The problem with this scheme is that fresh new plastic is incredibly cheap. A solvent based system like this basically has no chance of competing, even when getting the raw material for free. The end product won't be as good either thanks to all of the contamination.

I wonder if it would make sense to instead have dedicated areas in landfills where you put products that can't be reasonably recycled today in the hopes that in the future someone figures out a way to do it and can just tap into the neatly separated pile to get their raw materials? This is pretty speculative and optimistic. Plus it requires dump site operators to correctly guess which kind of materials are going to be useful in the future.

A book I read as a kid was set in a future where they were out of oil and couldn't make new plastic. Plastic became very expensive and things like plastic bowls were used as signs of wealth. The plot involved kids who were taken and forced to mine plastic from old landfills.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ear,_the_Eye_and_the_Arm

> The plot involved kids who were taken and forced to mine plastic from old landfills.

So basically what 3rd World countries do with the U.S. electronics.

> where you put products that can't be reasonably recycled today in the hopes that in the future someone figures out a way to do it

We have those; they're called landfills.

> neatly separated pile[s]

The problem is that most types of refuse are already semi-uniformly mixed at the household level, so you would have spend labor separating them, which might not be needed[0], so you might as well put off separation until know you need it.

0: Eg, if the most efficient way of recycling them turns out to be: dump the whole mess into vat of genetically engineered bacteria, and sift out the glass and metal bits when they build up.

"Genetically engineered bacteria" is basically pixie dust at this point. It's a potential solution, but we don't have the tech to know if it would even be practical.

Er, yes, that's exactly my point.

Incredibly expensive, solvent heavy and wouldn’t actually work either. You’d be better off burning the lot to produce electricity which is what increasingly happens.

I'd assume/hope they're capturing the gases from the burning, but do you know if that produces anything usable or something we also need to then figure out what to do with?

You're assumption, unfortunately, is incorrect.[1][2]

1.) Ocean City, MD opts to burn recyclables in Covanta Incinerators (selfish, awesome): https://www.oceancity.com/ocean-city-has-no-plans-to-return-...

2.) Covanta Incinerators are bad despite what the company claims (selfish, shocking): https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/too-much-pollution/

I tend to be a pessimist so I was trying to be a bit more optimistic, but I guess that was a bit misguided.

There's systems that are doing roughly that (but I think not a vat of solvent, some other process to crack the plastic):

https://renewlogy.com/renew-energy/

There are a few yoytube videos that show diy versions of what you describe, but efficiency ia not there yet.