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
Capturing the gases initially isn’t hard. What you do with them afterwards is.
Burn plastic and what comes off is a load of toxic smoke.
Now, without meaning to sound sarcastic, there aren’t many uses for smoke. Smoke by its nature is hard to do anything with – it’s already undergone one chemical reaction that releases a lot of energy, so it generally needs a lot of energy *input* to react any further.
What about storing the gases? You could do that, but you’d need a lot of storage space. Gases are very low density, so if you burn something you get a large volume of gas. Think of the size of a cloud of smoke compared to the thing that’s burning. So you either need a large storage space or to compress the gas. You also need to make sure it doesn’t leak. Now there have been proposals to do this with CO2, pumping it deep into the ground, so it’s not *impossible*, but it’s a complicated and expensive business.
In fact, if all you want to do is store the waste products, you’re better off just storing the waste as it is. Likewise, if you want to reuse the materials in some form, it’s very likely to be easier to do that with the original materials than the byproducts of burning them.
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