Machine Converts Plastic Back into Oil | Hacker News Reader

Machine Converts Plastic Back into Oil

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69 pointsygd18 comments

The nice things about this are:

a) From what I know, re-melting down plastic only works so many times till you hit a quality barrier, this can make use of the plastic that that process can't use.

b) This can make use of trash that otherwise would not have been recycled. It seems pretty agnostic about what plastics it accepts which is good, but on the other hand it also makes me wonder about byproducts in the oil and if or how they are extracted / disposed of.

Of course, at this point the price of waste plastic is cheap but it seems like if this caught on, then the oil suppliers would raise their prices for the raw plastic manufacturers, who would then have to raise prices for bottles and such, which in turn would probably lead to bottled drinks costing more. Which might even incentivize people to buy less of things with plastic packaging!

This price increase doesn't really apply much for the ton of existing plastic waste that we already have though, which can be obtained cheap, converted back to oil, then sold. All in all, this sounds great!

It looks like it distils the oil which would mean that it is purified. It also would mean that the machine needs to cleaned regularly.

Distillation isn't magic. It works because different materials have different boiling points. When it's salt and water it's really easy since the boiling points are totally different but when it's something like this we're talking about hundreds to thousands of possible compounds all in the same mixture (also, there might be different compounds each time because of the different materials), melted up together. I doubt it's purified.

Where's the catch? Energy efficiency? Patents?

Someone please fill me in why this is not-as-great-as-it-seems (or is it?)

Possibly the cost of energy to heat the plastic. But at some point that cost is mitigated by the environmental benefit. Many could argue that that point happened some time ago.

The cynic might point to destabilising the oil cartels and the general world economy underpinned by oil.

Funny you bring up patents. It's seems we already live in world fearful of the darn things.

Still, great video, and kudos to the folk who developed it. I really like the fact that the thing is so small and easily portable; killer feature.

I wonder if it being small is a problem. Converting some plastic to some oil is pretty nice, but does it scale? I have no idea

From the description of the video: "The Japanese company Blest has developed one of the smallest and safest oil-to-plastic conversion machines out on the market today."

The first hit on Google for "Plastic to Oil" is http://www.polymerenergy.com/

They say: "System capacity can range from 200 tons to 400 tons of plastic wastes processed per month. Overall plant capacity can be easily scaled up by adding additional modules."

There are many issues that complicate recycling. There are many different types of plastics. The possible uses and available processing methods differ. There's the matter of sorting them, minimizing impurities, transport costs, energy of processing, issues with various toxic materials.

At least five years ago an electronics/metals/scrap/recycling dealer I spoke with told me he was shipping his monitor scraps to the central valley (California), near Kettleman City I believe. He'd mentioned that there was a plant able to process the plastic from computer monitor cases into oil. I doubt that it is a cheap way to get oil, and it probably can't produce huge amounts of it, but it is a good alternative to putting scrap in a landfill. California collects a recycling fee with the purchase of monitors/TVs which goes to subsidize processing later. I'm not sure if the conversion is cost effective without the subsidy, but it seems the right thing to do regardless. I believe there's another processor near Victorville California. I heard they actually get quite a bit (over fifty cents a pound) for c.r.t. glass. It contains a large amount of lead.

Dealing with our wastes can be dangerous business.

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/california-cluster-birth-defect...

Huell Howser on PBS has had a number of shows relating to different kinds of recycling

http://www.calgold.com/green/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo2Pl7UxbNo

I have to laugh and cringe when Huell keeps scooping up and pouring c.r.t. glass sand with his hand... no doubt throwing a bunch of lead dust in the air. Opps!!

The real gain that I could see from this is that we could have a device like this in every home, similar to a waste disposal unit. Then, if the refinary tech is small and safe enough, we could create our own fuels (for vehicles or generators as the video suggested). That way we'd cut down dramatically on the CO2 footprint of fuelling these devices.

Processing plastic into oil just to burn oil as fuel is fundamentally still wasteful, because of all the great things you can do with oil (produce more plastics, for instance) you're still burning it for fuel. The presence of this technology might seem to turn useless plastic waste into useful fuel, but on the contrary--if you can turn plastic back into oil, and then back into plastic over and over again, the long term value of oil for making plastics is even greater, and so is the potential loss of burning this reusable, recyclable resource as fuel.

I got a kick out of this.

Being able to turn oil to plastic and back, that is true recycling...instead of converting plastic bottles into Old Navy fleeces (decycling).

probably just better to burn the plastic as fuel. I'd guess the oil -> plastic -> oil conversion process is probably pretty inefficient with respect to energy. It looks like they focus on carbon efficiency.

I wonder how much energy is need to create the oil vs. how much energy is then contained in the oil.

I'd assume that the net energy gain is positive, but it would be interesting if they said how positive.

It's efficiency is ~85%, according to the Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Pretty sure this is Blest company's site: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=...

Throw as much as you can into our magnificently superabundant landfills today. Future generations will thank you for it. The current recycling craze with today's tech is wasteful and harmful to the environment.

Doesn't Envion do something like this? http://www.envion.com/evp_envionoilgenerator.html

It seems Environ is making a large-scale system whereas the system in the video is small-scale. As a small-scale system, it's a business opportunity for an individual in a developing country with lots of plastic waste - they could apply for a loan from Kiva to get started.

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