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Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

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Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#81
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could probably use it in a diesel engine. People filter used frying oil from restaurants and run their diesels on that.

Yes, you absolutely can, especially in an old diesel engine, they can run on all kinds of oil. But the engine might not fare well, depending on the properties of the oil, and the exhaust might contain "interesting" stuff like dioxins, depending on what was in the mystery plastic to begin with.

I would say if this could be done by some utility company, that company could have diesel engines to generate power from that oil which could have filters and all that stuff.

I assume it still could be profitable because people who want to get rid of plastic waste would still have to pay. Getting excess power from grid is also something one would get paid for. Then turning on generators when grid needs power to get paid when there is a power shortage.

But as I write this out I imagine that it would require massive amounts of investments for setting up such operation and getting all kind of permits or environmental studies and god knows what. Let alone getting deals with electric companies - so I think that would be something that some electric company would have to set up. They would most likely have most know-how for such setup.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#84
post #52

I am dubious of the photos that show coloured plastics turning into clear oil. Does this process really break down all the many types of dyes?

No idea how this thing works but why wouldn't it destroy all "dyes"? It breaks every other bond, why not dye bonds? I'm also curious that the liquid is clear, though, because you'd think this thing creates a soup of organic chemicals each with different color responses.

> No idea how this thing works

I just have a suspicion that this thing doesn't work, and the claims on the website aren't real...

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#85
Sounds similar to the thermal depolymerization [1] developed by companies like Changing World Technologies. [2]

That technology seems very promising, but they ran into a number of difficulties in practice. They build a plant to process turkey leftovers in Missouri, but the plant wasn't profitable, and the community complained about the smell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#86
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the oil it produced would be worth about £0.25 (GBP) (400ml assuming the price is the same as Brent crude and ignoring the cost of the input plastic or the machine itself etc). But the power to run it (3kWh) would cost about £1 (1GBP) at current rates at least here in the UK. I might be wrong, I'm not sure whether the oil produced is equivalent to Brent crude (I picked it at random) or more valuable or less..…

Still might make sense when solar/wind is at peak to make it as a longer time storage? While still getting rid of plastic waste.

The key may be economically transporting the waste plastic as feedstock. Guess it may be much more expensive. Even assuming 5 cents/ kwh of solar this makes economic sense as storage system otherwise. I presume in the future we have autonomous robots that clean the cities of plastic and feed it to such machines which run on surplus renewable energy

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the conversion of plastic into oil will have cost much more energy, producing the same pollution in the end.

But at least we save some landfill space. Also micro-plastics contamination is everywhere.

In the USA, landfill space concerns are based on a hoax. Landfill space is a function of landfill development, and there’s no shortage of spaces to create landfills.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least we save some landfill space. Also micro-plastics contamination is everywhere.

In the USA, landfill space concerns are based on a hoax. Landfill space is a function of landfill development, and there’s no shortage of spaces to create landfills.

I am not talking about running out of space in general. I am talking about taking a hill covered with trees or farms, and turning it into a hill of garbage. Surely you can see why I would prefer a natural hill?

If you can burn it, there is no point in burring it. We're still taking a lot of stuff from underground and burn it for energy, why not burn the stuff we already have above ground?

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#90
post #58

Great, another reason I'm pissed off about plastic recycling! I've been collecting my plastic for as long as I can remember and recycling it, then they tell us only about 12% has EVER been recycled. Now we can break it down to get the oil back! A$$holes!

Don't recycle. If its going to get dumped anyway put your plastic recycling in the garbage. Then it'll end up in a nominally regulated local dump and not in a Vietnamese river. Btw anyone who has even a cursory understanding of polymer physics suspected that plastics recycling was a scam. The whole scheme was either to greenwash industry throwing the moral responsibility to the end users or to condition us to recycle…

You forgot the third option... Grind it up, and put it in inappropriate places... Like "ooh, we can mix it into asphalt"...

Mixing some material that you don't want and can be quite toxic into something you're gonna leave in the environment just seems like a bad idea...

Let me think... When else did we do that? Oh yeah - when we mixed coal fly ash into bricks[1]! Everyone wants mercury poisoning from the bricks their houses were made from - and it was a very cheap way to dispose of otherwise hard to deal with toxic waste!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash_brick

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