[yarky]

> Burning it produces all kinds of toxins from impurities and carbon.

Which can be trapped/filtered to avoid pollution.

> if plastics ever become sufficiently valuable - or recycling sufficiently viable.

If that was remotely probable, you'd have banks offering plastic-storage related ETFs already.

[yboris]

My guess about "can be trapped/filtered" is in theory and possibly, with a lot of effort, in practice. But then of course -- how much easier it is (and how much more financially-incentivized it is) to let the pollution out rather than to filter it.

We need good incentives with a system that self-corrects; we need to stop playing whack-a-mole with easily-known-ahead-of-time problems and implement good systems.

[smileysteve]

Modern island nations (Japan being one of the first) have been doing clean incineration through Arc Reactors / Plasma gasification for energy for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

[bm-rf]

I was curious as to how effective scrubbing was, turns out Packed Tower Wet Scrubbers can filter out 99%+ of VOCs from incinerated plastic. You still get carbon emissions however.

[mschuster91]

At the scale humanity is using plastics, 99% is lacking after-comma 9s in orders of magnitude. We're at 400 million tons of plastic waste a year [1], so even 1% inefficiency means that the VOCs of 4 million tons end up in the environment.

Yes, it's better than burning it outright in open fire pits (as it's done in an awful lot of "third world" countries to concentrate metals out of the waste), but it's way worse than a dump yard. And most of the places that have a lot of plastics waste don't have the resources to install decent scrubbers, much less perfect scrubbers.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/recycling-global-stat...

[jcynix]

> You still get carbon emissions however.

Yes and no. If the energy is recycled (for heating buildings and/or water) you'll reduce carbon emissions from coal/gas/oil. Waste incineration (instead of landfills) is a thing in various European countries and the heat can (and will) be used to heat buildings or the steam drives turbines to generate electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration