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by ars 1776 days ago
We need to stop trying to recycle things, and start burning them for energy.

It's simply better for the environment.

It suffers from not "looking" green, which matters far more to people than actually being green.

5 comments

I was shocked when I learned about all the things you can't recycle in Switzerland. But it seems that, indeed, burning is the better choice. And it works well in practice.
This is referred to as Waste Valorization[1] and is common in Europe with high temperature incinerators.

[1] There are other forms of valorization other than heat generation; but this one is the easiest to implement at scale.

Depends on the material, really. Switch to multi-stream recycling and reclaim the material as well as possible on a per-stream basis - that's what happens in Sweden, afaik.
It's not really better for the environment because you have all the byproducts of the combustion, some of which can be pretty toxic themselves.
Unless you sustain 1850°C
Sure, good luck with the vessel at that temp
Ceramics can handle it easily.
Plasma, bitches!