“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.

  • dumblederp
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    “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.

    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      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.