solarclonemike:

mtxyqmpsfqklt:

i may have posted this exact thing verbatim before but if you grok how miraculous plastic is as a material – lightweight, durable, flexible, molded at relatively low temperatures, the list just goes on and on and gets longer the more kinds of plastics and use cases you add – you start to get really mad about single use plastics. plastics do nearly everything well except eventually break down. they are made for whatever the opposite of a single use is. like making computer hardware out of plastic makes sense because you expect the component to last a long time. in theory (in practice i don’t think this is done too much) you could even reuse the plastic casings off of failed products to house new hardware. but making candy wrappers out of plastic reads like making a pillow out of metal. that’s not what that’s for.

caveat here that some level of plastics waste is inevitable because of medicine. could probably get away with biodegradable or at least frequently reused pill bottles but IV bags and syringe components probably need to be single use.

It’s possible to recycle many plastics back into hydrocarbons through the use of pyrolysis - high temperatures without exposure to oxygen. This would be a good way of disposing of single use medical grade plastic because the heat and anaerobic environment would sterilize any pathogen and destroy most chemical contaminants as well.

It’s energy intensive, of course, but that’s just a hurdle - the only real obstacle is the investment in infrastructure. Disposable plastics happened because it was the cheapest option and these companies are not going to be held accountable for their greed in any way, least of all financially, so the funding will have to come from some other source.

How much heat does the process need? Because people underestimate the power of the sun. Two metalwork hobbyists have told me they melted pennies (melting point of copper: 1984.32 °F, 1084.62 °C) using solar concentrators they made by covering old satellite dishes with reflective material. And this was in Massachusetts, not a place known for high levels of solar gain.

I can imagine a future in which every hospital (outside of perennially cloudy places like Vancouver) has a solar concentrator on the roof with an apparatus for keeping the medical single-use plastics in an anaerobic environment while being heated, and collecting the resulting hydrocarbons into an easily recyclable form. The energy required for this disposal method would probably be pretty small.