Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

It's all about small decisions. I'll list some examples but keep in mind that they're just examples.

* Prefer markets that overall use less plastic, even if this might bring you a small inconvenience. For example if market A sells groceries in bulk (bring your own bag) and market B sells the same groceries in styrofoam trays, then you buy it in market A, even if it's a bit further from your home.

* Actively refuse unnecessary plastic. For example, where I live bakeries often put bread inside paper bags, and the paper bags inside plastic bags; so I usually tell the workers there "no need for the plastic bag". I'm still creating some garbage (the paper bag) but it's way less than I would otherwise.

* Homemade alternatives for store-bought products. It doesn't even need to be the same product, as long as it fills the same role for you - like homemade fruit juice versus soda, homemade tomato sauce, or buying Parmesan in chunks and grating it instead of buing it pre-grated in small packages. You'll need to take your tastes into account, but some replacements might be even cheaper or better than what you're replacing.

* Reusing containers so you need to buy less tupperwares. Like ice cream pots, soda bottles, even margarine pots. Where I live there are even jokes about how ice cream pots never contain ice cream, but cooked beans.

Well this machine has been around for a decade or so I think

Here is some organization in Alaska demonstrating the operation but like I said in my other comment in this thread, the tabletop unit is more of a demonstrator model that is meant for educational purposes and their goal is to upsell on the industrial units.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhvogn49riI

Most (80% was the number I saw) large bunker-oil engines with scrubbers installed simply dump the removed sulphides into the sea as wastewater instead of venting it into the atmosphere. Not to mention the colossal amounts of carbon-related pollutants.

Solvable problems via a retrofit to be sure, but overall I'd rather than the HFO's are simply not burned at all.

>I'm a PhD chemist.

This sort of "chrust me, I have kwalifikashuns" is rather fitting the overall poor quality of your comment.

There are a thousand things wrong with this application. Viability of the process is NOT one of them, as already attested in the literature. Refer for example to

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016523701...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31917892/

The reaction boils down to R'-CH₂-CH₂-R" → R'-CH=CH₂ + H-R". It's practically the reversal of the polymerisation that created the plastic on first place. It's specially obvious by the third paper that I've listed as example, since they're generating butadiene and olefins from polyethylene.

It is by no means on the same level as "selling you a way to change Iron into Gold".

>Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen

General purpose polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene do not usually have double bonds. Specially not in the main chain (that you need to cleave to get smaller molecules). You'll only get double bonds in the main chain if your monomers had a triple bond in its place, as one of the bonds is broken in the polymerisation. Most monomers however start with a double bond and the resulting polymers have single bonds. Here, let me show it to you:

(...) + R'=R" + R'=R" + (...) → (...) + [·R'-R"·] + [·R'-R"·] + (...) → (...)-R'-R"-R'-R"-(...)

This is common knowledge among chemists.

>That is why, when you heat plastic it decomposes into char -- as in charcoal.

Yeah, because the hydrogens magically disappear. The presence of nearby oxidants (specially one that you, QuackOfAllTrades, should stop consuming, for a better humankind) is totally unrelated.

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For actual criticism of the application:

You'll get nasty junk oil as output. That oil will have ONE purpose: to be burned down. If you're burning down the oil might as well burn the plastic directly.

This could be solved by fractional distillation... yeah good luck doing it at home.

What happens if some clueless individual tries to recycle PAN? Or even PVC, given how nasty organochlorines are. So there is both health and environmental concerns.

What's the catalyst being used? Plenty catalysts are environmentally nasty.

1KWh/kg is a lot of energy, and it will have an environmental footprint.

It is not trying to sell you a magical device that transforms iron into gold. Instead it is trying to sell you a device that converts good iron into crappy iron, and marketing the crappy iron as if it was more useful than it is.

Breaking polymers down is a thing though. Not my area of expertise, but they try to make feedstock organic or of it. Lots of research to make it cheap and better control off the outputs.

But I wouldn't expect a crystal clear liquid output. Again, not my area.