The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 35 million tons of plastics are generated just in America, and 12.% of that becomes is garbage like plastic containers and bags and even appliances.

Sorry folks, politicians in states like California who insist it's being recycled are lying to you, scientists know better. What really happens to plastic, even if your government is shipping it to China to be "recycled" is landfilling and incineration. A new study finds that measuring how much carbon dioxide a potential chemical looping system would pump out compared to conventional processes to produce synthesis gas could reduce emissions by up to 45.



Synthesis gas, a pyrolysis gas, is hydrogen and carbon monoxide mostly derived from water and methane often produced using coal gasification, which requires high temperature, which means high energy. But because it uses CO2, their  could take worrisome emissions out of action while producing useful syngas. And if it is more pure than the 80% syngas generated now, the private sector will embrace it.

Waste to fuel - even environmental groups can't hate that

Their waste to fuel approach uses two reactors; a moving reducer where waste is broken down by metal oxide and a combustor that replaces the oxygen used so that the material can be regenerated. Purer syngas with less CO2 is a win. But it's new, and western nations are stuck in a rut of demonizing science, from agriculture to responsible land management, all thanks to groups that want to retreat to the past.

The team believes they can get syngas up to 90% pure, which may be a reasonable crossover point between cost and value. As Dr. James Hansen once said, the only thing we need to stop climate change is for existing clean coal tech to be used everywhere. Instead we force developing nations to keep on burning wood and dung in homes because we won't give them a loan for any centralized energy except solar everyone outside rich countries know does not work yet. 

It's still just in the 'we can do it on a computer phase' but the simulations estimate it could produce syngas better than other chemical techniques, and that's worth investigating in a 'let's try everything' cultural milieu. Unfortunately, we are now in year 15 of 'make what I want to do a mandate' energy positioning, and there is no way to know if the Trump administration will break from that tradition.