Recycling Plastic Waste Will Soon No Longer Be A Problem?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

We use an extraordinary amount of plastic every day. And, despite the prevalence of recycling bins parked next to trash cans, recycling plastic is still hard. That may all change, thanks to recent news from the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Laboratory (NREL).

A group of scientists from NREL has been working hard to find a solution for the piles of plastic inundating recycling centers and landfills. Their work is part of the Bio-Optimized Technologies to Keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE) Consortium. And the mission is simple.

Find an answer to our plastic problem. Data from NREL shows that only about 5% of all plastic ends up recycled. The rest ends up clogging up landfills.

That is a problem since plastics will likely take hundreds of years to degrade. So, despite your effort to separate recyclables from the trash, much of what you toss still ends up in landfills. The primary reason this happens is due to the chemical composition of plastics.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/recycling-plastic-waste-will-soon-no-longer-be-a-problem/ar-AA1346Zf

[eppur_se_muova]

1. What the article describes is a two-step process -- catalytic oxidation followed by bacterial ...

digestion. Still a process in development, though

[NNadir]

2. There is a tremendous amount of wishful thinking here.

The main problem with waste plastic is entropy; the world is awash on micro and nano plastic.

This news item makes somewhat wild assumptions. I'm sure without even looking at the paper that this claim has been greatly exaggerated. There are thousands of papers, probably tens of thousands published on the biodegradation of synthetic polymers each year, buet the still the problem remains intractable.

I believe that there are tractable solutions, but they are not easy nor cheap.

These kinds of news releases are not helpful. They produce complacency more than they produce results.