this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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zerowaste
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Recycling is chemically possible at very high temperatures and pressures; it's just energy intensive and wasn't financially feasible until just about now, when solar energy can offer cheap energy.
We'll see how this will develop in the future. For the point of oil consumption (and therefore CO2 emission), plastics is only like 3% of oil consumption anyways (other 97% is fuel for vehicles). For the point of pollution, you don't need recycling, just collecting and combusting at high temperatures (to fully oxydize it and not leave any toxic fumes.
We recently built a plastic recycling facility here in sweden which recycles.. 12 types of plastic i think? several of which were basically not possible before.
so yeah it's definitely possible to recycle plastics, countries have just been refusing to actually take measures to make it happen.
You mean GHG pollution.