Technology
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Human TL;DR- they're breaking ester bonds in PET via hydrolysis into it's base components. Theoretically they'd be easier to separate at that stage and reform into brand new PET. But it's only in lab reactors, not scalable, and most likely excessively energy intensive for the total material processed (as electrolysis almost always is), and such is a fluff article
There have been ways to recycle organic waste into oil for decades. They even built a full sized plant to use turkey offal from a nearby turkey processor (initially could get it for free). Even ran demos on tire rubber or plastics. Initially cost effective when oil prices were high as they could sell the oil.
Few of problems. Up front cost is high. Oil price volotility and the drop in oil prices made it uneconomic. Coupled with needing to pay for the turkey offal (someone else started paying the processor for it), killed the plant being fully self funded.
Since then refinements in the process, or closely related ones, keep being developed without being able to overcome the economics. These processes can recycle from just about anything organic, including plastics, to whatever oil feedstock you want. Plastic as good as virgin plastics, pharmaceuticals, or whatever oil you want. Still the economics don't work when oil is cheap and new oils societal costs are externalized.
Yeah. The issue has never been actually doing it, because chemistry is chemistry and all chemical bonds can be broken- it's the economic viability, because breaking chemical bonds in hydrocarbon polymers is incredibly energy intensive. Energy that, up until now, would have also been coming from petroleum or fossil fuels, so you'd end up with a net negative. Thermodynamics hates an engineer's guts and makes his life hard.
However those economics might certainly be changing as oil supplies gradually tighten and extremely cheap peak solar electricity becomes much more plentiful. Once midday electricity becomes an almost waste and the energy is cheap, the economics of processing becomes a lot more attractive.
That is a good point on energy costs. Cheap solar energy is going to change the dynamics to a lot of things.
Thanks, I was just testing the bot, but something failed. Thanks for the tldr, yea I guess electrolysis only pays for aluminum, because there is no other way to get it :/ maybe hydrogen too.
Maybe the best option for plastic that ensures it won't end up in nature and is not too expensive is incineration powerplants.
The autotldr bot is currently in beta testing so will only work in the auai community on programming.dev