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Just want to being particular attention to this quote:
“...around 80% of the oil produced in the UK is refined overseas into the products demanded by the UK market."
It's quotes like this that convince me more and more that one of the best things we common folk can do to help tackle climate breakdown is just buying less stuff...
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
It comes first for a reason.
And yet we're still barely doing recycle
You can't really do much with plastics. It can handle being reprocessed once or twice before it just becomes too brittle.
We can only reduce to fix our worst pollutants. Well, until we get some plastic eating bacteria.
Plastic eating bacteria introduces all sorts of new problems, actually. Plastic is popular because plastic is forever (as long as it's protected from excessive heat and UV light)
It's going to be bad when your plastic can rot.
Sorry, my response was to the comment about recycling plastic.
I completely agree that it would cause issues ones it has plastic eating bacteria, but there are many reasons why plastic recycling hasn't taken off, the biggest being "it doesn't actually recycle".
It does recycle, though. You can't recycle plastic bottles into plastic bottles forever, but they can become lower grade plastics meant for different tasks for their entire life cycle. Highly degraded plastic can be made into building materials and roads, for example.
The real reason it hasn't taken off is because it's not profitable.
And we do that already.
But considering you can only do it basically twice, you can't mash different types of plastics together, and you can't "recycle" into the types of plastics that are in demand, it's all rather pointless.
They make low grade building materials, think benches, and flake easily so roads are a really bad idea. There are only so many benches you can make and Walkers have that covered with the green washing of crisp packets.
you can only do it basically twice,
If you stick to the cheapest recycling process of just washing, grinding, and heating the plastic. That's mostly all that is done because it's the only process that's even slightly profitable .
you can’t mash different types of plastics together, and you can’t “recycle” into the types of plastics that are in demand
You actually can in a chemical process called transesterification. Rather than just grinding the plastic into flake and heating it, it can be refined and rebuilt into new polymers.
Repolymerization (transforming polymers back into monomers to purify them) can also be used to recycle plastics almost indefinitely.
There's actually a lot of chemical recycling processes that can be used that we just don't bother doing, because again, profitability.
Do you have an example of anyone providing transesterification recycling options?
Googling only provides research papers, which say that it is extremely energy intensive, has only been demonstrated on PET, and being research, is no where near ready for scaled use as they are only 6 months old.
Nope. I guess I should say I believe that there are recycling processes that can be used and am convinced by what I found.
I also know that they aren't profitable, so they won't be. Not until they become cheaper or raw resources become more expensive, anyway.