The Delusion of “Advanced” Plastic Recycling
www.propublica.org
The plastics industry has heralded a type of chemical recycling it claims could replace new shopping bags and candy wrappers with old ones — but not much is being recycled at all, and this method won’t curb the crisis.

Turns out even the most “advanced” modes of plastics recycling are bullshit, just as 40+years of plastics recycling efforts before them.

  • nikaaa@lemmy.world
    31·
    8 days ago

    I didn’t read the article.

    From a technical viewpoint, all types of plastics can be recycled; it just costs a lot of energy. So instead of supplying this energy through fossil fuels to re-cycle old plastics, they just used the fossil fuels directly to make new plastics.

    In the future however, when there’s abundant amounts of cheap solar energy, it will make sense to re-cycle plastics.