[fullspectrumdev]

I recall seeing a small documentary about some people living in a small island community who were using destructive distillation to convert the absolute fuckload of plastic waste washing up on their beaches into fuel for generators and such.

I’ll have to go find it again, it seemed like an interesting “local” solution to a genuinely hard problem (plastic waste).

[TeMPOraL]

Burning plastics is the simplest useful way to recycle them (plastics being mostly hydrocarbons in solid form), though it's also the least interesting. It's a kind of minimum - if you don't know how to better reuse the material, then treating it as fuel provides some amount of value. Now, when proposed recycling schemes start to look economically or energetically worse than burning it or just leaving it in landfills for future use - that's a really bad mark.