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My_Body_The_Mystery t1_j969ldi wrote

Plastic producers and users have to be put on the hotplate about only producing recyclable plastics. Also plastics should be easily categorized. Any type of waste plastics is always a huge mish-mash of different kinds (and deemed contaminated) plastics that cant be recyclable. That's the biggest problem with all of these new ways of recycling that needs to be addressed first

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Xicadarksoul t1_j96gdmn wrote

>Also plastics should be easily categorized.

They in fact are.

You can use cheap-ish near infrared spectography to tell em apart. https://www.oceaninsight.com/blog/spectroscopy-for-plastics-recycling/

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Really the issue is how ridiclously cheap it is to "mine" the base mineral (oil), making it utterly uneconomical to recycle even when its technologically feasible.

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My_Body_The_Mystery t1_j96pq7b wrote

I agree. All plastics have that little recycling label on the bottom. Easy peasy!!! Then why are we shipping crate after crate to developing countries. It's because the plastics are not seperatable. There are so many variations. (We can recycle the white plastic but not the black plastic take out containers) The lables the food residue. The contamination. The logistics should be hammmered out by the manufacturers in the first place instead of just printing the recyclable label then rejecting it whne its done

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DinoHunter64 t1_j96r57p wrote

No, no, that's not the major problem here. The major problem is that plastic is more or less an indirect byproduct of refining crude oil, so it will always be cheaper to produce new plastic than it is to recycle it. Unless we cut back on our other uses of oil, this will likely never be solved. Hell, we should really be abandoning the use of many plastics due to the microplastic issue, but it's effectively too late for that.

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Iceykitsune2 t1_j970rdl wrote

>Plastic producers and users have to be put on the hotplate

individual action was conceived by the plastic industry.

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[deleted] t1_j96ltd9 wrote

To be honest, in the same way trees were once not biodegradable, I feel like we could probably just wait out the whole trash thing.

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alexwasashrimp t1_j96nqtt wrote

It took life quite a while to find a way to consume dead trees. Are you sure we have that much time?

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[deleted] t1_j96od75 wrote

I don't anticipate plastic waste to cause any kind of significant effect on human population anytime soon.

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