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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

Also, plastics can contain all sorts of nasty toxic surprises. Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity.

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> Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity.

If we can assure that the output meets a standard should we burn it, then certainly we should be able to assure the output meets a standard should we refine/convert it.

And the conversion of plastic into oil will have cost much more energy, producing the same pollution in the end.

But at least we save some landfill space. Also micro-plastics contamination is everywhere.

In the USA, landfill space concerns are based on a hoax. Landfill space is a function of landfill development, and there’s no shortage of spaces to create landfills.

I am not talking about running out of space in general. I am talking about taking a hill covered with trees or farms, and turning it into a hill of garbage. Surely you can see why I would prefer a natural hill?

If you can burn it, there is no point in burring it. We're still taking a lot of stuff from underground and burn it for energy, why not burn the stuff we already have above ground?

Landfills amortize the carbon emissions. Keeping the plastic's carbon temporarily sequestered in a landfill puts it somewhere other than the atmosphere. Eventually we'll have to do something with all that carbon, but we're better off burying it until we get a better handle on emissions in general.

You can still burry the soot after you burned the plastic.

Most of the carbon is going to end up as CO2 in the air, though.

You don't need to burn it in an open field ...

You can used a closed system so that the waste is actually all captured. Or you can have a more continuous system that'll capture/scrub the output.

Unless you capture it, as Amsterdam has been doing.

CO2 capture is a scam, perpetrated by the petroleum industry to make people think it's okay to burn more fossil fuels.

You would be right, IF we were to not take out any other fossil fuel to burn. But to bury the plastic now it just means we will dig for an equivalent quantity of coal, oil or gas to burn. We will burn some stuff regardless, we might as well burn what we already have, instead of burying it and digging for new stuff.

Since this consumes electricity, the energy need could be filled by running the converter at peak hours for renewable energy, so effectively soak up excess energy to recover oil that's already out of the ground. Which would be a net win in terms of energy, possibly even financially depending on the investment costs for that device. Assuming it even holds up to the promises.

All these processes best done in centralized plants with quality controls, not in bench processors.

It is more efficient to burn it, generate electricity and charge a EV battery with it, than it is to convert it to fuel (consumes energy) and burn it in an internal combustion engine (very low efficiency due to small scale).

It's much easier to purify the burning waste products than raw trash. It is much less varied.

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