Plastic-based fuels may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health

So long as we're going to be making plastics, it seemed that pyrolysis and/or incineration made sense to destroy the plastic waste. Then reduce the amount of plastics at the start of the pipeline.

(Obviously it's more efficient to make fuel directly from oil, but that's not the point. Narrowly from an energy perspective, the comparison to make is (a) make plastic from oil, separately make jet fuel from oil, burn the jet fuel, and send plastic to the landfill, vs (b) make plastic from oil, use it, then turn it into jet fuel and then burn that. Obviously you don't make plastic as only an inefficient intermediate step in jet fuel production.)

But if the pyrolysis process is going to release potent carcinogens up the smokestack, then that changes everything.

The article is a little bit bad, in that it doesn't clearly explain whether the fuel itself is carcinogenic, or if it's a byproduct of the pyrolysis process that is. It also doesn't explain what those chemicals are (I assume they are hydrocarbons, cousins of benzene), or why they are not burned in the process that powers the pyrolysis. Is the combustion too dirty, not high-temperature enough? Are volatile gasses leaking through some insufficiently-selective distillation process? Are products just recklessly being vented to atmosphere?

There are plenty of examples of corporations doing horrible things to make a buck, and the corporate/PR/lawyer-speak from Chevron does nothing to allay my fears. But I assume there are also chemists involved who do give a shit and are not setting out to poison people nearby. We've heard from the whistleblower. We've heard from the lawyer/PR flaks. I'd like to hear from some chemists.

I think they might have linked to the wrong paper, that one doesn't cover pyrolisis and none of the economics cost are even 2x using new fossil fuels.

Diagram: https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acssuschemeng.2c05497/asset...

> "But the agency won’t turn over these records or reveal information about the waste-based fuels, even their names and chemical structures. Without those basic details, it’s nearly impossible to determine which of the thousands of consent orders on the EPA website apply to this program. In keeping this information secret, the EPA cited a legal provision that allows companies to claim as confidential any information that would give their competitors an advantage in the marketplace."

There's no explanation of this other than regulatory capture. Might want to look into how many people from the EPA Chevron has been hiring as consultants etc., or how much money Chevron has been giving to politicians who approve EPA heads, the hiring practices of EPA heads, and so on.

I'd guess much of the problem is that they only partially breakdown the plastics into the desired long-chain hydrocarbons that make up the jet fuel, so there's likely a big pile of partially-broked down plastics that they then have to dispose of, which is a likely source of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and so on, plus dioxin which is particularly problematic as a hormone mimic and disruptor of basic cellular processes (see Agent Orange, Vietnam):

"Dioxin formation during combustion of nonchloride plastic, polystyrene and its product" (2005)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16097324/

Sounds like the environmentalists will soon advertise their campaigns with "Get cancer to save the climate!".