Would burning plastics be better solution than shredding them, due to the created microplastics?

Question

Would burning plastics be better solution than shredding them, due to the created microplastics?

In: 3

Answer 1

Yes. Burning is one of the cleanest ways to get rid of waste plastic. You also get useful energy such as heat and electricity from it.

This process is widely used in parts of Europe. However, huge amounts of misinformation about it exists so some countries don’t use ir much.

Burning plastics at the wrong temperature or without proper flue gas processing can produce chemicals like dioxins and cyanide. For this reason, the furnaces need proper design such as fluidised.bed combustors and proper gas processing to remove dioxin and cyanide (such as plasma pyrolysis).