I’m far from an expert on recycling of plastic. However, the options I see are as follows:
- it sits in a landfill where the plastic eventually (many years down the line) breaks down into microplastics.
- it gets sent into to a recycling facility (fuel/time/energy spent to transport), then it may or may not get “burned” or processed with other like plastics and eventually recycled (iirc, plastic can really only be recycled through this process a few times)
- it gets sent to city recycling facility but repackaged and sold to some other state or country for processing (+more fuel consumption/time/energy). Then depending on the country, or state it’s processed in same fashion as option 2 and thus incurring more GHGs
- or maybe it somehow ends up in your local street, rivers, lakes, oceans and eventually degrade into microplastics and eventually into the food/water you live on
Plasma gasification is the cleanest mechanism to convert plastics to energy while rendering byproducts inert, there just isn't much will to implement. Energy output can contribute towards direct air capture of carbon to mineralize, the rest can be from renewables.
You can gasify many materials besides plastic (garbage/waste stream). Filter out metals, brick, rock, glass first. Perhaps site near existing landfills in order to balance the ingest stream between ongoing waste and the waste mine. I have heard the phrase that the landfills of today are the mines of tomorrow, but I think they're more like Superfund sites, all to require remediation in the future at some point (hence the importance of projects that can reasonably degrade these materials into inert byproducts).
The first one is much better than any of the others. Global warming is a far more pressing problem than microplastic pollution. Plastic is in fact one of the few materials we have that can sequester carbon in a relatively inert way, so burying it in a landfill is infinitely better than burning it.
I want to believe landfills of plastic are a form of carbon sequestering, but that depends entirely on whether anything leeches out of it over time into ground water.
- it sits in a landfill where the plastic eventually (many years down the line) breaks down into microplastics.
- it gets sent into to a recycling facility (fuel/time/energy spent to transport), then it may or may not get “burned” or processed with other like plastics and eventually recycled (iirc, plastic can really only be recycled through this process a few times)
- it gets sent to city recycling facility but repackaged and sold to some other state or country for processing (+more fuel consumption/time/energy). Then depending on the country, or state it’s processed in same fashion as option 2 and thus incurring more GHGs
- or maybe it somehow ends up in your local street, rivers, lakes, oceans and eventually degrade into microplastics and eventually into the food/water you live on