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Comment by Double_a_92 | Hacker News Reader

You don't even have to recycle it. Burning it for heat energy is enough. Most plastic only produces water and co2 when burned...

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Are you sure about that? As a younger person I burned a few samples of various things called 'plastic' and the fumes sure smelled like maybe I should be sterile by now.

Plastics tend to consists of carbon and hydrogen chains. See for example polycarbonate [1], polyetene [2] and ABS [3] (contains nitrogen). They might however contain all sorts of additives. In order to produce just water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen the burning must be carefully controlled [4] - in your experiment the burning was probably not complete, which explains the fumes (that might have been carcinogenic [4]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Incineration_of_plasti...

You generally don't want to burn halogenated plastics like PVC though. As I understand it that will release highly toxic dioxins (which cause cancer and birth defects among other things) unless they are incinerated at high temperatures.

I don't know why this is downvoted, it's correct - incineration of plastics is needs to be done at high temperatures to avoid this problem.

Maybe it was PVC. That releases plenty of nasties when you burn it.

Ditto, the sibling posts seem to cover it except for printed plastics, even if the plastic is good the printing probably wasn't/isn't.

"the fumes sure smelled like maybe I should be sterile by now"

You, sir, have just enriched the English language.

The C in PVC stands for chloride. Wikipedia claims it is the world's third-most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer, after polyethylene and polypropylene, which are pure carbohydrates.

So, technically, it is 'most', but chances are fairly good a random selection of garbage plastic contains chloride, too, and that can be nasty.

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