Which is basically irrelevant, since you need to dope the recycled plastic with fresh plastic for most applications and no one is doing this at a meaningful scale
And even if we did scale it up, this just means the amount of plastic use will continue to increase. We’d have to find uses for the lower strength and quality plastic even
At the time of the concept of plastic recycling, most plastics couldn’t be melted down and re-molded. They just burned when heated.
Now though, most plastics used can be ground down to pellets and reused in a mold.
You can turn PET bottles into a string and use it in your 3d printer.
Which is basically irrelevant, since you need to dope the recycled plastic with fresh plastic for most applications and no one is doing this at a meaningful scale
And even if we did scale it up, this just means the amount of plastic use will continue to increase. We’d have to find uses for the lower strength and quality plastic even