All these add up to make the proposed process extremely expensive to try to do. And no one is willing to foot the bill for something that is extremely complicated and failure prone.
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