Love how the site ambiguate oil
Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
111–120 of 288 posts
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative is polluting the entire planet with micro-plastics for a 5% savings in greenhouse gasses.
This does nothing to prevent micro plastics. Micro plastics are plastics that have escaped into the environment, which by definitions means we are no longer collecting them for disposal or recycling. All this does is keep some recycling programs from shutting down, and most of those are collecting bulk #1 and #2 which as far as I’m aware are not the major source of micro plastic pollution. Patagonia has a fucked up p…
if you're worried about microplastics from drying your patagonia fleece in the dryer, worry about other things first. Car tires get ground up into microplastic and estimates range between 10 and 28% of the total microplastic pollution in the oceans [1]. And that's not surprising - the weight loss of a single tire over its lifetime likely exceeds the entire weight of your fleece jacket. Drive less car miles before worrying about patagonia clothes.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#113It is written in one of the pages - "As you look into the data you can understand our machine can produce high grade oil mixture of gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and little heavy oil. The oil can be used as recycled fuel for electric power generator without refining" I am no expert, and so I have the question actually. How do we use that oil in reality?
Crude oil is much messier than this. Still we refine it just fine :)
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Landfills amortize the carbon emissions. Keeping the plastic's carbon temporarily sequestered in a landfill puts it somewhere other than the atmosphere. Eventually we'll have to do something with all that carbon, but we're better off burying it until we get a better handle on emissions in general.
You can still burry the soot after you burned the plastic.
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#115It is written in one of the pages - "As you look into the data you can understand our machine can produce high grade oil mixture of gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and little heavy oil. The oil can be used as recycled fuel for electric power generator without refining" I am no expert, and so I have the question actually. How do we use that oil in reality?
It will definitely burn. Diesel heater for water and air is one application.
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#116Some issues:
1) Says it draws 1 kilowatt constantly and 'begins to produce oil in one hour', while also only holding about 1 kg max of plastic. How long does it take to finish processing the 1 kg of plastic into the 0.8 kg of oil? Is this a reasonable overall energy-return-on-energy-investment (and see #2 below, it will take additional energy).
2) If this is producing a typical crude oil, is further refining needed to create individually useful products? What's the average hydrocarbon length and the overall distribution of different lengths of hydrocarbons? Are there aromatic components of the oil (such as benzene, a known carcinogen)?
2) What kind of waste is leftover? Does it generate a polcyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-laden toxic glop, or what? How is this waste to be disposed?
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Landfills amortize the carbon emissions. Keeping the plastic's carbon temporarily sequestered in a landfill puts it somewhere other than the atmosphere. Eventually we'll have to do something with all that carbon, but we're better off burying it until we get a better handle on emissions in general.
You would be right, IF we were to not take out any other fossil fuel to burn. But to bury the plastic now it just means we will dig for an equivalent quantity of coal, oil or gas to burn. We will burn some stuff regardless, we might as well burn what we already have, instead of burying it and digging for new stuff.
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#118[deleted]
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity. If we can assure that the output meets a standard should we burn it, then certainly we should be able to assure the output meets a standard should we refine/convert it.
And the conversion of plastic into oil will have cost much more energy, producing the same pollution in the end.
Since this consumes electricity, the energy need could be filled by running the converter at peak hours for renewable energy, so effectively soak up excess energy to recover oil that's already out of the ground. Which would be a net win in terms of energy, possibly even financially depending on the investment costs for that device. Assuming it even holds up to the promises.
Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil
#120It is written in one of the pages - "As you look into the data you can understand our machine can produce high grade oil mixture of gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and little heavy oil. The oil can be used as recycled fuel for electric power generator without refining" I am no expert, and so I have the question actually. How do we use that oil in reality?
oil usually has mixtures of hydrocarbons like this. Refineries use processes like fractional distillation to separate the components so that they can be used separately, or processes like cracking are used which convert longer chain hydrocarbons into simpler hydrocarbons.