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Comment by beanjuice | Hacker News Reader

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.

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