Whangārei plastic burning hearing against Warren Sinclair raises questions over NZ recycling reality
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I made a comment for this post:
Pyrolysis = you extract the hydrocarbon/ pyrolisis oil back from the plastic to be repurposed.
Landfill = you bury the whole component intact and let Mother Nature degrade it over 100 years. (No repurposing, no Life cycle, lazy way)
The man is actually speeding up the 100-year time decay into 1 process.
Because there is no oxygen present, the material cannot catch fire or burn (combustion). Instead, the intense heat thermally cracks the large, complex molecules apart into smaller, simpler ones.
The process typically yields three types of products:
Liquid (Bio-oil / Pyrolysis Oil): Condensable vapours that cool into a synthetic crude oil.
Gas (Syngas): Non-condensable gases like methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide.
*Solid (Char / Carbon Black): A solid carbon residue.
With that, only solid carbon goes back to the ground, just as plants do through their leaves, all the way to the roots, feeding the ground.
The man should get a medal, as he sped up a 100-year process, saving money and reducing carbon emissions from overseas plastic dumps, and he should be preserved as one of the few remaining on earth with a brain still working.
If Pyrolisis is banned, then we should ban LCA (life cycle assessment) of all products.
Put everything to the ground and let us have plastic cassava or any fruits in the near future.
DP