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At the scale humanity is using plastics, 99% is lacking after-comma 9s in orders of magnitude. We're at 400 million tons of plastic waste a year [1], so even 1% inefficiency means that the VOCs of 4 million tons end up in the environment.

Yes, it's better than burning it outright in open fire pits (as it's done in an awful lot of "third world" countries to concentrate metals out of the waste), but it's way worse than a dump yard. And most of the places that have a lot of plastics waste don't have the resources to install decent scrubbers, much less perfect scrubbers.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/recycling-global-stat...




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