Plastic products are items that we use every day around us, and their replacement speed are very fast, so that to recycle waste plastic has become the focus of environmental problems. This study has proposed an optimized circular design for the recycle plant of waste plastic, therefore, and our proposed strategy is to build a new tertiary recycling plant to reduce the total generation amount of the derived solid plastic waste from ordinary and secondary recycling plants and the semi-finished products from secondary recycling plant. Results obtained from a real recycle plant has showed that to recycle the tertiary waste plastic in a tertiary recycling plant, the finished products produced from a secondary recycling plant accounts about 27% of ordinary waste plastic, and the semi-finished products that mainly is scrap hardware accounts about 1% of ordinary waste plastic. Other derived solid plastic waste accounts for 6% of ordinary plastic waste. Therefore, if the ordinary, secondary and tertiary recycle plant can be set all-in-one, it can reduce the total generation amount of derived solid plastic waste from 34% to 6%, without and with a tertiary recycling plant, respectively. It can also increase the operating income of the secondary recycle plant and the investment willingness of the new tertiary recycle plant.
Global warming is a thermodynamic problem. When excess heat is added to the climate system, the land warms more quickly than the oceans due to the land’s reduced heat capacity. The oceans have a greater heat capacity because of their higher specific heat and the heat mixing in the upper layer of the ocean. Thermodynamic Geoengineering (TG) is a global cooling method that, when deployed at scale, would generate 1.6 times the world’s current supply of primary energy and remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The cooling would mirror the ostensible 2008–2013 global warming hiatus. At scale, 31,000 1-gigawatt (GW) ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) plants are estimated to be able to: a) displace about 0.8 watts per square meter (W/m2) of average global surface heat from the surface of the ocean to deep water that could be recycled in 226-year cycles, b) produce 31 terawatts (TW) (relative to 2019 global use of 19.2 TW); c) absorb about 4.3 Gt CO2 per year from the atmosphere by cooling the surface. The estimated cost of these plants is $2.1 trillion per year, or 30 years to ramp up to 31,000 plants, which are replaced as needed thereafter. For example, the cost of world oil consumption in 2019 was $2.3 trillion for 11.6 TW. The cost of the energy generated is estimated at $0.008/KWh.
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