Before looking, it will probably be more pollution.

There is a reason that portion of the crude oil was made into plastic, and not sold as oil or fuel to begin with.

My first thought was "what kind of oil?". It matters. The clean burning, energy dense stuff was turned into fuel from the start. The rest of it is barely fit for a cigarette lighter.

But beyond that, not all plastics come from crude oil directly. Many plastics, especially baggies and consumer plastics of the type shown in these photos, come from liquids that are removed from natural gas.

Either way, you're certainly dealing with a liquid hydrocarbon of inferior quality. And at the huge energy cost of having refined it twice. I'd be surprised if this provided any net-positive energy. And it's certainly a dirty burning fuel with low BTU per volume.

Why not just burn the plastic directly at this point?

there was an infuriating segment on the local news last night that single-use/disposable coffee cups (e.g. keurig) are somehow "greener" because they supposedly use water/energy more efficiently than "traditional" ways of making coffee. of course, zero mention of where these things end up after their 15 seconds of fame.

https://wgnradio.com/the-business-of-food-with-steve-alexand...

it's like CO2 is the only impact to the environment that matters. you can always find greener ways to source the energy, but you're not going to find a lot of ways to reduce plastic trash.

Omg infuriating. Telling me my French press wastes hot water is absurd.

If you wanted to burn plastic for energy, you can already do it at a electrical generation plant.

You have to put more energy in to get oil out.

Um. And climate change.

Burning plastic however, has high temperature requirements to avoid giving off toxic fumes in the smoke, which I think you would reduce by doing a conversion to oil first.

Some of it doesn’t even burn: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-india-plastic-recycl...

Waste-to-energy plants are designed to reach those high temperatures, amongst other measures, to minimise and prevent toxic emissions.

They still produce a lot of CO2, though: plastic is still a fossil fuel. From a climate perspective, we’d be better to bury the stuff in the ground than to burn it. And ideally, we’d just produce a lot less plastic in the first place!

Are you suggesting to bury it in the ground so it can leach into groundwater and soil rather than even trying to capture and reuse the CO2? Are you serious or are you joking?

Digging a hole and lining it with clay and polymer, filling it with household waste, and then covering it with a polymer liner is significantly cheaper than what you are describing.

It's not great, there's no great solution, the problem is hard on multiple levels. If a solution made sense, people would already be doing it.

The solution is to not generate waste we cannot dispose of

I think this is the correct approach. No need to recycle what we do not generate. My only question is, how much legacy plastic would remain in the supply chain and what do we do with it?

> From a climate perspective, we’d be better to bury the stuff in the ground than to burn it.

Actually from a climate perspective we'd be better off burning the plastic, and reducing how much fresh oil we pump.

I'd rather "bury" if you will, the oil, instead of the plastic.

At the point where the plastic is already produced it's the exact opposite. It makes more sense to burn it and reduce our fossil fuel consumption. There may be edge cases where it's debatable, like in Iceland which already runs on 100% renewables.

Btw all these processes aren't as simple. For example decomposing polyethylene produces methane which can leak into the atmosphere where it's one of the worst greenhouse gases of all. If you burn it you "only" produce CO2, which is much preferable. The oil and gas was (semi)-permanently trapped before humans started digging it up without knowing the consequences. Putting waste into a surface dump and covering it with a few meters of soil and maybe some plastic sheets is not the same thing at all. This is not permanent carbon sequestration.

Everyone should consider there are many things we do not understand. In the media we're often presented "experts" who purport to know it all, but it's not true. And many laypeople have strong opinions despite understanding even less.

Not all energy is created equal though. There are applications where 1kwh of oil is more valuable than 1kwh of electricity.

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks that...