My TL;DR:
Ministers have repeatedly claimed developing the huge oilfield off Shetland will improve UK energy security.
For example, in September, Rishi Sunak said Rosebank would help prevent young people from growing up “dependent on foreign dictators” for energy security.
Furthermore, in the king’s speech: “Legislation will be introduced to strengthen the United Kingdom’s energy security and reduce reliance on volatile international energy markets and hostile foreign regimes".
However, in a written answer to a parliamentary question, the government admits that the private companies extracting the oil will sell the vast majority internationally: “Around 80% of the oil produced in the UK is refined overseas into the products demanded by the UK market".
Alexander Kirk, of the climate justice group Global Witness, says “UK oil and gas is owned by the companies that extract it and sell it on global markets. New oilfields like Rosebank will only line the pockets of rich fossil fuel firms, it won’t help the millions of Brits that are struggling to pay their bills.”
Edit: Making title more clear.
It does recycle, though. You can’t recycle plastic bottles into plastic bottles forever, but they can become lower grade plastics meant for different tasks for their entire life cycle. Highly degraded plastic can be made into building materials and roads, for example.
The real reason it hasn’t taken off is because it’s not profitable.
And we do that already.
But considering you can only do it basically twice, you can’t mash different types of plastics together, and you can’t “recycle” into the types of plastics that are in demand, it’s all rather pointless.
They make low grade building materials, think benches, and flake easily so roads are a really bad idea. There are only so many benches you can make and Walkers have that covered with the green washing of crisp packets.
If you stick to the cheapest recycling process of just washing, grinding, and heating the plastic. That’s mostly all that is done because it’s the only process that’s even slightly profitable .
You actually can in a chemical process called transesterification. Rather than just grinding the plastic into flake and heating it, it can be refined and rebuilt into new polymers.
Repolymerization (transforming polymers back into monomers to purify them) can also be used to recycle plastics almost indefinitely.
There’s actually a lot of chemical recycling processes that can be used that we just don’t bother doing, because again, profitability.
Do you have an example of anyone providing transesterification recycling options?
Googling only provides research papers, which say that it is extremely energy intensive, has only been demonstrated on PET, and being research, is no where near ready for scaled use as they are only 6 months old.
Nope. I guess I should say I believe that there are recycling processes that can be used and am convinced by what I found.
I also know that they aren’t profitable, so they won’t be. Not until they become cheaper or raw resources become more expensive, anyway.