There are a couple European countries that burn all their waste. Sweden has been _importing_ waste to burn for a while. Switzerland is now retrieving various kinds of metals from the ashes. Ireland has installed an incinerator at a landmark position in the focal point of all the Dublin's shoreline.
Clean coal, clean diesel, now clean incinerated plastic: I don't doubt that it's manageable or maybe even fully solved, I just don't have much faith in it being employed. The track record of such things is not great.
The local incinerator here in Switzerland isn't merely burning the waste. IIRC it gets vapourised using a high energy plasma or something like that, broken down to constituent atoms. At any rate it belches smoke into the atmosphere in the middle of a city, has done for a while and nobody seems to suffer any ill effects, so I believe them that the "burning" is highly effective.
> it belches smoke into the atmosphere in the middle of a city, has done for a while and nobody seems to suffer any ill effects
How long is a while, and how does that compare to the time it would take to detect meaningful increases in cancer or other illnesses in the vicinity of the incinerator?