Turning Plastic to Oil, U.K. Startup Sees Money in Saving Oceans | Hacker News Reader

Turning Plastic to Oil, U.K. Startup Sees Money in Saving Oceans

bloomberg.com

169 pointsendswapper45 comments

I feel like I see one of these every few years. I remember the Japanese one from a while back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGGabrorRS8

The article does mention this particular technique tries to get bigger yields and remove the need of sorting that other methods require. If it works as they claim, I could see it working for mining landfills, but when it comes to plastic patches in the ocean, I have trouble seeing a ship being able to recover enough plastic to be greater than its fuel use skimming through it.

> I have trouble seeing a ship being able to recover enough plastic to be greater than its fuel use skimming through it

There are passive technologies that claim to be able to skim plastic from the ocean:

https://www.theoceancleanup.com/technology/

It goes further back then that. The 1980 Supreme Court patent case Chakrabarty v. Diamond was about oil eating bacteria that could be used to clean up oil spills. Not the same, but similar category. It was a very important case for patent law, but the technology was never commercially developed.

For the patent law nerds out there, it's a pretty great case to get acquainted with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Chakrabarty

> I have trouble seeing a ship being able to recover enough plastic to be greater than its fuel use skimming through it.

I don't think this would be the idea.

I think by making it worth money to recycle the plastic it doesn't get into the oceans.

It's certainly not worthwhile trying to getting the existing plastic out of the oceans, this has been well covered by engineers.

You don't even have to recycle it. Burning it for heat energy is enough. Most plastic only produces water and co2 when burned...

Are you sure about that? As a younger person I burned a few samples of various things called 'plastic' and the fumes sure smelled like maybe I should be sterile by now.

Plastics tend to consists of carbon and hydrogen chains. See for example polycarbonate [1], polyetene [2] and ABS [3] (contains nitrogen). They might however contain all sorts of additives. In order to produce just water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen the burning must be carefully controlled [4] - in your experiment the burning was probably not complete, which explains the fumes (that might have been carcinogenic [4]).

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

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Incineration_of_plasti...

You generally don't want to burn halogenated plastics like PVC though. As I understand it that will release highly toxic dioxins (which cause cancer and birth defects among other things) unless they are incinerated at high temperatures.

I don't know why this is downvoted, it's correct - incineration of plastics is needs to be done at high temperatures to avoid this problem.

Maybe it was PVC. That releases plenty of nasties when you burn it.

Ditto, the sibling posts seem to cover it except for printed plastics, even if the plastic is good the printing probably wasn't/isn't.

"the fumes sure smelled like maybe I should be sterile by now"

You, sir, have just enriched the English language.

The C in PVC stands for chloride. Wikipedia claims it is the world's third-most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer, after polyethylene and polypropylene, which are pure carbohydrates.

So, technically, it is 'most', but chances are fairly good a random selection of garbage plastic contains chloride, too, and that can be nasty.

> It's certainly not worthwhile trying to getting the existing plastic out of the oceans, this has been well covered by engineers.

Can you link to some info on this?

Well here's a couple of articles quoting scientists. I mean the idea doesn't pass a smell test. If plastics are bad in the oceans how can you remove them in something so big without wiping out ecosystems at the same time?

One of the quotes (theoceancleanup) here is a idea from a 17 year old teenager (now 22) who was kickstarted. This also fails a pretty big smell test.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/26/ocean-cl...

https://www.kcet.org/redefine/6-reasons-that-floating-ocean-...

Compared to something simple like collecting it before it hit the oceans and you can dump it into something cheap like a truck and process it which it's easy to see how it does work?

> I have trouble seeing a ship being able to recover enough plastic to be greater than its fuel use skimming through it.

Surely it could just be solar powered? Autonomous even?

There are natural "gyres" in the oceans that collect garbage - see this link for the "Great Pacific garbage patch" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch). It's about the size of Texas and has a significant amount of plastic in it, although of smaller sizes. That would seem to be a great place to focus these collection and conversion efforts.

Except even in those places the density of plastic is very low.

> 200,000 pieces per square kilometer in the North Atlantic garbage patch.

> 4 particles per cubic meter in the Great Pacific garbage patch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

It's a serious problem, but it's one that requires people to stop using so much plastic; to make sure they re-use plastic; and to make sure that plastics are recycled after use.

Microbeads in cosmetics and microfibres from clothing are a huge problem.

So much this and I don't know that we really have an answer to fix this. This micro things are toxic to the entire aquatic ecosystem.

Part of the answer is simply to stop using non-biodegradable stuff in cosmetics.

It isn't difficult to do. All that is needed is an incentive like making inclusion of plastic micro-beads illegal. Isn't California considering doing that?

Wow, that is encouraging. I hope that is true and gets passed. It could mean the end of yoga pants (they are good and bad) so I'm not sure how I feel about this. :)

Before long we're going to campaign protecting the unique ecosystem that arose on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Patch is shrinking, we will say, due to ongoing cleaning/mining operations, and its endemic creatures are struggling without their home.

This idea feeds my current existential crisis nicely.

I wonder if, given time, an organism will evolve to make use of the plastic. Currently it's an untapped source of energy floating around the oceans and nature is really clever in finding ways to tap energy.

I can see this working very well for plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene (which fortunately make up the majority of the stuff floating in the oceans) which are essentially long-chain hydrocarbons with nothing but H and C, but I wonder how it would handle fluorinated and chlorinated plastics (PTFE, PVC).

If there was a way to really do it, I would not mind a x% tax on items that use plastic. Plastics make our life easier, much easier, so we can afford to pa x% more to safely recycle it.

The money would be going to getting rid of it...not pork projects or paying for $400,000 pensions for civil servants.

I think we could avoid an actual tax with an effective tax.

Container deposits such as bottles and cans have proven to be effective. It's worth exploring whether expanding the concept to cover materials in general would yield similar benefits. It wouldn't have to cost consumers anything more and it provides an incentive for the consumer to take on more responsibility for material and environmental stewardship.

In Norway we have variations on systems like this for tyres, electronic equipment and so on. Generally the manufacturer or importer pays into a fund that is supposed to pay for recycling of the product once it is scrapped. In addition shops that sell electronic goods have to accept scrap electronic goods (anyone's not just what they sold) for recycling. Petrol stations have public bins for recycling containers that contained toxic chemicals like screen wash, antifreeze, and oil.

Really it all just comes down to political will.

All carbon that comes from fossil sources should be avoided. This is only a good idea if it prevents further extraction of oil or coal.

Otherwise we will just be adding more extra carbon to the carbon cycle, by dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

In fact, having the carbon stored in the garbage patch is better for the environment (and the organisms that depend on a stable environment) than burning it and releasing it into the atmosphere.

You don't want to burn and release, that's true, but you also don't want the plastic in the food chain. So you need some sort of way to compress and store the co2 until it can be sequestered.

Perhaps making plastic waste ingots when the recyclability is too low to be profitable and then burying large volumes of plastic this way.

There is another company that is also working on this in the Bay Area. http://www.resynergi.com

There's an Australian company that's trying to build a plastics-to-diesel plant in my city, but is facing a lot of local opposition due to pollution and safety concerns - a government health review panel has basically suspended the project until they can provide more evidence of safety. Will be interesting to watch.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/foy-group-aims-to-p...

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/independent-panel-s...

In VICE HBO Season 5 Ep 7 "Plastic Oceans," Jeanette Garcia, a PhD polymer science researcher at IBM's Almaden Bernal facility in San Jose, discussed chemical recycling of plastic.

http://www.hbo.com/vice/episodes/05/61-life-under-sharia-and...

(PS: I went to a dark matter conference at that enormous facility in the mid-90's and was offered a job but couldn't get a work permit being 15 requiring parental and school approvals. Bernal Road is also an awesome, steep road bike route.)

Plastic-to-diesel plant set for Nova Scotia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14307390

While generating fuel from plastic is nice, the value is really low, and the carbon goes back in the environment. The oil that comes from catalytic pyrolysis also contains some oxidation products that are nasty smelling and of questionable toxicity.

Even better is to simply recycle for use in some other application. The cost of plastic monomers is typically higher than fuel.

The holy grail will be to get monomers back to generate pristine polymer back!

If that would work profitabely, why not use it for regular trash? I guess it collects the plastic, but the oi transformation is just a gimmick to get publicity.

As a tech product it's cool, but as a green project, I'd guess that increasing recycling programs would probably have a much larger and immediate effect.

Conventional recycling (or better yet: avoidance) can reduce new landfills, but ha zero impact on stuff that is already there.

I suspect a gullible investor money grab: "Saudi riches while saving cute animals, you'd be a fool not to try!", there will always be some people ignoring the too good to be true test.

But if it does work, creating some fuel while doing the cleanup could make a world of difference in terms of funding. I don't see this ever really competing with conventional resource extraction while there is still a drop of crude in the ground, but as a trophy token, "plastic patch fuel" could make fundraising much easier.

> Conventional recycling (or better yet: avoidance) can reduce new landfills, but ha zero impact on stuff that is already there.

Every day, we are putting tons of waste into the ocean. With better recycling/avoidance programs, we may reduce that by 20%, greatly reducing the amount of waste we put into the ocean each year. I don't know the details of this tech, but it could remove far less than that same 20% reduction.

No mention of the carbon footprint of this thing.

In principle negative by one measure since you are recovering energy (embedded in the outputs, possibly to then be used as fuel) if done well.

If it runs on electricity, the carbon footprint will vary wildly with where the power comes from.

>Turning plastic to oil [...] saving oceans

The phrase "robbing Peter to pay Paul" comes to mind.

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