Just want to say that my grandfather, while working at Hughes, was one of the earliest proponents of aluminum recycling, but everybody was mad at him because they had to pay CRV (which is a terribly-designed incentive actually). Then he was one of the earliest opponents of recycling plastics, and he received nearly universal excoriation, including from my own family. Now the facts are slowly trickling out of the cultural taboos, and perhaps rationality will prevail either way, but itβs been about 50 years now, and it seems like maybe cultural consensus on technical topics is a poor indicator of fact.
I think if we only used two kinds of plastic for food or consumer packaging, plastic recycling would make more sense, we unfortunately use like 10, which means s high labor cost for sorting.
Plus a myriad of additives in the plastic, plus various contaminants. Which makes it kind of hard of to recycle without seriously degrading the end product, even if we had everything nailed to spec and not the chaos we are in now.
I my book, we need to make energy production seriously cheap (renewables, plus maybe nuclear) and put some of the energy excess into transporting heavier but inert packaging such as glass, metal and carton. And by decree lock down the types of plastic and additives which are allowed to use.
In a 100% renewable economy, there will be a need for storable chemical energy for filling rare prolonged outages of wind and solar. Refuse, and in particular high energy density refuse like plastics (made from renewables feedstocks), would be good for this.
