How is PET not a hydrocarbon (for the purposes of burning it)? It's (C10 H8 O4)n the oxygen makes it not technically a hydrocarbon, but it will burn just fine and cleanly.

Your point about building waste is valid, but I think most of that stuff goes in dumpsters and can be directed to a different wasting handling.

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lstodd 2 days ago | parent [-]

Hah.

We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum.

That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.

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kragen 2 days ago | parent [-]

Environmentally speaking, shipping it off to a landfill would have been orders of magnitude better; burning it released thousands or millions of times more pollution. Most polyester resins are aromatic, so incomplete combustion can produce a wide variety of quite toxic substances.

	▲	lstodd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I guess we did release some. Mostly soot and half-burned hydrocarbons to be decomposed by solar UV. Still, thinking of all this just being buried for like 2e6 years ... that seems even more wrong.