Entrepeneur says he strikes oil with our garbage

[n2doc]

October 19, 2009 -- Updated 1307 GMT (2107 HKT)

By Dugald McConnell
CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer"

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Like the alchemists who once tried to turn lead into gold, a green entrepreneur says he has found a cost-effective method for turning plastic trash into oil.


The Envion plant turns plastic garbage into oil by isolating petroleum from the plastic's other ingredients.

During a recent visit to his new demonstration plant in Maryland, Envion CEO Michael Han describes his process: Waste plastic is shredded and melted and then processed in a way that separates the petroleum from the rest of the ingredients.

At one end of the machinery, shredded plastic trash is dumped in a hopper and goes up a conveyor belt into a "reactor." At the other end is a spaghetti of pipes and valves and tanks.

Han turns open a spigot on one of the pipes and produces a liquid the color of apple juice. It smells kind of like diesel, and Han claims it's ready to be processed for any number of uses: fueling cars, diesel generators or even jets.

But not all of the ingredients in plastic can be refined into petroleum. All the chemicals that were added when the plastic was produced must be separated out and collected in a sediment tank.

more:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/10/16/plastic.trash.into.oil/

[madokie]

1. I think we should have a robust recycling system

where it is encouraged that everything is to be recycled other than simply thrown away or left to just rot away.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. I know I am not the only person who has thought of this.

You know, one of those " Why don't design a way to reverse engineer plastic?".
Glad to see someone is doing it.
And, like the curious researcher mentioned in the story, I too wonder:
"what happens to the additives and the metals and the other things?"

[lysosome]

6. sounds easy to refine. Plastics were refined from crude oil, refining these things from plastic...

should be no problem

[slutticus]

3. What's the energy balance here?

How much energy does that waste melting the plastic to extract drops of petroleum?

[WhiteTara]

4. here's the scale tipper in the energy balance

http://hubpages.com/hub/Pacific-Ocean-Garbage-Patch-
this is the floating plastic island in the Pacific ocean where the plastic is literally choking the ife out of the sea.

[dysfunctional press]

5. bad link.

try again

[WhiteTara]

7. maybe this one will work

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm

[slutticus]

8. That's great, but essentially what this means is that we have a choice between...

...releasing more CO2 and reducing plastic waste in the sea. (in this context anyway.....)

[sudopod]

11. CNN dropped the ball on this.

5 minutes with google would have fixed them up.

Supercritical water reactors have been around for a long time.

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

Water in this state, at high pressure and temperature, can break up pretty much any complex organic molecule into much smaller pieces that can be refined into fossil fuel-style products like diesel. The trouble until recently is that supercritical water eats up just about anything over time, including the walls of the reactor vessel. Advances in materials science have brought us to the point where vessels are durable enough to make industrial-sized versions a reasonable investment.

Note that this works on pretty much any organic stuff. A similar operation backed by Warren Buffet is being used to reprocess turkey guts from a nearby poultry plant. Not only would it be a good way to push peak oil back a little ways, a supercritical water reactor would also be an option for producing biodiesel from plants, including algae.

It's good stuff, if CNN could be bothered to stop researching SN fucking L and read a book.

[sudopod]

9. What the hell...

"Like the alchemists who once tried to turn lead into gold, a green entrepreneur says he has found a cost-effective method for turning plastic trash into oil."

No, actually, organic chemistry is completely different because it is real.

[Cleita]

10. I've said this for twenty years now that there is a whole industry

waiting to happen by mining our landfills to salvage whatever can be reused for the future.

[Barack_America]

12. No one has more trash, and more wealth in it, than we do. nt