JBI's Plastic To Oil Gets Operating Permit 223
Whammy666 writes "JBI, Inc. announced that it has entered into a formal Consent Order with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Region 9, which will allow the Company to immediately run its Plastic2Oil (P2O) process commercially and begin construction of an additional processor at its Niagara Falls, New York P2O facility. JBI has developed a process that takes waste plastic destined for landfills and converts it into diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas with very little residue. The process is said to be very efficient thanks to a special catalyst developed by JBI and an attention to process optimization. That plastic water bottle you tossed in the trash could soon be fueling your car instead of sitting in a landfill for 1000 years."
Just what we need... (Score:3, Interesting)
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The output is mostly diesel, it also creates propane, methane, and a few other things, that are captured for either further processing, or use in its current state. Apparently JBI has been running a demo unit for a while under a demo permit, and has tankers full of fuel ready for further use. Posting Anonymously, because, well, because its safer that way...
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Informative)
You make an invalid assumption that oil==bad.
In modern SULEV cars the air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air going in, due to the catalytic converter neutralizing lung-damaging poisons like NOx and CO as the air passes from intake to exhaust. Ditto oil-burning electric plants. I consider that better than letting the solidified oil (plastic) lay in the ground or float in the ocean for a thousand years until bacteria breaks it down.
Converting our waste to oil will also allow us leave a few million tons of crude in the mantle rather than dig it up. The ideal would be to reach a point where we don't need to dig-up any oil, and can just run our society on the accumulated plastics of the last ~100 years, plus solar power.
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You have a link to a source explaining that the SUVLEV and oil-burning electric plants exhaust is cleaner than the intake air?
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At least one source (marketing, though) claiming that PZEV can emit less than ambient: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/automobiles/low-cost-path-to-low-emissions.html [nytimes.com]
And, there are other sources detailing how to accurately test a PZEV to avoid getting a negative emissions reading.
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Please note that PZEV is essentially a subset of the SULEV standard.
PZEV is a SULEV car with an extended 150,000-mile warranty on the exhaust control system.
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In other words, it doesn't clean the air. (Of course it doesn't!) You have to hand it to doublespeak. Marketing copywriters are managing to convince some people that automobile exhaust is more breathable than air. Astonishing.
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I heard that a lot, it's worth checking. At the very least, I didn't find it on Snopes.
It's just USA Today, but this is what I found so far:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2003-09-16-cleancar_x.htm [usatoday.com]
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Tailpipe pollution of a PZEV is as much as 90% less than from other new cars.
The cars won't deliver California levels of low pollution without California's unique blend of low-sulfur gas
But even on non-California gasoline, PZEVs pollute little. Ford says the PZEV Focus puts out a pound of smog-producing pollutants in 15,000 miles on California gas, roughly two pounds on typical U.S. fuel. A non-PZEV Focus would put out 10.7 pounds in 15,000 miles, Ford calculates.
What? (Score:2)
You mean to say that "go suck on a tailpipe" will cease to be a death-wishing insult?
What is this world coming to?
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You won't be poisoned by a SULEV or diesel car's carbon monoxide (since both are essentially zero), but you will develop lung cancer & heart disease from the particulate matter (carbon ash). So no I don't recommend sucking tailpipes. Makes a good fertilizer for plants though. ;-)
Alas... it is not the same... (Score:2)
Wishing cancer and/or heart disease on someone is more of a long-term situation.
Sure, it may be more "entertaining" in the long run, but it just ain't the same.
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Actually, if you don't breathe some different air quickly, you'll die from lack of oxygen. There's no oxygen in tailpipe emissions, since it was all consumed inside the engine, and humans need to breathe oxygen to live.
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It's also true that the air coming out of a tier-4 diesel engine is supposed to be cleaner than the air that went in, in terms of articulates and NOx. But that does very little to address the root causes of global climate change, which is net CO2.
If it does reduce dependency on foreign oil, it's a good thing, though, but it's certainly not about reducing CO2 emissions.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that is the main point: You take a barrel of oil and you get to use it twice. And while the whole world is fretting about CO2, the idea of reducing the footprint of plastic trash from 100% to 1% is nothing to sneeze at. Add the other ongoing research to create alcohol out of cellulose (another major portion of trash), and all of a sudden you are virtually "mining" trash by reusing the plastics and paper, making recovering of the aluminum and steel easier. This also decreases water pollution in the long run.
What matters is that using plastics to create oil isn't going to INCREASE CO2, as those cars would be burning something or another to run regardless of source. What also matters is that this would DECREASE the need for agriculture to be specific for fuels, which pushes food prices up and increases the amount of fertilizer (and other pollutants) in the system. It isn't a silver bullet that fixes pollution, but it can be part of a better overall energy policy.
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Hurray, we can turn safely contained pollution on/in the ground into air pollution!
You're presenting it as instead of landfill bulk, we now have pollution in the air. That's a false dichotomy. We're already going to burn oil, doesn't matter if we get the oil from plastic recycled or "fresh" from the ground.
This way we have only the air pollution instead of air pollution, plastic bottles in the sea, AND oil spills in the gulf of Mexico.
Re:That plastic bottle ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, but have you talked to the people who are actually doing your "recycling"? Most of the towns around here contract with a firm in New Hampshire. That firm sells the plastic to the highest bidder, which is as it should be. Trouble is, there are few bidders for it.
Currently, as I understand it, most of the recyclables are going into the previously empty shipping containers making the return trip to China after bringing over all the stuff we import from there. Once it's in China, it can be recycled in methods free of US environmental laws, and the bulk of the plastic is simply burned for fuel because it can be done over there in a land without environmental law.
We're not actually "recycling" a lot of what we recycle. We're saving it from going into a landfill, and we're not polluting air in our close vicinity, so we're calling it good.
I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not quite as good as you might think.
I do it because the recycling company breaks even on it, so it doesn't cost me money like bags of actual garbage do.
Projects like this are cool and uncool at the same time, from an environmental perspective. They are cool because we've found a use for old plastic. They are uncool because they lengthen the time before we find more environmentally-conscious alternatives to both burning shit in our automobiles for propulsion AND encourage the use of disposable plastic bottles under a commonly-held myth that recycling them makes it all better.
Remember the chant of the treehugger. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". We're putting waaaaayyyy too much emphasis on the last of those, when "recycle" should be the absolute last resort because it's horribly inefficient and only marginally effective at best. Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
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Ah, but have you talked to the people who are actually doing your "recycling"?
No, but I've seen the number of states doing any bottle recycling at all in the US, and even less so plastic bottles if I remember accordingly. I've also seen the numbers for how many bottles got recycled in the state with the highest refund upon returning.
I assume the numbers where quite similar for our whole country as they where for that state. Think it was well above 90%.
Some people only want to look at cost or energy consumption, and I'm not convinced recycling fails even there, but anyhow atleast you
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> * 750.000-800.000 metric tones of packaging get recycled every year.
Am I the only one annoyed by the term "metric ton"?
It's a megagram or Mg! And don't top it off with thousands of metric tons. That's just gigagrams! If people can learn the prefixes for bytes they can apply them like they're suppose to for other units.
Sorry for the bytes analogy, the IEC binary prefixes is another can of worms.
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Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
This is a commonly held myth that can be corrected with the following very simple thought experiment: as an individual, I use a certain number of plastic bags each month. If I am careful and pack the bags better, I'll use perhaps 10 or 20 percent fewer. If I use each bag just *twice* instead of once, I've reduced my consumption of bags 50%. If I manage to use each bag *three* times instead of once, my use drops to 1/3 of previous.
Re-use is a far, far more powerful method than conservation.
So, re-use thos
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I believe the "reduce" mantra refers to not using said item in the first place. Your "percent reduction" anecdote is well constructed, but in your 33% less scenario you've used one "bad" bag. In the similarly anecdotal "reduce" scenario, you use a paper or other biodegradable bag in its place, and you've used zero "bad" bags.
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I believe the "reduce" mantra refers to not using said item in the first place. Your "percent reduction" anecdote is well constructed, but in your 33% less scenario you've used one "bad" bag. In the similarly anecdotal "reduce" scenario, you use a paper or other biodegradable bag in its place, and you've used zero "bad" bags.
Reduce means conserve. If I'm replacing the use of plastic bags with the use of paper ones, then I'm still consuming a large amount of raw materials and using them not nearly to their fullest. If I replace each plastic bag with a paper one, I'm still using the same number of bags. If I reuse each bag *just* *once* then I've cut my overall consumption of materials by HALF.
Re-use is far more powerful than reduce. Show me another method that has nearly as much impact in the total amount of consumed goods.
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I have a cloth bag I have used for near a decade. That is reduce. I have reduced away all plastic bag use, save for those that I use for cat litter. If I could find a better bag for those I would.
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Personally, I "repurpose" my plastic bags: they're used for disposing of kitty litter.
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Let's say I take a canvas (or heavier plastic) bag with me to the grocery store... I can reuse my canvas bag for decades... So the investment in creating the canvas or heavier plastic bag means it is suitable for more reuses... Reduce trumps reuse.
This example is precisely a re-use scenario because you are re-using the canvas bag many times. That is the only factor driving the total reduction of raw materials. Swapping canvas for plastic merely increased the number of re-uses required for parity since the materials consumption for canvas is much higher.
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I try, but getting beer in growlers is expensive and most places do not offer it.
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I agree. Not much you can do with used motor oil. I remember back in the day when they didn't collect the stuff. I was young, and emptied a lawn mower's oil into a corner of the back yard, and that damn patch didn't grow grass for YEARS.
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In my area it is actually resold as heating oil, so older building with oil furnaces buy it up, and the county makes a bit of money.
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my cat's litter goes in a paper bag you insensitive clod!
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The only thing going straight to the land-fill is cat litter in a plastic bag.
Every time I hear something like that, I think to myself, "when did 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' turn into 'ashes to plastic, plastic to eternity'?".
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Don't be so sure. Where I live, we have curbside recycling, so everyone's free to put their recyclables in the blue container so they don't go to the landfill like all the stuff in the alley trash bins. However, every time I put my trash in that bin (about half of which is cat litter in a plastic bag, incidentally), I see plenty of stuff that should have been put in the blue recycling bin.
The fact is, people are stupid and lazy, and many of them would rather not bother with recycling at all. Who knows ho
I remember Mendeleev's quote... (Score:5, Informative)
... after studying the chemical composition of oil: "This stuff is way too valuable to simply burn it".
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The full quote is even more badass: "Oil shouldn't be used burned, one can burn paper money just as well".
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I prefer burning my plastic Australian currency.
Best of both worlds. :)
Re:I remember Mendeleev's quote... (Score:4, Informative)
Mine won't burn hot enough to stay alight - is there a process (grinding?) I'm missing, or do I just need a bigger bundle?
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I know the quote from my high school organic chemistry teacher.
He's best known for the periodic table, but he was also a pioneer in petro-chemistry.
Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong it's a great solution to what's already in the landfill, but if most people re-used, re-cycled or substituted (wtf do you need to buy bottled water anyway, the stuff runs from every tap in the city), then there would be a much bigger impact. How much energy does the process need? What are the impacts with regard to the catalyst that is used? Ho
Re:Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score:5, Insightful)
From their website, it shows that 1 kilogram of plastic converts roughly to one litre of oil.
So the big question in my book is, how much does 1 kilogram of scrap plastic cost, and how much power is needed to do that conversion.
If we say that one litre of oil is worth ~$1, 1 tonne of plastic is ~$200, and power used for one kilogram conversion is a minuscule 1kilowatt.
You have ~$0.30 in direct costs, but after factoring in the plant, machinery, tankers, etc etc etc, the margins on this process must be hair thin.
OH, thats right, lets not forget the government subsidies!
Re:Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score:5, Informative)
power used for one kilogram conversion is a minuscule 1kilowatt.
Power is meaningless here. Energy is what shall be considered. And the physical unit for energy is the Joule (J), or possibly the kilowatt-hour (kWh).
Usually I don't try to explain that anymore, but here it's different, it's Slashdot...
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And which way are the oil prices headed?
You have to think long term.
Re:Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you would have to get paid in order to take the plastic - putting plastic in a landfill is not free. So 1 tonne of plastic costs $x to store in a landfill - residue costs $y to store in a landfill - so $x-$y would contribute to your margin.
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My concern is if you get a net win in energy. If you do, that's great. If you don't, then it should be scrapped like ethanol should be scrapped and not subsidized simply as a feel good program.
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Even if the energy is break-even, you're converting electricity from a hydro plant where very little manufacturing exists any more into fuel that can be used in cars and trucks. It's still more efficient than battery-based electric cars (which are great, don't get me wrong, but with battery storage losses and range issues, anyone other than a short-haul commuter won't find them very useful).
We can easily convert petroleum into electricity, but this is a way to convert electricity plus garbage into petroleu
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Drat and bother (Score:2)
Ok, having worked in a recycling center doing IT work I would imagine that paper economies and plastic economies are much the same. The way it works is that depending on economic factors they would likely take the plastic for free, or might pay a small dividend for it.
It's really up to their providers to determine the costs of sorting the plastic out. If your already sorting plastic to begin with than it makes sense, if you aren't than the costs of sorting the plastic out of the garbage and transporting it
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...offset by the fact that the plastics in question would be trucked and stored regardless (by a trash-disposal entity being paid to take them).
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"So your average plastic water bottle requires about 1/4 a litre of refined oil products to be produced."
I have no idea of plastic production, but it looks wrong to me: if oil costs about $40 per barrel (159l), 1/4 litre is about $0.05. I can't imaging a plastic bottle costing that much - I can buy a bottle of water in a supermarket for not much more than 5 cent. Am I missing something?
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Oh, just checked oil prices... $88 per barrel. That means a plastic water bottle's raw material costs over $0.10?
Re:Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score:5, Informative)
So while 1/4 litre of refined product is needed to make a bottle, much more crude is needed, however that crude contains other quite valuable products that also generate money, so there never can be a generalised direct link between the price of oil and the price of a finished product as it heavily depends on the economics of the individual refinery.
I work at a refinery which is currently burning propylene and butylene through the flare because the unit which uses that feed is down, and it's cheaper to burn it than to try and sell it to a chemical plant. That doesn't directly affect the price of bottles in the local shops either
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Hmm.. but in that case, the bottle would be made of less valuable components. Which would mean that the demand for the components required for a plastic bottle is lower than the demand for the other components, and thus plastic bottle are merely a by-product. So I wonder, would reducing the number of plastic bottle have any impact on the general oil consumption?
After all, even if there wouldn't be any plastic bottles anymore, the oil would still be needed because of the other components.
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I'd like to point out 2 things here:
1. this is a form of re-cycling
2. there are many uses of plastics that are near impossible to avoid as a consumer.
So while I agree with your statement about bottled water, I think your statement about re-use/re-cycle/substitute is overly simplified, and ignores that this is just another way of re-cycling.
Yes, those things will help a fair bit but having a way to better re-cycle the plastic we end up with anyway is solving a problem independent of if people re-use/substitu
Landfill? (Score:5, Informative)
Recycling is wrong... (Score:3)
Try Germany ... they refill the bottles and use them again. Wow!
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Huh?
Re:Landfill? (Score:5, Interesting)
I like what Germany does (perhaps other European countries too) with drinks, slap a deposit on it and any place that sells it must take it back and refund said deposit. None of this recycling center hodgepodge BS. Most drinks are in glass bottles (which I greatly prefer) although unfortunately plastic bottles have been coming in on personal size more and more.
Oh, and since almost all drinks come in plastic crates (also a deposit and reused) when you buy in quantity, including water, applejuice and Coca-Cola and the like, the customer isn't using plastic bags upon plastic bags getting it home, which is a f-ing hassle if you ask me. There are even services through most of the country that bring crates of whatever you want drink-wise to you, they'll come once a week, once a month, or whatever, take the empty bottles in the crates and exchange them. Like milkmen of lore here.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaschenpfand [wikipedia.org]
or it translated to English [google.com] (and yes, I realize there is an English wikipedia page on it, but it doesn't cover prices and other details).
Still, glass rules. Clean and no worries about organic chemistry this or that.
I wish they implemented the pfand system here in the states, not just with water bottles, but with CFLs and fluorescent lights, electronics, batteries and other things - things THAT SHOULD NOT BE THROWN AWAY in the trash, but people rarely do otherwise because it's either an inconvenience or expensive to do it properly. Often, it's expensive to do it properly because it's not done on a massive scale (for instance, it costs me more to recycle my fluorescent tubes than it is to buy them - that ain't right).
Walmart does this with car batteries, charging something like $8 and gives it back when you bring you're old one in. But I don't know if that is voluntary on Walmart's behalf, and limited to my state or other states -- but it's a good system.
Re:Landfill? (Score:5, Informative)
Walmart does this with car batteries, charging something like $8 and gives it back when you bring you're old one in. But I don't know if that is voluntary on Walmart's behalf, and limited to my state or other states -- but it's a good system.
Every place that sells car batteries does that, it's called a core fee. Most auto parts that can be re-manufactured have it.
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For what it's worth, Michigan does exactly what you describe [michigan.gov] (link is to PDF), at least with bottles and cans. I don't know why other states with deposits don't do the same, or for that matter why so few states have deposits.
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I like what Germany does (perhaps other European countries too) with drinks, slap a deposit on it and any place that sells it must take it back and refund said deposit.
America does that for many drinks, and not just ones that come in plastic bottles. Glass and Aluminum are also targeted.
.. we enacted it to stop the bulk of non-biodegradable littering.
We did not enact this for the recycling benefits
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We have a five cent deposit on soda here in New York State. Half the people I see just throw their cans and bottles in the garbage can anyway. Amusingly, it's often the people with the lower incomes who are the ones just tossing that money in the trash. Though maybe we need a deposit larger than 5 cents...
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"Oh, and since almost all drinks come in plastic crates (also a deposit and reused) when you buy in quantity, including water, applejuice and Coca-Cola and the like,"
I love the crate system, which BTW is a most excellent way to carry beer. The ceramic "pop tops" with rubber gaskets on some bottles ensure reusability.
"Walmart does this with car batteries, charging something like $8 and gives it back when you bring you're old one in. But I don't know if that is voluntary on Walmart's behalf, and limited to my
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Plastic bottles recycled? I guess you mean they have a pawn as in you get money when you return the bottle. But what happens to the plastic bottle after this? It's not recycled like paper.
Many many years ago Finland was "recycling" all plastic. But instead of actually recycling it it was simply dumped or burned.
Recycling plastic in Finland is very minuscule.
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We are approaching the point where recycling plastic is Smart, and when it becomes Really Smart then landfills will start being dug up (especially older ones, where all the biodegradable stuff is gone) just for the profit potential (plastics, metals...)
^^ This.
Perhaps we haven’t yet reached the point where it is worthwhile to dig up old landfills, but breakthroughs (like this one) are exactly what we need to move in that direction.
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At the rate trash is produced, we have more than enough land to bury it.
How about we bury it on your land
My recycling beliefs are such that anything that can be recycled for a profit will be recycled by the free market, without my help, and the stuff that can't be recycled for a profit shouldn't be recycled.
That only holds if the costs to society, clean air, clean water supplies, depletion of natural resources, etc. are borne by the trash dumpers and the producers of replacement products - costs they do not currently bear.
Note, I'm not saying the recycling is always a good answer. Most of the time reducing wasteful production is a much better, and cheaper, option.
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global resource corp's microwaves seem cooler (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been watching GRC [globalresourcecorp.com] for a while now... Last I heard their prototype microwave was functional, and they were taking orders. The prototype uses a vacuum chamber: fill the chamber with used tires, apply vacuum, turn on the microwave, and *poof*, out comes the hydrocarbons.
Every 20lb tire [globalresourcecorp.com] yields a gallon of diesel fuel, ~50 cubic feet of "propane" (butane and... something else), recyclable steel, and carbon black. Haven't seen anything recently, just a new patent for using microwaves to desalinate seawater...
This thing looks useful too - there's a ton of plastic warehoused in the world's garbage dumps, and it won't be long until they start getting mined.
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Re:Floating plastic in the ocean (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Floating plastic in the ocean (Score:4, Informative)
Your view on the world is criminally simplistic. The great pacific garbage patch is several thousands of miles away from the west coast of the US. Furthermore this stuff is highly fragmented into tiny pieces. Processing this would be really painful. Even if youd set up your plant right there floating in the ocean transportation would hardly justify the cost of harvesting. I really wish you would have a point but I dont see this happening for a long time. If you compare this to the gulf of mexcio where you can easily drill for oil in your backyard there is no way this would work. Its sad put this probably isnt a solution. The big benefit for this technology could be that we just stop dumping our trash into the ocean in the first place. But for whats there already we might have to come up with something else. Like somebody said in this thread: Just dont buy bottled water and try to avoid plastics if you can find a reasonable alternative. Its actually pretty hard, I have been trying to do this for the last year and often theres just no option: e.g. keyboards, toothbrushes, tupperware and so on...
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Craigslist is the ultimate recycler for things like toys. I have kids. I buy maybe 5 toys a year at retail, mostly impulse buys. My kids have hundreds small and large.
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Which is better for everyone than re-cycling. (well, perhaps not better for Wal-Mart, but that doesn't upset me much)
Blasphemy! (Score:3, Funny)
The Earth wants plastic for itself, and created us to make it! (Thank you, George Carlin.)
Way to catch the previous train here (Score:2, Insightful)
So this guy has a process that takes plastic and turns it into oil to power cars. Great...
Well guess what: the new trend is electric, or hybrid-electric cars. Their main fuel is electricity, and there's already a very efficient way to turn waste plastic into electricity, by burning it to fuel a power plant (with the proper filters at the smokestacks to avoid polluting and all). Even accounting for the loses in transportation, battery storage and reuse in electric motors, I bet the plastic-powered electric c
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The main output of this is Diesel fuel. The fuel used to power large trucks. The same trucks that can't be converted to electricity because we don't have anywhere NEAR the energy density necessary in electric storage to power a cross-country truck.
We can very easily convert petroleum into electricity. We have few means of turning electricity plus old petroleum into new petroleum. This is a stopgap measure that will be obsolete in 50 years, but will still be useful for at least a few more decades.
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even electric card need lubricating oil, and hydraulic oil.
Panorama Chemicals (Score:2)
Why is this a better solution (Score:3)
Why is JBIs solution supposed to be a better alternative than the UN sponsored machine made by Blest (founded by Akinori Ito)? /. reported on this earlier this year, but no-one mentions a comparison between these solutions.
IIRC,
Check out the article [unu.edu] and the video [youtube.com] about Blests "plastic to oil" solution.
From what I can see, two of Blests major advantages, is that the equipment is so small that it's portable, and that it requires no chemical additives to do its thing.
That's going to be a huge factor when it comes to introducing this to the developing countries, which we most definitely will need to do in the long run.
Plastic mining (Score:3)
Quick! Start buying up landfills!
Plastic mining is the way of the future.
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I get the sense that you're being sarcastic here, but I honestly believe you're on to something.
After all, it is getting more and more expensive (both in terms of money and energy) to retrieve crude oil. Once the energy cost of producing a barrel of oil exceeds the energy we can retrieve from it, there is going to be a huge market for alternative sources for oil.
If the cost of recycling plastics back into oil becomes lower than pumping up new oil, this becomes a viable alternative.
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When oil becomes expensive enough that something like this is a lot cheaper than sucking the remaining dead dinosaurs out of their graves, we'll have long since stopped using our precious remaining petroleum reserves for something as horribly wasteful as disposable plastic bottles or propelling our automobiles.
I very much agree with your sentiment, and sincerely hope you are right in this, but with world oil consumption still on the rise and peak oil production having occurred sometimes in the late 70's, I just can't manage to be optimistic about this.
I guarantee that we're going to stop using oil frivolously, but I fear it's not going to be because we can, but rather because we will be forced to, through the sheer economics of the situation.
Maybe the next war (Score:2)
Maybe the next war will be fought over those floating piles of trash in the ocean.
"very little residue" (Score:2)
Not a sustainable practice (Score:3)
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We can if we keep coming up with ways to manufacture them, rather than mine them. Which is what I think will happen before we get viable hydrogen power.
at least, a water bottle feels no pain (Score:3)
That plastic water bottle you tossed in the trash could soon be fueling your car instead of sitting in a landfill for 1000 years.
In any case, that's a lot more humane than using cats for this purpose [slashdot.org]
Why no just burn it in a power plant (Score:2)
If you are just "recycling" it for a fuel, it should be more efficient to burn it in a power plant.
Con Who? (Score:2)
That plastic water bottle you tossed in the trash could soon be fueling your car instead of sitting in a landfill for 1000 years.
I'm still waiting to run my car off turkey guts.
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil [discovermagazine.com]
So wrong... (Score:2)
This is wrong way around. We need plastics far more than we need oil. We can get our energy from other sources, but do we want to return to fabric wrapped wiring and wooden cases for equipment?
Smells fishy (Score:2)
I looked on their website too. None of it got into details. I wish they would post an energy balance. They say they get 1 litre of oil from 1 kg of plastic. One liter of oil has a mass of .8 kg. An 80% mass conversion rate seems a bit high to me. Though the paper linked below talks about a 3:2 conversion ratio plastic to oil. Or a 1/3 loss in mass, 66% conversion. f it is a revolutionary new pprocess it may work out. However, the paper I am citing speaks of by products such as coke and tar.
On standard barre
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you mean continent [wikipedia.org]?
BTW, that's what you get when you let fucking sodas define your personality: very little of these bottles are drunk by thirsty people.
Re: (Score:3)
IIRC, he put the bottle into a fusion-reactor along with some banana-peels, then the car flew away. You might be cherry-picking your facts a little here...
Actually, it was a soda can... (Score:2)
In both versions. [youtube.com]
Possibly a beer can... but it was a can.
Re: (Score:2)
CO2 is not the only thing in the world that matters.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFY.
Cue "I took the time to correct the grammar of an AC but I'm far too chicken to void my mods."