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Comment by foofoo55 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting she doesn't work with PET.

I wonder what happens to the waste from deburring and installation, and the microplastic dust from cutting and wear & tear.

I sometimes feel the only option for waste plastic is incineration.

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PET has a much higher melt temperature, which would degrade the HDPE. At HDPE melt temperatures, the PET would remain unmelted, which would probably cause strength and visual problems.

Incineration would probably be much, much worse, because all you're doing is releasing toxic pollutants into the air/atmosphere

Unless you're talking about plasma gasification, in which case I wholeheartedly agree it appears to be a very promising solution, and wish I had resources to invest in that.

I too would love to work in the plasma gasification space, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of interest in investment in that area even with the waste to energy and environment benefit potential.

We could have self powered ocean platforms collecting and plasma gasifying plastic waste, instead of dragging all of that waste back to land for processing.

I've been dreaming about this for years. Most people who hear about it think it's nonsense. You could even set up plants near landfills and deploy little Wall-E robots to dig up and transport landfill for syngas. Feeling like we'll see this in the next 100 years.

Part of the reason there's little investment is apparently because the energy generation is barely above net neutral with current technology. Still though, even at neutral it seems like it would be good to clean up soil and create slag for construction.

It would probably work best as a nonprofit/government project

Keeping my eye out for natural gas processing ships going for a song.

Plasma gasification is overkill, obtaining complete combustion is a matter of reaching sufficient heat and mixing adequate oxygen, that, and not allowing particles to escape before combustion is complete.

Basically, the difference between a fireplace and a rocket stove.

There are plenty of ways to construct an incinerator which does this, it's a fairly mature technology.

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