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A comment on How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. Parent comment

Re:How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Woul... by tedk-42 on Saturday September 12, 2020 @02:42AM (#24450373)
They produce a lot of toxic gases as the plastics often contain a variety of elements which when burned formed nasty compounds
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Re:How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Woul... by lrem on Saturday September 12, 2020 @03:05AM (#24450500)
Filtering that out is a solved engineering problem and you still remain energy positive.
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Re:How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Woul... by WealthVsSurvive on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:10AM (#24452553)
Clean coal, clean diesel, now clean incinerated plastic: I don't doubt that it's manageable or maybe even fully solved, I just don't have much faith in it being employed. The track record of such things is not great.
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Re:How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Woul... by thu2111 on Saturday September 12, 2020 @01:39PM (#24454059)
The local incinerator here in Switzerland isn't merely burning the waste. IIRC it gets vapourised using a high energy plasma or something like that, broken down to constituent atoms. At any rate it belches smoke into the atmosphere in the middle of a city, has done for a while and nobody seems to suffer any ill effects, so I believe them that the "burning" is highly effective.
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Re:How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Woul... by EForEndeavour on Sunday September 13, 2020 @02:33PM (#24462902)
That sounds like plasma gasification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification). Out of curiosity, which city are you in?

> it belches smoke into the atmosphere in the middle of a city, has done for a while and nobody seems to suffer any ill effects

How long is a while, and how does that compare to the time it would take to detect meaningful increases in cancer or other illnesses in the vicinity of the incinerator?

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Re:How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Woul... by thu2111 on Monday September 14, 2020 @04:24AM (#24467993)
http://fernwaerme-zuerich.ch/index_en.htm

Was built in 1995, or so it claims, with other kinds of incineration being done for >100 years.

So 25 years or so. I think that's enough time for a clear effect to show up.

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