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Xicadarksoul t1_j96gdmn wrote

Reply to comment by My_Body_The_Mystery in Scientists create carbon nanotubes out of plastic waste using an energy-efficient, low-cost, low-emissions process. Compared to commercial methods for carbon nanotube production that are being used right now, ours uses about 90% less energy and generates 90%-94% less carbon dioxide by Wagamaga

>Also plastics should be easily categorized.

They in fact are.

You can use cheap-ish near infrared spectography to tell em apart. https://www.oceaninsight.com/blog/spectroscopy-for-plastics-recycling/

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Really the issue is how ridiclously cheap it is to "mine" the base mineral (oil), making it utterly uneconomical to recycle even when its technologically feasible.

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My_Body_The_Mystery t1_j96pq7b wrote

I agree. All plastics have that little recycling label on the bottom. Easy peasy!!! Then why are we shipping crate after crate to developing countries. It's because the plastics are not seperatable. There are so many variations. (We can recycle the white plastic but not the black plastic take out containers) The lables the food residue. The contamination. The logistics should be hammmered out by the manufacturers in the first place instead of just printing the recyclable label then rejecting it whne its done

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DinoHunter64 t1_j96r57p wrote

No, no, that's not the major problem here. The major problem is that plastic is more or less an indirect byproduct of refining crude oil, so it will always be cheaper to produce new plastic than it is to recycle it. Unless we cut back on our other uses of oil, this will likely never be solved. Hell, we should really be abandoning the use of many plastics due to the microplastic issue, but it's effectively too late for that.

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