Australia isn't the only, but they are incinerating this stuff. They are are spending more energy treating it like fire wood than it takes to convert the majority of the mass into usable fuel and hydrocarbon stock.
Waste Plastics into Fuel Oil?
One way to clear the existing mountains of waste plastics is to turn them into clean fuel oil; a company in New York appears to have done just that at a cost of 11 cents a gallon using unsorted, unwashed plastic wastes in a safe, environmentally friendly, and highly efficient process; but will...
www.i-sis.org.uk
The small 1-gallon continuously charged reactor was assembled and operated for several months, gathering data for scaling up the process. It was charged with 100 g of plastic every 5 minutes. Over 44 runs, the reactor processed shredded waste plastics including food waste packaging, agricultural film, and shredded gas tanks as well as high density polyethylene regrind in some runs to establish ideal conditions. The low boilers (methane, ethane, butane, propane, and hydrogen) were analysed with a gas chromatograph (CG) and quantified. The resulting fuels underwent typical petroleum tests including automatic distillation and flash and pour point evaluation. The fuel output consisted of a diesel/naphtha mix. GC testing showed a total absence of wax-like hydrocarbon chains in the C20-C60 range. Additionally hydrocarbon production was predominantly in the C13 diesel range
If you want an explanation of this and what it means on a smaller scale,
its a guy treating plastic the same way some people were treating used cooking oil in the mid 2000s, as free fuel stock.
National Geographic
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There seems to be 6 billion metric tons of plastic waste that has been produced and is around somewhere, in landfills or piles of trash. Thats 40 billion barrels of crude oil derivatives. Or around five years of total US consumption. Thats a lot of material that isn't being reclaimed, and lazy morons are trying to incinerate away.