141–150 of 288 posts
It would be nice if they listed safe use cases for oil from squished plastic… I couldn’t imagine you want this reaching smoke point. BRB drinking water derived from urine to wash down the bug protein bars I ate earlier. I’ll be sure to wipe later with 2 square inches of newspaper that I’ll later dispose in my apartment’s communal compost heap…protect the planet!
So what is wrong with this? I am assuming it only takes soft plastic but still why we don't see widespread use of it.
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When running on spare hydro, wind or solar power which cannot be accumulated or returned to grid, it can have some uses.
I'm not sure the economics works on something like that. Once you buy all the equipment, employees, and commercial buildings, it simply isn't going to be profitable to only run your factory 10% of the time (How often does solar power go wasted? Not actually sure). Maybe it would work if this was only one step in a larger processes. When energy is free, use it to make a ton of this crude oil and then process the crude…
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I don't know if most households have enough use for lubricants to be able to consume a quantity equivalent to 80% of the volume of plastics they're disposing of. My door hinges and bike-chains can only be so smooth. Even if it was converting it into usable motor-oil (which I doubt it is) I don't think I could consume that much. I suppose if it's usable for a kerosine type of lamp maybe, but is it pure enough to not p…
Many people still have ICE cars, you left that intentionally out?
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I don't know if most households have enough use for lubricants to be able to consume a quantity equivalent to 80% of the volume of plastics they're disposing of. My door hinges and bike-chains can only be so smooth. Even if it was converting it into usable motor-oil (which I doubt it is) I don't think I could consume that much. I suppose if it's usable for a kerosine type of lamp maybe, but is it pure enough to not p…
Airplanes run off kerosene, so that's a sizeable market if this fuel is good enough
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Other than if you have a Mr Fusion you can’t run a car off of solid plastics. But, I assume some additional steps are required to make it usable. The site doesn’t detail the possible uses of the the oil, but generally liquids and solids can be used in different situations. The oil could also be used as lubricant rather than an energy source.
Flammable lubes are a big no no
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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…
How exactly do materials go from dryer lint to trash bag and then somehow end up in the ocean? I can see a washing machine sending micro plastics down the drain resulting in some small percentage of those ending up in the ocean. Assuming some failure where raw sewage was dumped into a river or ocean.
Some particles make it through the lint trap into the hot/humid air stream into the environment.
Normal wear of the garments will shed micro particles from just rubbing up against them.
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I'm guessing the answer is, "Because you can already burn the plastic directly." Presumably burning this oil would have the same levels of pollution as burning the plastic in the first place, but also takes extra energy to produce.
I imagine it's easier to purify the oil and burn the oil with high efficiency, than to burn solid garbage and filter the flue gas.
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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 wor…