Yeah, a much lower price for recycled plastic would change things some. Europe does a better job recycling plastic than the U.S. and Canada in terms of how much they recycle, and a lot of that is because governments subsidize recycling, bringing the cost down and making recycled product significantly cheaper for manufacturers.

However (ain’t there always a however?) Europe still recycles only a tiny fraction of the plastic they produce. Most plastic can’t be effectively recycled. Plastic that can be effectively recycled can only be recycled once or twice before quality degrades so badly that the recycled product is crap, and manufacturers always have a strong incentive to use virgin plastic to keep line failures down due to unpredictable results with recycled plastic. It’s not always about the cost of raw materials.

I saw some good news the other day, however, regarding a new technology that could allow recyclers to harvest polycarbons from vaporized plastic that are almost exactly the same as the raw materials we get from petroleum, which would let us stop using petroleum completely for a very long time, given the staggering masses of garbage plastic lying around everywhere. That would be a dramatic game changer.

But don’t count your chickens. I just tried googling the article to share with you, and I can’t find it again amidst the hundreds of other articles about recycling game changers that didn’t pan out. I’ve gotten a little cynical about stories of new technology. Nevertheless, this isn’t an intractable problem from an engineering point of view. I mean, it’s way easier than fusion as an energy supply!

Like fusion, though, it’s a very difficult problem when you consider all the political will and treasure that would be required to make something really positive happen.