This is the problem with oil; no matter what steps you do inbetween (be it fuel or plastic, or recycling/processing the plastic), it will still accelerate climate warming in the end.

[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh noes not the C!

What is "the C"? In this context

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Carbon. The stuff that prefers to be in a gaseous & bound form to do heat house effect, which we take out of the ground where it got to in times with significant warmer global climate.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Bad news: over 90% of plastic with those recycle tags end up exported and burned to make electricity.

[–] dawcas@scribe.disroot.org 4 points 2 days ago

It's also burnt to make cement. Or just burnt, in Spain "mysterious fires" in sorting/recycling plants that only affected the plastic trash were pretty common after China stopped importing ship containers filled with mixed and unrecyclable plastics. I don't know what is going on now, blessed ignorance, fuck reality.

[–] MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

It’s pure plastic waste at that point. No one is going to be making plastic bottles for the purpose of dissembling them into hydrogen fuel anymore than they are currently making plastic bottles for the purpose of sending to waste-to-energy plants (incinerators).
It’s not just plastic. It’s plants too; ideally agricultural and industrial byproducts.

Solar reforming has emerged as a class of sunlight-driven technologies capable of converting waste-derived substrates into fuels and chemicals. By utilizing substrates such as glucose or ethylene glycol (EG), derived from lignocellulosic biomass or polyethylene terephthalate (PET), as electron donors, solar reforming enables a more energetically favorable oxidation pathway compared with water oxidation.

source: the paper linked in the article (emphasis mine)