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Ah I see. I didn't think either of the parent comments were talking about plastics. Is most oil turned into recycled plastics? I assumed that most oil is turned into combustible fuel, but maybe that's not true.


Seems like 8-12% is turned into plastics. Though it’s usually natural gas that is used, not oil directly. Natural gas is also used to produce fertilizer and explosives in large quantities.


But I think fertilizer and explosives are also not recyclable.


That depends on your definition I guess. They both do add a lot of nitrogen (and some carbon) to the atmosphere when ‘used’.


I'm struggling to figure out what definition of "recyclable" fits what you said. What definition are you thinking of?


I’m guessing I misread what you wrote and got the sense backwards.


Most oil is not recycled. We know how to do it for all uses, but that doesn't mean we can. The energy costs make is not useful. If we had an infinite source of free energy we know how to recycle CO2 and h2o back into hydrocarbons.




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