How do they make hydrogen clean? 95% of hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels. I doubt they're going through electrolysis to make the hydrogen or sourcing it from a supplier that does.

It's part of the ongoing process, we can't skip to the final step. I think it is fair to rely on electricity and assume it will at least one day be green when thinking about green processes in totality, since some places are already generating green electricity. In my city we have a hydrogen plant powered mostly y solar that is feeding the steel mill, and this is just the beginning of exploring this process so it is bound to get more efficient.

The variable nature of most renewable energy sources might make hydrogen produced by electrolysis cheap enough

You can also coke iron with carbon from plastic. It's still not super great. But it does reuse plastics which don't get recycled enough.

Reusing plastics is honestly one of those "do we need to" things these days. The theory is that if we reuse them, then the waste doesn't pollute the environment - but landfilled plastic waste is basically sequestered carbon, and plastic pollution is ocean-borne and mostly being directly produced by poor environmental practice - not unrecycled plastic waste or landfill escape.

Yeah I agree, I'm pretty pro, bury plastic in the ground, but I figure if we need to coke steel rather than digging up coal we can just divert a few trucks.

Yeah seriously, bury the plastic really deep away from water tables and forget about it. We clearly can’t recycle most of the stuff. Couple that with moving away from a frivolous use of plastic and I think we are golden. There are a bunch of abandoned mines miles away from substantial water tables. Fill those up.

We can’t figure out how to store a minimal quantity of radioactive waste in a purpose-built salt mine dozens of miles away from any small town. I have no faith that we can find places to store megatons of plastic waste.

Plastic doesn't radiate.

NIMBY neighbors don’t compromise.

They might if it affected their states tax revenue and was only a plastic landfill (which is to say, not a compromise but a pure self interest play).

There shouldn’t be any neighbors in the middle of nowhere.

funny question: could we mix the nuclear waste with the plastic to make (the plastic) degrade faster?

That's brilliant. I would love to learn if that could work and wouldn't just create a bunch of radioactive plastic.

Even if it did, if it ended up enriching the soil carbon-content, would it matter?

I suppose it solves littering but in the end you're still just burning plastics and turning them into CO2, which isn't great.

Reminds me of "Plasteel" from RimWorld.

Steel production is one of the largest contributors to global C02 emissions. Reducing it by 30% isn't a solution. Unfortunately, zero-carbon-emissions steel is still not feasibile, which is a major, major issue for the health of our planet.

We have to start somewhere don’t we?

Yes -- but it's not a start unless we're making zero-emissions steel possible. Otherwise, it's just more of the same. (Akin to stabbing someone with a 30% smaller knife.)