So true.

This is the reality people don't want to hear. Even in perfect industrial conditions, you’re only getting a 15% mix before the quality falls off a cliff.

We aren't "recycling" plastic into new bottles. We are slowly downcycling it into a gooey, unusable blob until it eventually ends up in the dumpster anyway. It’s a delay tactic, not a solution.

It’s even wilder when you look at the feedstocks. Ethane, the byproduct that makes most plastic, is essentially a waste resource of gas and oil extraction.

We often have so much of it that it’s just flared (burned) off at the wellhead because there’s nowhere to put it. The industry has spent decades building "cracker plants" just to find a way to monetize this byproduct by turning it into single use plastic.

Theoretically, we have enough of the trash gas to keep making plastic for a long time, regardless of oil shortages. The high prices are often more about the energy cost of the manufacturing plants than a lack of raw material.

Can confirm, as someone who worked half my career in plastics production, this is fact. We could only reuse plastic in our supply chain if it was free of any contamination or it would clog up the extruder breaker plates or damage the crazy expensive machined extruder itself. And the longer the polymer is in that heat cycle, the stringier it gets until it turns goey blob, making it totally unusable. Edit: cured plastics do not have the option of remelting and can only be burned or buried.

The most we could recycle if it was 99.999% free of contaminants was about 15% regrind and that was significantly lowering the physical qualities like strength and other QA requirements.

Ask any janitor where that plastic recycling bin goes, "same place as the rest, out back in the dumpster."