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)
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.
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: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.