First of all, plastic is very difficult to sort, just because every time you sort, you need to use hand motions. Imagine this for the water bottle you have in front of you. You need to have 27 pieces to make a pound. To get a pound and then sell plastic as a tonne, say, at $400 a tonne, you need millions of what we call “time motions”. In the past, we just could not do it. Now they have optical sorters. They can automatically scan each type of plastic by polymer. This speeds it up: plastic number one, plastic number two, plastic number three, blah, blah, blah, all the way. You have seven grades of plastic sorted out, every one worth something. The lowest is worth about $200 a tonne and the highest about $700 a tonne. That has a positive economic value.
That's why I say that in the past people talked about the problem of plastics. Because of technological advancements, that's history. That will happen to other products too. That's why one of my recommendations is that our government needs to spend time, money, and energy in research and development and innovation. All these technologies are from Europe.