In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Fri, 25 May 2018 22:30:58 -0400: Hi, [snip] ><[email protected]> wrote: > > >> Plastic bags are made primarily of hydrocarbons. >> >> 1. Dissolved in a solvent, they might make a useful diesel fuel. >> 2. Bundled and compressed the bags might be burned instead of coal. >> 3. Added to a blast furnace, they could replace, or augment coal. >> > >Trash incinerators are used to produce energy in some places. Unfortunately >they cause a lot of pollution. > >The problem with plastic bags is that the total mass is small, and the >plastic is scattered around. Bringing it all to one place would take a lot >of energy. Think of how many plastic bags you use in your daily life. >Grocery shopping bags, Saran wrap, the bags used packaging in new >computers, plastic sheets at Lowe's used to keep plants from soiling the >back of your car, and so on. It seems like a lot, but if you were to gather >a whole month of that plastic, and burn it, it would burn up in no time. It >would be nothing compared to the coal or natural gas that is burned to >provide you with electricity. People who cut and burn firewood to heat >their houses have gigantic mounds of wood, the size of two or three pickup >trucks. That's just the fuel need for space heating. Wood has low energy >density, but not that low. 16 MJ/kg versus 24 MJ/kg for coal. See: > >http://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_density > >People use large sheets of plastic in some industries, where they unpack >delicate parts, for example. It might make sense to gather up the plastic >in a factory and burn it or recycle it some other way. > >There are recycling bins for plastic grocery bags.
This is what I was aiming at. Something to do with the collected bags. >I suspect this is not >economical but it is better than scattering the bags around the landscape. >They cause great harm to wildlife. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk local asymmetry = temporary success
