OTish DIY Plastic recycling

Seems to me developing clean incineration plants is way more sensible than horribly inefficient plastic collection, sorting and recycling that is going on at present. How much energy is needed to turn something from a domestic dustbin back into something useful?

Lots of useful energy locked up in all that plastic.

Tim

I tend to agree, but perhaps a basic "first pass" might enable some useful recycling into "garden furniture" type products?

As discussed a litle here by Julia Higgins, worth a listen for those of a scientific bent.

Having had a quick look at the web site I'm quite impressed. (I admit I didn't search around to see who is funding it). I could believe that with third world labour costs to do the sorting and cleaning (and we have all seen the videos of kids swarming over disgusting rubbish tips), this sort of small scale enterprise could provide real opportunities in the right places.

I was expecting it to be full of "save the planet" rhetoric, but actually it is more about starting an industrial revolution without too much capital.

And then it can branch two ways, either to provide useful recycled material to conventional manufacturing, or to produce alternative innovative products (say, plastic bicycles or housing).

But you can always burn the stuff which is too contaminated or otherwise not suitable for recycling as well.

Good that at least one person could see the plan. I only found the site from having looked at this:

And use so much more energy than creating new plastic, very handy. Apparently the latest ideas are for smart plastic that self destructs on encountering a certain gas or liquid. However two issues with that, firstly, what about all the old plastic, and second one would need to choose your destruct signal substance very carefully or granny witht the new formulation pledge might suddnly find the tv as a gooey blob on the floor. Brian

Burning plastic is extremely polluting. Even if scrubbers are fitted,the collected material still has to be disposed of. We should be using more glass and returning containers for reuse. The plastic is poisoning us.