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Dow Chemical is recycling plastic the old-fashioned way: It’s burning it. The company has wrapped up a trial at its Midland, Mich., headquarters in which it incinerated 578 lb of linear low-density polyethylene film waste from its nearby extrusion laboratories. The firm was able to recover 96% of the energy from the plastic, the equivalent, it says, of about 11.1 million Btu of natural gas. Dow suggests that incineration is a viable alternative to the landfill for those plastics that aren’t commercially recycled. It also asserts that waste-to-energy is an underused scheme in the U.S. compared with Europe, where the practice is fairly common. “The U.S. lags behind many other countries that capture trapped energy from recovered materials,” says Jeff Wooster, plastics sustainability leader for Dow’s North American plastics business.
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