“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
They’ll start mining landfill for metals and probably plastic soon enough. Air it out, wash it, get the metal and plastic, don’t worry about that other in the air/water, that’s a future poor person’s problem.
metals, sure. The problem with plastics is that plastic is not plastic, it’s a plethora of different chemical structures. Very difficult to recycle some of them, even if sorted.
“Recycling the plastic” in my tip-mine dystopia fantasy would be what they called burning plastic to fire the smelt to get the metals out. They’re gonna burn rubbish for metal and market it as a good thing, someone will get paid a lot of money to think of a word like reclamation.
If it’s incinerated properly, burning the old plastic shouldn’t be much different from burning other hydrocarbons.
I’d rather they burned up plastics from landfills than coal, and probably oil and gas too really.