Another good article...
We know the quality and cleanliness of plastic is of extreme importance. This should be addressed worldwide to those who manufacture plastics to those who run waste facilities. There is a solution here.
A few problems though...some plants never got up and running. Hard to evaluate success in a plant that never was. Also, two plants closing because they weren’t commercially viable is not a good reason to close a plant. We need to clean up this plastic mess and if they need to be subsidized then so be it
We all contribute. We all need to support a solution.
“The Salt Lake facility never got up and running, and Boise found itself renting warehouse space to store the collected orange bags
the program didn’t work because the plastic recyclate was “contaminated with other garbage at 10 times the level it was told to expect.”
Dirty recyclate is a major problem with advanced recycling
Renewlogy also built a plant in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in collaboration with Halifax Sustane.
My last inquiries to Sustane as to whether the plant has been built and is operational went unanswered.”
Reuters’ report concludes that the driver for these advanced recycling technologies is the pressure brought to bear on big companies and the passage of “polluter-pays” laws “that would shift the cost of waste collection from taxpayers to the companies that make the plastic we use.” It’s obvious that Reuters has it a bit wrong. If these laws were really about the polluter paying, then consumers, the people who run waste management companies, and municipalities that do not have good infrastructure in place should pay. They are the ones polluting, after all.
Reuters notes that “at least four high-profile projects have been dropped or indefinitely delayed over the last two years because they weren’t commercially viable.”
