You've got it backwards - Taiwan (the Republic of China) actually used to control the mainland before the Chinese civil war that resulted in the modern-day government (the People's Republic of China) taking control. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
rallatsc
joined 1 year ago
For plastic definitely. Glass & aluminum recycling is actually viable long-term and I don't think enough emphasis is put on that.
Second, power lines face an especially onerous permitting process. A new transmission project must generally seek approval from every city, county, and state that it passes through. A new natural-gas pipeline, by comparison, only needs to be approved by FERC.
Ridiculous. Should be the other way around if anything.
The critical assumption here is that it is easy to make plastic from "carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen". While those are the primary atoms in plastics, actual polymerization reactions (to form plastic) require them to have specific reactive functional groups. The most common ones are alkenes (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, PVC, Teflon), epoxides (epoxy), or amines and carboxyl groups (the 2 monomers of nylon). While some compounds with these functional groups exist in nature, they are rare and polymers based on them do not have the full range of properties that conventional polymers do. There is a lot of active work in this field, but even once these polymers are perfected it will likely require quite a bit of chemistry/engineering knowledge to produce thm safely and without huge quantities of waste. The only practical way to get large quantities of the major synthetic polymers is as a by-product of oil refinement (they are in such low concentration in oil that it would be infeasible to refine oil just for them), and again there is the safety concern of bootstrapping it.
Sorry, bad phrasing. I intended to say "The current government of Taiwan"