Dutch designer drives his car on the plastic waste he collects
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
A kind of pyrolysis, I assume, and very energy intensive. Does this process really produce more stored energy in the output product than it took to run the reaction?
What, _specifically_ is that liquid and how toxic is that stuff vs diesel/petrol...?
If you spill a liter of that stuff into a canal/ditch/stream, What consequences?
This:
https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-pascagoula-pollut...
"fuel production by burning plastic on the roof is four times more carbon intensive than producing fuel from crude oil in a refinery."
You can see how dirty the burning is producing soot-heavy smoke when he drives it around Arnhem
It does sound like a lot though yes
Edit: Like bruce343434 said below it is right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994147
People in general might be more conscious of greenhouse emissions if they could visualise them.
"So you're saying that when I go thru a tank of gasoline, the CO2 could fill HOW many football stadiums ?!"
Plastic waste is carbon that isn't going into the atmosphere, not very fast at least. Turning it back into oil and then burning that is the very opposite of what we should be doing with it.
> On the other hand, the CO2 emissions from fuel production and combustion are not praiseworthy. First, there is the burning of plastic on the roof. Making 1 liter of diesel requires burning 1 kg of plastic, which results in 2-2.7 kg of carbon emissions. Second, there is the combustion of diesel fuel while driving, which emits 2.7 kg of carbon dioxide per liter. Together, that becomes 4.7 to 5.4 kg CO2 per liter. Consequently, with a fuel economy of 7.14 liters per 100 km, the Volvo emits 33.6 to 38.6 kg of greenhouse gases per 100 km.
> In contrast, the emissions of the average fossil fuel-powered car in Europe amount to 25.8 kg/100 km, including crude oil production, fuel refining, and vehicle manufacturing The emissions of a small electric car like the Nissan Leaf amount to 10.9 kg/100km in Europe, including the emissions of electricity production.
The article make some other interesting points:
> Much of the plastic waste that the Volvo 240 burns burns anyway. Not in cars but in incinerators. That is the case for 44% of plastic waste in Europe.
> The carbon emissions are the same. So is the air pollution, although it’s easier to put a flue gas scrubber on thousands of incinerators than on millions of cars. The main difference is that burning plastic waste in incinerators to power electric cars allows many of us to externalize the side effects of car driving. An incinerator can be (and always is) located in a poor neighborhood, where it causes high incidences of cancer and other health problems despite air pollution control.
And moreover, this isn't really meant to be for widespread adoption:
> In contrast, Schalkx’s Volvo internalizes all the side effects of driving automobiles. The car is not a pleasure to drive, at least not regularly. It is dirty. Its interior stinks of plastic, which cannot be healthy – Gijs keeps the car windows open no matter the weather. Furthermore, he needs to spend a lot of time collecting plastic and making fuel, and all these disadvantages make him think twice before he gets behind the wheel.
There's plenty more interesting points, and the article is relatively short and worth the read.
The reality is that plastic waste is a much, much lesser problem than global warming. Burning plastic to power cars, even a statement, is insane given that we have already blown past the 1.5 degrees warming and are on a trajectory that will probably lead to much more than 2 degrees, which is now the most optimistic target for 2100 - and even this assumes 0 net emissions in 10 years, which is obviously a fantasy.
Overall this is an idiotic art piece that entirely misses the point of what we should really care about in environmentalism.
Literally this is not the case, and should be evidenced by the quotes I highlighted. It's more an intellectual deep dive on an interesting concept. It's not advocating that people ought to do this. To quote TFA:
> Carbon emissions are not the only worry. Because of the chemicals added to plastic, burning it to make fuel creates a lot of nasty air pollution. Nobody in their right mind would propose a switch to cars fuelled by plastic waste. However, it is instructive to examine the motives behind this unanimous conclusion.
Low-Tech Magazine's niche is low tech self-sufficiency, which is the main talking point of the article. Here from the first paragraph:
> During the Second World War, many motorized vehicles in continental Europe were converted to drive on firewood. 1 That happened as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels. Wood gas vehicles were a not-so-elegant alternative to their petrol cousins, but their range was comparable to today’s electric vehicles. In Germany alone, around 500,000 wood gas cars, buses, and trucks were operated by the end of WWII. An even more cumbersome alternative was the gas bag vehicle.
> Somehow, the Dutch authorities, who are not known for their permissivity, officially approved the car after inspection. Schalkx drives tax-free and – thanks to his car being an oldtimer – can enter low-emission zones, where he parks alongside the latest electric SUV. Justice is not yet out of this world.
To me this seems to be an overall endorsement of the project as an environmentally friendly idea.
And of course you can cherry pick the one or two positive notes from the article but then you'd have to ignore:
> the CO2 emissions from fuel production and combustion are not praiseworthy
> Nobody in their right mind would propose a switch to cars fuelled by plastic waste.
> The car is not a pleasure to drive, at least not regularly. It is dirty. Its interior stinks of plastic, which cannot be healthy
I'm not sure how this could be an overall endorsement.
like if they called it “trash-burning monthly” it wouldn’t be surprising that you open the cover and find that’s exactly what’s inside, but it’s also not a good thing to encourage even in a hobby sense, really. And there is a lot of the world that has done some pretty awful things environmentally for a very long time.
If it makes you feel better I have hobbies that are environmental disasters too. I don’t feel great about the knowledge that mercury/chromium/selenium intensifier or pyrocat exist, even plain old fixer isn’t great (although people will take it since it’s full of silver and worth recovering).
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/mercury-intensifier.74... (Mmm mercury II chloride, if you don’t have any in your medicine cabinet just pop over to the barber and ask them for a scoop, very “traditional”!)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/324458861037
(In film, this will bind to the un-fixed silver and help pull a little more in, or even strip the fixed silver and re-precipitate another metallic salt instead. Obviously takes a pretty aggressive reducing agent to bind to precipitated noble metals, so more aggressive the action the better it works… and those agents also love to bind to your nerves. So it’s pretty much literally “the better it works the more poisonous”. Mmm, organometallic chemistry, isn’t it grand?)
How is this in contradiction with what I'm saying? To quote my own post:
> Low-Tech Magazine's niche is low tech self-sufficiency
Neither I nor the writer of TFA think the venn diagram of low-tech self-sufficiency and environmentalism is a perfect circle, and that should be pretty obvious.
> it’s also not a good thing to encourage even in a hobby sense
That's not what TFA is doing. Do you really think there's going to be any consequential amount of people taking this up after reading the article? Maybe a few hackers will think it's fun, but the article spends a lot of time emphasizing how undesirable this idea is in practice.
So.. it's a toy and not a tool. It tries to invest interest around this mans childish ambitions, but it fails to produce anything of lasting or shared value.
> During the Second World War, many motorized vehicles in continental Europe were converted to drive on firewood. That happened as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels. Wood gas vehicles were a not-so-elegant alternative to their petrol cousins, but their range was comparable to today’s electric vehicles. In Germany alone, around 500,000 wood gas cars, buses, and trucks were operated by the end of WWII. An even more cumbersome alternative was the gas bag vehicle.
> Nowadays, there’s much less firewood available than in the 1940s, especially in industrialized regions. So, what would be the solution to the disruption of gasoline or electricity in the Third World War? Dutch designer Gijs Schalkx found another fuel supply, which is abundant: plastic waste.
In an SHTF situation, such as a country at war? I can sooner believe that, since plastics are more energy-dense than woods. It’s still not all that useful, but at least there is some minor niche it could possibly achieve.
Why are they measuring carbon impact per mile for manufacture? Is this based off some assumed period of ownership after which the car magically is useless and the battery can't be recycled, etc?
- it sits in a landfill where the plastic eventually (many years down the line) breaks down into microplastics.
- it gets sent into to a recycling facility (fuel/time/energy spent to transport), then it may or may not get “burned” or processed with other like plastics and eventually recycled (iirc, plastic can really only be recycled through this process a few times)
- it gets sent to city recycling facility but repackaged and sold to some other state or country for processing (+more fuel consumption/time/energy). Then depending on the country, or state it’s processed in same fashion as option 2 and thus incurring more GHGs
- or maybe it somehow ends up in your local street, rivers, lakes, oceans and eventually degrade into microplastics and eventually into the food/water you live on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
https://netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasificati...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783... ("Plasma gasification versus incineration of plastic waste: Energy, economic and environmental analysis")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984 (u/CptFribble: "I am once again asking you to consider plasma gasification. Here is my standard comment, copied again")
https://news.mit.edu/2021/inentec-turning-trash-into-valuabl... (Control-F "Recycling plastic")
HN Discussion stream on the topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(the art project is fine though)
https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasificati...
Your premise implies that he wouldn't have burned anything if he didn't burn plastic. This is largely false for most of the population. You're going to burn _something_ somewhere, whether coal or natural gas at the power plant or most likely gasoline in your car. You might as well burn things that need to be cleaned up anyway.
The article itself how much more CO2 this art project produces compared to a gasoline car.
Has a good callback to history (wood gas cars)
Has an interesting take on plastic waste - it's currently free which is weird when you think about it.
Is horrendous for the environment so would never scale but again do our current activities scale in a way that is acceptable any more.
Doesn't matter if you like it or not - as art it works well.
Pumping our environment full of artificial hormones and getting everybody full of random plasticy bits is bad. Until we have so much renewable energy that we don't need fossil fuels, burning garbage displacing burning coal/oil/gas is a net positive.
Dioxins for instance:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572...
Of course, it's much better to produce less plastic in the first place.
Now refining plastic to fuel used in other ways or small scale burning is likely just idiotic.
Even if we look at production costs, extracting and transporting liquids from the ground is also less energy intensive than transporting and processing solid plastic waste.
With an electric car you are not limited to any one fuel, whether it be solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, nat gas, oil, coal or plastic / garbage this is the big win decoupling fuel from transport.
Even a tiny whiff of burning plastic makes me nauseous for hours. I want nothing to do with that. If I seal clothes in a plastic tub for a few years, the clothes take on a plastic smell that also makes me nauseous. It doesn't wash out, so those clothes get thrown out. Long ago I got rid of all the dishes made of plastic. Even plastic cups impart a plasticy taste to water.
1. The still needs a way to generate heat to work. A primitive method done in some poorer countries (and in DIY stills) is to use wood to heat it. Guessing the way his still works here relies on fossil fuels to incinerate the plastic (maybe butane or his own fuel -- but if using his own fuel then he would have needed to bootstrap it.)
2. I realize the article mentions this but unless you read the entire article carefully you may not notice this. A lot of people are just going to assume that the designer found a way to recycle plastic without realizing how insanely toxic what they're doing is. Even in the incinerators designed for this purpose scientists have found chemicals in their ashes that never break down from combustion.
3. The author of this article makes frankly a bizarre logical leap by saying that since plastics are already burnt in incinerators doing this isn't that different. They neglect to mention that incinerators are still horrible ways to dispose of waste and that plastic specifically can be recycled into other materials without burning it into a toxic mess.
Overall, the still will generate an extremely dirty fuel capable of being used by ancient engines. For the modern gentleman who gives absolutely zero fucks about the environment. A possible next step from this project would be to figure out how to run a car on nuclear waste so that your car can be a fukushima/chernobyl on wheels.
> Making 1 liter of diesel requires burning 1 kg of plastic, which results in 2-2.7 kg of carbon emissions.
> Second, there is the combustion of diesel fuel while driving, which emits 2.7 kg of carbon dioxide per liter.
C : CO2
12 : (12+16+16)
12 : 44
1 : 3.666
so turning 1kg of pure C into pure CO2 by pulling O2 from the surrounding air creates 3.666kg CO2
Plastic also contains some H (weight ~1). Depends on the kind of plastic. Assuming water bottle plastic, AKA PET, AKA Polyethylene terephthalate, Its molecular formula is (C10H8O4)n.
So starting weight of 10x12+8x1+4x16=192, and we assume complete burning so CO2 + H2O end products.
1 C10H8O4 + 10 O2 = 10 CO2 + 4 H2O
1x192 : 10x44
192 : 440
1 : 2.29
perfectly burning 1kg of PET produces 2.29kg of CO2
The hydrogen in hydrocarbons on the other hand, doesn’t weigh much at all. Atomic weight of 1. But with a high school knowledge of chemistry I couldn’t tell you what all is in those plastics.
> 1 kg of plastic gives 0.5 liters of diesel, so the fuel economy is 7.14 liters per 100 km
This converts to about 33 MPG
https://convertermaniacs.com/liter-per-100-kilometers-to-mil...
The late 70s/ early 80s Volvo diesel uses a 6 cylinder version of the VW 4 cylinder engine used in the old Golf/Jetta, and is a historical precursor to the more efficient engine in your TDI. It was incredibly advanced and efficient for its time- it's competition, the Mercedes 300TD wagon, only got 22mpg at the time, and gasoline station wagons of that size would be lucky to get 15mpg.
Why don't the fuel producers do this? Is it less efficient than recycling the waste?
I recall reading about some of them looking into it but running into issues ensuring a "clean" recycled plastic supply at the scales they need. Can't seem to find the article in my history but there's a ton of varied results I'm seeing from searches talking about the idea of recycling plastic. Example: https://www2.afpm.org/forms/store/ProductFormPublic/sum-21-3...
I think one of the main issues was, at least in the US, chlorinated plastic (e.g. PVC) ends up in the bulk supply of used plastics through negligence/malice/whatever and even at a few percent ends up creating some pretty corrosive compounds which are difficult/expensive to remove before they damage the equipment.
Looks like people are working on that issue too though: https://www.power-technology.com/features/plastic-pyrolysis-...
> In contrast, Schalkx’s Volvo internalizes all the side effects of driving automobiles. The car is not a pleasure to drive, at least not regularly. It is dirty. Its interior stinks of plastic, which cannot be healthy – Gijs keeps the car windows open no matter the weather. Furthermore, he needs to spend a lot of time collecting plastic and making fuel, and all these disadvantages make him think twice before he gets behind the wheel.
Although I will agree this is ridiculous, as most anti-car ideas tend to be. If he’s privileged enough to consider whether he should use his car, then perhaps he should consciously live without one.