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.
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.
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.
mschuster91|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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