Its old technologies from the waste industry, coal industry and oil industry sewn together. The result is low carbon footprint fuels that can be used in aviation and even cars.
BTW if you have ever used synthetic oil (lube oil in your car), it has come from a process similar to this.
My humble request : Skip recycling this week - instead use the time you spend recycling to call or write to your waste company or congresswoman to find a better solution to waste handling. Point out that Recycling is a farce !!
Recycling of aluminum is absolutely not a farce.
Even steel, paper and glass have net benefits.
The plastic recycling is sadly hard to justify. It not only didn’t ramp up, it seems to be aiding the plastics industry to continue polluting the world.
Can you link to this plant? I’m wondering if is really at all a positive.
They tried to sell the garbage incinerator power plants as a good thing and they’re horrifically bad. Massive air pollution and an extremely toxic end waste product.
No big name news articles on this but it does look promising from this article.
I need to learn more about BioMass Magazine though. The added link to the OP is a PR release apparently and thus only a starting point and not a cite.
I would love to find an objective third party article about this plant. BioMass Mag is
Yes - good point. Call your waste Company and ask if they will guarantee that your recycled trash will actually be recycled. If they cannot guarantee, then try calling your senators and congresswomen for better systems.
For $30, you can get a apple tag (size of a quarter) insert it in an used plastic bottle - put it in a recycle bin and you can follow its journey to a landfill.
It is kept under hush hush but aluminum cans are lined with plastic. This plastic is hard to get rid of - and goes to the furnace together with the aluminum. It produces a lot of dioxin (a carcinogen). Now most recycling plants have dioxin removal systems in the US, but it is poorly regulated. Just like we have animal welfare laws in the US, but we all know what happens in chicken farms etc :
Okay - Lets agree on plastics then. Please do not spend hours and precious water to wash plastics before recycling.
Our municipal waste management operation finally admitted defeat on recycling and shut down the entire program about 3 years ago, shortly pre-COVID. The public put far too much trash in the recycling stream and once China stopped accepting imported plastic it was all destined for the landfill after a very expensive money-losing hand-sorting process to pick out the smidgen of clean glass & metal.
I don’t fault them for the decision. It was simply admitting what the rest of the USA isn’t quite ready to admit: consumer recycling is now a con (though it may not always have been so). Reduce & reuse are the two legs of the stool that make the real difference.