“Plastic band-aid” (October 21) indicates why recycling cannot answer the plastics problem, but the interesting thing is the facts have been known for a long time.
Every cycle the plastics degrade, so the formation of microplastic fragments increases. There are good uses for recycled plastics, but the market is limited.
We are approaching a number of problems arising from our increasing use of technology, and what is our response? The obvious one should be to at least investigate new methods of making the problem go away, but our outgoing government did not understand and one of the parties in the new government seems to think shutting down research spending is the answer. It is not.
In the 1980s, a proposal was put up in the US to make hydrocarbon fuels by hydro-treating all the organic fraction of municipal waste. This includes all plastics, garbage, etc. The plant was designed by a corporation with labs in Boston. I have been in the Boston lab and saw some of the product from what some would call a pilot-scale operation.
This proposal would save considerable space in refuse dumps and provide fuel that would offset our fossil fuel intake, and since the plan was to construct a plant that prodded 50 tonnes a day, we can assume the engineering was reasonably well examined. Almost
