Theres An Actual Reason You Cant Recycle Plastic

TITLE: There’s an Actual Reason You Can’t Recycle Plastic CHANNEL: Hank Green DATE: 2026-01-07 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I do not know what the title of this video is. It might be the reason you can’t recycle plastic as your stove or the perian basin or the power plant down the road or Elon Musk’s Grock. All of these titles are true. It’s going to be interesting to see which one gets the most clicks, but they all point to the same very strange fact, which is that plastic recycling cannot compete with fresh new plastic because the precursor chemicals to fresh new plastic are basically free. Not metaphorically, but geologically and kind of economically free. like they come out of the ground whether or not you want it for free. I was just down on the Gulf Coast of Texas and we kept driving past these amazing gigantic kind of beautiful to me anyway chemical plants. I know that no one else feels that way, but look at this. Is crazy. It is amazing what we build. And part of the reason why a lot of this infrastructure is here and why there keeps being more of it and why a lot of the world’s plastic begins here in South Texas is because this is where a huge chunk of the feed stocks for plastic come from. And down there on the Gulf Coast of Texas, a company might be able to buy a barrel of ethane for $2. If that seems like it is cheaper than a barrel of fresh water, you’re right. Of course, that does not include the cost of the barrel. There are very few barrels involved here. But even then, how in the world could this stuff be so cheap? And this dirt cheap price for ethane from like $2 to $10 per barrel significantly depresses the price of virgin plastic is the reason why plastic is so dirt cheap. But why? Why is ethane so cheap? I can explain this to you. So, when I think of the reasons why plastic’s recycling probably doesn’t happen, the biggest thing I hear is just like evil, like they’re taking all the plastic and they’re like, “You should recycle it, but then they’re not recycling it cuz they’re bad.” But, of course, the fundamental reason why plastics don’t get recycled is cost. So, the pellets from recycling cost more than the pellets that are brand new. And that seems a little bit weird, but there’s a bunch of reasons why. Sorting is really hard. Sometimes there’s colors in it and those get mixed together. Sometimes bits of other plastics get in and they degrade it. Sometimes when the plastics get super hot that can degrade the plastics and make them less good. You also have to take this like dirty stuff and make it food grade again. Whereas if you make it from scratch it doesn’t have anything but plastic in it. But really at the root of it here, nobody’s surprised by this. Recycling plastic is losing to virgin plastic because virgin plastic is cheaper. Meet ethane. Well actually first meet methane. Methane is the thing that we call natural gas. This is what we burn in natural gas plants. And ethane is what happens when two methanes get stuck together. Ethane is, I think, the most common of what we call the natural gas liquids. You can do some fairly simple chemistry to ethane to make it into ethylene, and then that can polymerize into polyethylene, which is what like plastic grocery bags are made out of. And you can also do like a little bit of further chemistry to make PET, which is both, I think, the most common form of plastic and the easiest form of plastic to recycle. This is the stuff that soda bottles are made out of. Most single-use plastic starts out as ethane that comes out of the ground along with methane. But here’s the thing. Nobody is drilling for the ethane. People want the methane. Cuz the thing about methane is you can only use methane once because the whole purpose of methane is to burn it. And over the last 20 or 30 years in the US for a variety of reasons, we have become very methane hungry. We use it all over the place. We always have. So if you turn on a gas stove, that’s methane burning in there. Probably it might be propane, but it’s probably methane. We also burn methane to heat our water and our hot water heaters, to heat our homes and our furnaces. But like the biggest thing that we use methane for is to generate electricity. We’ve shifted largely away from coal and into methane. This is on the whole good. It’s better for air quality. Like much better for air quality. Methane burns very cleanly. We also get more energy per unit of carbon dioxide produced. Now in the short term, this might be worse because some methane leaks out and it’s itself a very potent greenhouse gas. We don’t need to talk about the details. Methane is a really big part of how we generate electricity. that share has been growing over time both because we do and should prefer it to coal but also because we got a bit of a surprise which was called shale. So you can imagine hydrocarbons being trapped in a variety of situations inside of the earth. Sometimes it’s like a big pool like literally a big reservoir of gas or oil. Much more common than that, you have like loose rock that you could think of kind of like a sponge that is holding on to it. But you, you know, the sponge is getting squeezed by the planet’s pressure and you know, you can get a lot of it out by just pumping it out. But shale is not like that. It’s not like a sponge. Shale is like trying to get oil and gas out of like a marble countertop. And for a long time, that didn’t seem like a thing we could do. But then we invented horizontal drilling and fracking and we had this explosion of US natural gas production which we are still in the middle of and which we are not going to stop doing cuz suddenly we need way more electricity than we ever needed. Both because we’re electrifying certain things like hot water heaters and furnaces and our cars and also because apparently we need to spend a half a trillion dollars on Nvidia chips and run them all of the time. But point is shale wells don’t just produce methane. They produce tons like more than typical of natural gas liquids, especially ethane. And you cannot make a shale well produce only methane. It’s going to cough up that ethane whether you want it or not. The result is that the shale boom meant a massive overupp of ethane. Now, there are a number of things that you can do with ethane. You can certainly turn it into plastics precursors, but you can also do two other things with it. One, you could just shove it down the pipeline with the methane. take it all the way down to the point where it’s going to get burned. This is probably happening right now in your home. It’s likely that there’s methane burning in your home. It’s likely that there’s a little bit of ethane in there with it. But you can only do that so much, and I’m not going to pretend I understand why, but apparently you can only put so much ethane into the pipe before things start to break. And so, if there’s nobody there to buy the ethane as a plastics precursor, and you’ve got too much to shove it down the pipe with the methane, you can flare it, which means that you burn it. You just burn it on site. You don’t want to release it into the environment. it’s not a good thing for the environment. So, you just light it on fire and you you’ve seen flares. That’s what those flares are. I mean, if you see a flare, it might be ethane, it might be methane, it might be a number of other things, but that’s one of the things you can do with it. And then it’s wasteful and you get carbon dioxide and you get nothing out of that emission of carbon dioxide, but it’s better than just releasing the ethane. But here’s the thing, a lot of governments, including the US government, control how much you can flare. So, it might be that you are producing so much ethane that you cannot flare it and you cannot send it down the pipeline. And if you can’t sell it, you have to shut down the well. They hate shutting down the well. If there’s still methane down there, if there’s still oil down there, that’s money in the ground. And so if you can’t send the ethane down the pipe and you can’t flare it, you can’t sell it, you have to shut the well down. So it doesn’t matter if you’re making money on the ethane. You just need someone to take it away from you. And so since fossil fuel companies often want to sell ethane at rock bottom prices, petrochemical companies are going to take that and they’re going to process it into a number of things. And the easiest thing to turn ethane into is ethylene that then goes through more chemistry to become a plastic. That’s not responding to the world’s demand for plastics precursors. This is responding to ethane over supply because you can’t get the methane without getting the ethane. It’s just there for free. And sometimes it’s worse than free. It’s actually causing a problem if you can’t find someone to take it. And so, as you might expect, we have an explosion of extremely cheap plastic. Ethane, pennies per gallon. Ethylene becomes extremely cheap. Polyethylene becomes cheap. The precursors for pet plastics become cheap. The US becomes a huge exporter of virgin plastic and plastics precursors. And then a new price floor for plastic is created. a floor that recycling, even though technology in that space has been advancing over those same 20 years, even though recycled feed stocks for plastic are cheaper than they’ve ever been, recycling cannot keep up with the continuous drop in the price of plastic feed stocks. So, from what I can tell, and I’m not an expert on this, but I think that like brand new polyethylene that just came from ethane that was brought out of the ground costs like 30 to 40 cents a pound to make at the Gulf Coast of Texas. recycled costs like 60 to 90 cents per pound. Even if recycling were perfect, it is competing with a material whose whose feed stock is basically trash. And yes, unrecycled plastic is also trash, but it’s trash that’s like distributed around and it’s got stuff in it and there’s a bunch of like glue on it and it maybe has colors in it. But there is like a little bit of good news, which is that pet plastics, which are like the soda bottle plastics, these are easier to recycle. And the costs between the recycled pellets and the brand new ones is closer. It’s to the point where I could see a possibility where if we use less natural gas and so ethane gets more expensive, if technology for recycling gets better and so recycled feed stocks get cheaper, they could get to par at some point. That’s true for pet plastics. It seems kind of impossible for polyethylene. It’s just so cheap to make polyethylene. And as I was making this video, I was feeling kind of hopeless about this whole thing. Like ultimately the reason why plastics are so cheap and why recycled plastics can’t compete is a thing that’s not going away. It’s fracking shale for natural gas so that we can power the AI data centers so that we can heat our homes so that we can have stoves that have little blue flames. I’ve made a video about this before but we really should not. If you have the opportunity next stove, don’t do that. It’s bad for indoor air quality and also eventually we are going to get off natural gas. Why would we be burning methane in our homes? That’s weird. So I thought basically my conclusion was going to be like we can’t recycle plastic for a functional reason which is that there is an artificial depression in the price of brand new plastics. But then I watched a video from another YouTuber and he was talking about ways that technology might make it cheaper to recycle plastics. And that gave me a little glimmer of hope. And you know what I did? I reached out to him and I said, “Hey Matt, would you like to chat?” because I’ve never talked to him, but I watch his videos for ages. And he said, “Yes, and this is my new thing. I love it so much. If I get to talk to cool people for a living, I will take that opportunity. Everybody, here’s my chat with Matt Frell.” When I was making my video a little bit hopeless about this whole thing, and I watched your video and I was like, “Well, maybe not just we need to get the price of ethane up, but we could get the price of recycled plastics down with technology.” And I was like, “That’s great.” And I want everyone to watch this video, and you should. It’s linked in the description. But here is Matt Frell to tell me about this video. Hi.

Hello. We’ve never met. This is so cool. Yeah, it’s the first time. Yeah, it’s awesome. Welcome. I just yelled at you a little bit. But I appreciate it cuz I have the same exact feeling when I read about this stuff and I’ve been learning about plastics. It makes you want to if I had hair, it would have been pulled out. It’s just like it’s infuriating. So these technologies which are hopefully going to reduce how much energy it takes to do the recycling, make it more cost competitive. Yeah. But at the same time, we also have to have policies to help support them and incentivize them to try to kind of like give it a level playing field so that it has a chance to mature and hit that mass scale to become cheaper. It would be great. We’ve come a ways. That’s part of that’s some of the other research I did. So I was like, so ethane has been getting cheaper and cheaper as the shale fracking boom has happened and as we’ve converted a lot to natural gas from coal, but we’ve also been doing things that are that are in the market now that have made things cheaper. But a lot of them are mechanical. So they’re like using special lasers to identify what kind of plastic something is really fast or having like AI assisted robot arms sorting the recycling. But what you were talking about was is not mechanical, it’s chemical. Yeah. When we were digging into this, it’s like is there a ray of hope? And yeah, I mean there’s some new research out of like Northwestern University that we were looking at which can break down my video. I laugh about it every time I say it, but PeeP, which is polypropylene plastics, it basically their technique is using a nickel catalyst and some hydrogen and they can crack it apart and break it down into kind of some component parts that can be give it a second life for something else. Yeah. And what’s fascinating about this is because the PP is difficult to separate from the other types of plastic like polyethylene. very difficult because they’re the same kind of density. So when they’re trying to sort them like they they grind them all up and they try to sort them out, you can’t. Right. That’s one of the main systems is like you floated in water in various ways. So like density separation is old as time. But if things are the exact same density, then density separation doesn’t work. The thing that’s exciting about this one is it uses nickel, which is way cheaper as a catalyst versus pick your metal. Yeah, we have a lot of nickel that’s sitting around. We don’t have that much to do with it. It comes out of the ground along with other stuff just the way that ethane comes out with methane. And it’s going to last a long time. They said it can be recharged. I think it’s up to three times. So, it’s going to last a very long time. Yeah. In this process, this is my interpretation of what you said like they’d tested three times and they hadn’t tested four yet. They could go beyond. Yeah. Who’s got the time? You got to publish. Stop waiting around. So, one thing that I always talk about, I don’t actually have a plastic bottle near me. But I always think about is when you like have a plastic bottle that’s at least four plastics. So, there’s the plastic of the bottle, there’s the plastic of the wrapper, there’s the plastic of the cap, and there’s the plastic that is the seal on the inside of the cap. Uh, which that’s caps. God, I’m glad it’s not my job. You don’t realize what a mess it is. And then I can get kind of immediately hopeless. I’m like, “Oh, well, fine. I now I get that it’s it’s not about evil, so I guess that’s good, but it’s about a problem that I have would have no idea how to even approach solving.” But that’s where these people are coming up with like there are insanely like intelligent people coming up with the solutions for this. Yeah. But it’s unfortunately it’s like how long have we been dealing with plastics and we’re only really getting to the solution now, which makes me depressed. But at least we’re getting there and there are things happening to help the sorting process, to help the actual recycling process and make something useful out of it. So what are some other things people are doing? The other one was that we talked about in a video recently which is the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials known as Kim. They have a plasma torch system. Okay. Which is wild to me. But it sounds like you’re just going to burn the plastic which is a thing we do. We do that sometimes. But it’s not pyrolysis. It’s not actually burning it because it’s doing it inside of an oxygen free zone. So it’s not actually burning. So like this is a torch that is not made of flame. This is made of like excited electrons. Yes. Electricity. So this is where it’s like is it being are you going to power this with green energy, renewable energy, or like how are you going to power it? Is the giant question mark on it. But it takes no sorting. You can just take the plastics, chuck it into the plasma torch labels. It could be dirty. It doesn’t matter how many different types of plastic. Peanut butter all over that thing filled with You could put a piece of pizza in there with it. That far. Your worst enemy also goes in. Component parts. Component parts. What’s really cool about this process is it breaks it down into what is it? It’s the benzene and the ethylene. So then you end up with the component parts that you can turn right back into virgin plastics. Right. Right. So you don’t get plastic out of it. You don’t get like a pure pet pellet. You get ethane and you get benzene. You get the virgin feed stocks. Yeah. The stuff that you need to make the virgin plastic you get back. Yeah. So that’s where it could potentially create a close loop. But my concern about this one is just how much energy does it take? Because a lot of energy. But Matt, aren’t we in a world where energy is going to be like really cheap in the future? The real question is can you run it only sometimes? With any industrial application, you’re building these very expensive pieces of equipment, these very expensive plants. So, you want them to be operating basically 24 hours a day so that you can get the most out of your infrastructure. And that means that you have to run them at night. If you could only run them during the time of the day when electricity is basically free, which we now have in a lot of the country because of solar, then that would be great. You’d just be like, “Oh, well, we’ll be one of the people who absorbs the free energy.” probably. It’s not a super cheap piece of equipment, so you’d want to be running it all the time. Yes, exactly. Where do you think we’re going to get the energy from? I have my opinions. Oh, man. That’s a loaded question. It’s going to be a mix of things. I think my personal take is I think there’s going to be a lot more. Obviously, solar, wind, and other renewables. I think nuclear is going to be having a comeback. I think I made a video about this like a year ago, and I really don’t want to look like an idiot. I was like, “The new age of nuclear is coming.” And I’m like, “All right, come on. Start building.” I have talked to so many people in the nuclear industry that are doing small modular reactors, all that kind of stuff. It’s like it seems inevitable that it will start to happen. So that feels like it’s going to be a part of our base load again at some point. SMR I can’t I just seen a wave of YouTube videos and these are YouTube videos. So it’s not like primary research here, but a wave of YouTube videos that are like actually SMRs turned out to be just as hard to build as anything else because you can standardize how it’s built. You don’t have to create a bespoke nuclear power plant. For sure. Maybe the first one is going to be more expensive. Very expensive to start out, but again with scale, if they can survive the scaling process as a new technology, then it will get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to do. What do you think about my pet project, my pet belief? Geothermal. Geothermal. Okay. I’m very bullish on geothermal. Yes. And part of the reason why was have you looked into the company Quaz at all? Are they the laser one? Yes. I call it a death ray. They don’t like it. I’ve talked to them multiple times and every time I called it a death ray, they’re like, “Please stop calling it a death ray.” It’s a death ray. But like if you pointed it at a person, it would be a death ray. It’d be very bad for you. But the fact that they have this technology that could theoretically drill cheaper than we’ve ever drilled before, deeper and cheaper than we’ve ever done before, that is going to unlock geothermal in places of the world where typically it hasn’t been available. And that is like an endless power source for us. Yeah. Well, and then also combining weirdly, you know, will fracking save the world. Geothermal is totally doable in places where the volcano is close to the surface, but that’s not most places. If you can increase the surface area, you can get a lot more heat out of it. And one thing fracking does is increase the surface area. So, there’s what is it Fervo or something like that? Fervo. Yeah. They are doing this. They’re basically taking the learnings of the oil and gas industry and they’re like, “Well, what if we didn’t take oil out of the ground or gas out of the ground, we took heat out of the ground?” And actually, that would be like entirely even cleaner than nuclear, maybe cleaner than solar, like lower footprint than solar. Just all happening down there because it’s not that far down that the Earth gets really hot. Yes. Very. It’s right there. And all we need is a laser capable of ablating away the earth. Yes. The fascinating thing about Quaz is that the hard part of drilling is that eventually your drill bit breaks and you have to pull everything up. All like you can’t go down there to replace it. You pull everything up, hundreds, thousands of feet of this and then you have to replace it and send it back down. And that’s the thing that takes like the most of the time when you’re drilling really deep. I’ve actually had a chance to see their demonstration rig actually running. It’s such a cool system. It was running. It was kind of like it was hard to describe. It was on a regular drilling rig. So it looked just like any drilling rig you’ve ever seen. But instead of the giant spinning thing going into the earth, it was literally just a cable gyrotron thing shooting into the earth and it was really cool to watch. What’s a gyrotron? It’s actually kind of fusion technology. It’s using the fusion industry for like the reactors to kind of help create the plasma. They’re repurposing that technology for Quaz to do the drilling. Gotcha. It’s like we all were convinced that fusion was going to solve all the problems and then one day we woke up and like what if we just pointed like one little piece of a fusion reactor at the Earth. Let’s not worry about fusion energy anymore. Yeah, there’s energy in there. We don’t have to push hydrogen atoms together or whatever it is that they’re doing in fusion reactors. There’s this weird also thing I feel about plastics, which is I don’t know what to do about the microplastics question because I get it a lot. People are like, “Hank, how bad are microplastics?” And I’m like, “Boy, do I not know?” Like what I’ll say is if they were very bad, we’d know. We are actually pretty healthy on the sort of like scale of humans over the time humanity’s been here. So, it’s not like lead. We’re not experiencing lead-like effects from microplastics. It’s orders of magnitude less significant than that, but recycling plastic does not make microplastics go away, unfortunately. No, that problem’s going to be with us forever, unfortunately. Yeah. Unless we really get back to our roots and we’re like, “Yeah, cotton was good enough.” The fact that we found microplastics in Antarctica makes me go there’s no hope for getting rid of microplastics. Yeah. I mean, there’s no hope for getting rid of microplastics, but it’s all dose. Well, one thing that I do think about microplastics is that our ability to detect these things has increased. And so it feels like we’re constantly discovering microplastics in places they never were, but we’re actually testing places we’ve never tested. And that includes arterial plaques and testicles and Antarctica. We just haven’t been looking. So the idea that like the millennials all have the microplastics the way the Gen X had the lead is like, well, Gen X probably also had the microplastic. They just didn’t know how to look for it. But maybe less. I mean, I think textiles are probably a bigger contributor to microplastics than people would think. You think it’s from drinking out of bottles, but it’s from wearing. Oh, it’s definitely got to be the clothes that we’re wearing. Yeah. It’s so dusty on that like most of the polyesters that’s kind of a PET kind of plastic from my understanding. And so you got companies like Carbios in France that are their enzymatic system for breaking plastics down is just I can’t stop reading about Carbios. I just love the whole enzymatic idea of taking biology and using it to break plastics down. And it’s the same thing. They can break it down back to the component parts to make brand new PET. So you could make brand new. You could take a shirt, recycle it, and put it into a vat with a bunch of enzymes. Yes. Yeah. But their process truly is a kind of a closed loop potential for a closed loop system. And I’m really hoping they can make it make a go of it. There’s always in my head this tension between technology and regulation where we could say this is a wild sentence. So in the Bible, okay, just starting there. There I only know about this because it’s used as an example of like an anachronistic thing from the Bible, but like it’s a sin to mix different kinds of fibers. I don’t know what this means. If it’s like you wearing wool with cotton, linen with wool. I don’t know. What I know is that there’s this thing in Leviticus, but like we could pass a similar regulation that’s like, look, you have to have all of the fibers in your clothes be the same kind of fiber so that we can chuck it all in the same vat. Or you need to stop using certain kinds of plastics and labels so that to sort of make the recycling process more efficient. But like good luck doing that in the free market America. I mean that’s one of the things I find interesting about the Carbios story in France because France is actually doing you can do the stick or the carrot like you can tax virgin plastics to make them so expensive that you want to use recycled plastic or you can use the carrot. you can incentivize, please use this recycled plastic, we’ll give you some tax rebates, that kind of a thing. And France has taken that approach where they’ve helped to fund Carbios. They’ve given it something like 40 plus million euros to try to kind of build it up and then they’re incentivizing companies that manufacture with plastic for every I think it’s for every ton of recycled materials they use, they get 1,000 euros or something. They’re incentivizing companies to do that. And because that’s in place, Carbios has actually been starting to get companies signing up. So, it’s like they’re getting the proper support from the government to try to let them kind of get their sea legs and be able to walk on their own eventually, right? Without that support, it probably would go nowhere fast. Right, you know, that is also was true of solar, and now we’re in a world where solar is cost competitive. Like we lived through that. You and I did. We’re old enough to remember when solar power was something that was for space and nowhere else. Exactly. The thing about using the tools of biology to do our work for us that’s so powerful it scares me but I think is a big part like a piece of the future that’s really exciting to me. Yeah. We have way more control over those systems than we once did. And I always like to say if you ask a scientist to make wood, they’ll just laugh at you. Like there are things that nature just does constantly. All like our bodies are full of things that are way too complex for us to ever create in a laboratory. Like from top to bottom, all of it is impossible to make, but nature is making it like crazy. And the best example is wood, which just seems like that we put that in fires. Like it doesn’t it matters to us so much that we use it to heat up marshmallows, but like really truly a miracle substance. You know, if it didn’t exist and then we made it in a laboratory, it would be extremely big news to have made such a lightweight strong material, especially if we could make it at the scale that nature makes it for us. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what we’ve been talking about are also systems that are going to require massive scale, public support, that kind of thing. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it from a different angle which is like what could you do from an individual point of view but like there’s a company also from France ironically called Polyfloss that I came across a couple years ago they have a recycling machine that you can buy. Oh for yourself? What? It’s wild. Basically the first one they created is larger it would fill kind of like the room I’m in it would be larger but it’s only cost I think it was like 18,000 euros and it was meant for humanitarian uses, local communities. Because what it’s basically like a candy floss machine, like a cotton candy for plastic. Yeah. PET, PETG, different kinds of PLA, it can take a whole bunch of kinds of plastic. You put it in there and it just spins out this like real fibrous lightweight material that you could use for insulation and it has a really good R value. You could compress it and make sheets of plastic that are really rigid to help build a house. It’s like there’s all these different uses that you can come out the other side with it, whatever works for you. And just this past year, they came out with a system that is like literally a desktop sized version. This is not something that you’d have in your kitchen. This is something that like a maker would want. But again, I love the idea that like where everybody’s zigging this way and they’re zagging that way. Like everybody’s looking for consumer product solution. And Polyfloss is like, “How about the little guy?” Like, “What if we put the power into the little guy?” What if the biggest nerd in your neighborhood was like, “I need everybody’s plastic.” Yeah, exactly. Your neighbor’s like, “I will take your waste plastics here.” That’s literally what this could be. It’s very cool. Never heard of that before. That’s so cool. The thing that making my video made me feel was, okay, what we need to do is use less methane so that we’re producing less ethane, which is going to drive up the price of virgin feed stocks for plastic and make recycling more cost competitive. And also, if it’s more expensive, we’ll do it less. If it’s basically free to make plastic, then we’re going to use a lot of plastic. Then that led me to a place of not feeling particularly hopeful because how are we going to use less methane in a world where it’s a lot cleaner than coal and oil. We’re not going to turn on the nuclear tomorrow. We in America have a leadership structure right now that’s very like yes the way that it was done in 1989 was the best possible way and that’s how we should do it forever kind of. Yeah, let’s not look backwards. Yeah, the sort of the look at like should can some kind of regulation do this or can some kind of difference in market force do this versus is technology going to do this. I think it’s going to be a combination of all those things. In the US, I don’t know that we’re going to have a maybe, you know, time continues to pass that we’re going to have a strong incentive based structure for recycled plastics, but the technology is going to keep getting better. That’s going to make it more cost competitive and there will be a future where we’re not burning natural gas the way we are, where we’re not fracking shale the way we are right now. That’s going to happen. It needs to happen 10 years ago, but it’s going to happen. I don’t know what the timeline is, but eventually we’ll get there and we’re all going to be very happy that we invested in these plastics recycling technologies. I’m right there with you 100%. It’s just a matter of time before we hit that point. Give me a year. Give me a year. Oh my god. I unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to be Yeah, I think it’s going to be longer than a decade. Yeah, for sure. It’s going to be a while. This is going to be a wild time. I cannot wait to watch an undecided with Matt Frell from the year 2040 and see what the hell kind of crap we’re talking about. I try to remain optimistic about where we’re heading even though the world is chaos right now. It’s like I am hopeful that fast forward 10 years we’ll be in I hoping that there’s amazing stuff that has happened and we’ve made some significant advancements. And it helps having been in this for as long as I have. I’ve been writing in the green technology space for more than 20 years now and it helps to have seen progress be made even if it has not happened fast enough. It’s moving. It is things are happening. Yes. Wish it was going faster. Yeah. But it is moving. Don’t think I’m saying that I think we’re doing a great job, but it’s moving. We’re still kind of getting a failing grade, but we’re making progress. Yeah. 60% is better than 40%. They’re both failing, but like they’re different from each other. Jeez. I have this great shirt that says I create new problems by solving problems. And I’m like, this is not just like how I feel about people. It’s how I feel about myself specifically. I think I’m a little more optimistic than you are then because it’s like when you look at the prices of like solar is now the cheapest form of electricity ever. Yeah. And battery prices over the past like 10-15 years have dropped like 90%. The rate at which the technologies we need are dropping in costs is astonishing and it’s not slowing down. And so when I look 10 years out, where we are now, imagine where it’s going to be in 10 years. It’s going to be bonkers how cheap solar and batteries for your home are going to be at that point. Yeah. It’s going to be limited by like installation costs. Yeah. We’re just going to roll it out on the yard. No joke. One of my neighbors has actually kind of done that. He’s got those like little solar panels that you get from like the battery brands like they fold up. He’s got those just like draped all over a shed in his backyard. He’s got them draped over his tents and so cheap. They’re just everywhere in his backyard. Just charging up a battery for something. Maybe we’re going to use it eventually. Energy hoarding over there. Great. Well, everybody, you’re missing out if you’re not following Matt. 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