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Well:

Tsuji et al. (2003) Thermal cracking of oils from waste plastics https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s10163-003-0090-x

Walendziewski (2005) Continuous flow cracking of waste https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.fuproc.2004.12.004

Das and Pandey (2007) Pyrolysis and catalytic cracking of municipal plastic waste for recovery of gasoline range hydrocarbons https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/53188820.pdf

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Like I said in the first response, if you're willing to throw a huge excess of energy at the problem, sure. Calculate out the energy expenditure on any of those reactions. You're talking about burning thousands of times more hydrocarbons than are being recovered. It's a bit like saying you don't need to worry about algorithmic efficiency with a big enough computer.

So they're just doing it as an exercise, I guess.

What then? Just landfill it? Recycling mixed plastics is nontrivial. And old-school incineration is a nightmare of toxics emissions.

What's wrong with landfills? The petroleum was taken from the ground now the plastic returns to where it came from. Unless Recycling is economical, it will release additional CO2 into the atmosphere.

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