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Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back to Oil
An anonymous reader writes "From the newscientist article: "Key to GRC's process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.""
Finally, a use for all those AOL CDs!
That the mines of the next century will be our garbage mountains. It will be the place with the highest density of easily obtainable materials.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
no mention on how much energy it takes to run the thing, or how much energy it puts out. it's not of much use if it costs a fraction to just bury the old plastic and make new stuff from scratch.
People are made of hydrocarbons... kind of!
Will this be the new trendy form of cremation?
I drink to make other people interesting!
when I stop at the gas station/convenience store, I'll be able to buy a burrito that's 1/2 frozen coming out of the microwave, and fuel 1/2 frozen coming out of the microwave. How far we've come!
I've gotten my microwave at home to break my food back down into component carbons. Or at least something pretty similar to coal.
Gamertag: WyleType
What I gather is that they use multiple magnetrons or microwave circuits to generate frequencies that will resonate with all the common bonds in hydrocarbons, just as 2.4Ghz is the resonant frequency of the protons in a water molecule swinging back and forth. However, they also claim (for example) that it can dissolve the insulation off a piece of copper wire. But it's still the same principle as a microwave oven, so I ask: how can they put a conductor into the chamber and not have it immediately burn up due to microwave absorbtion? Cut it up into teeny bits?
But it's recycling, we're not allowed to ask if it's worth it, because if we did we might not bother to recycle anything.
Error:
FTA: "GRC says its Hawk-10 can extract enough oil and gas from the left-over fluff to run the Hawk-10 itself and a number of other machines used by Gershow." So, yeah, you get energy out of this, I guess. You do add a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere, though...
The process they are talking about sounds a lot like petroleum cracking, both use catalysts to break larger hydrocarbons/polymers into smaller pieces but the petroleum cracking takes place upwards of 1000 degrees so if it is already being used, why not this too? Currently to produces plastics we use crack petroleum into ethylene, propylene etc. and to produces certain precursors we use superacids, zeolites and super lewis acids which are really not very environmentally friendly. whatever use they can get out of the process without needing to crack more petrol is a good thing at least on paper.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Powering the next generation with the accumulated shit of the previous one. Brilliant.
Almost two years ago.
-- Old Man Kensey
Good! they can start by zapping all that annoying hard plastic bubble packaging that every bleeding thing seems to come in now and is harder then hell to open without damaging the contents! What frigging idiot came up with that idea?!? If there isn't a hell, they should make one, and put idiots like that in it! I know...a prison...we'll strip them naked and make sure their cells are free of anything with sharp or pointed edges, and all their meals, toilet paper, soap etc will come wrapped in their diabolical inventions!
You're using her as bait, Master!
The short of it is that you need to do is put a lot of electrical energy into water and you get hydrogen. Electricity can't run a car because you can't just have an extension cord dragging out the back. Hydrogen is a portable form of energy that a car can run on. The fact that it takes more energy to produce than gasoline is irrelevant.
God spoke to me.
>> plastic... broken down into... combustible gas
Try feeding your dog a (small) Lego. It has the same effect. For almost a week.
This is true and people have been using animal fat as a fuel ever since they discovered fire. Exxon realized that 150,000 people already die each year from global warming and their bodies represent an untapped, carbon neutral fuel source. Check out the results at Vivoleum.com, and you to may want to be a candle or SUV fodder. Burn guilt free!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You can still see the tribute video here. It has all of the good parts anyway. The press release is also preserved elsewhere.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Water vapor would be a powerful greenhouse gas, if there weren't already so much of it there. Basically, our atmosphere has so much water vapor, that every frequency of IR that can be absorbed by it is already fully absorbed. So more water vapor won't make a difference. CO2 and CH4, on the other hand, are potent greenhouse gasses because not only do they absorb IR, but they're pretty scarce our atmosphere.
wonder if it could be used to convert coal to a liquid hydrocarbon--would make the US the new saudi arabia for oil considering our huge coal deposits.
I'm sure it helps to stick the stuff into a blender first.
True, but how is it enforced? Perhaps in the Netherlands, people can be trusted to just do it, but I'm not sure that would work here.
... well, you tell me which one people are going to do? (Hint, it's the one that's less work.) Hell, I know people who don't even recycle metals, because it's too much work to sort stuff into the bin that they're already given. Easier just to chuck it all in one bin and not think about it. And that's only two cans, one for all mixed recyclables and one for 'everything else.'
In fact, I'm pretty sure that in my municipality, it's technically illegal to throw out anything that's toxic into the regular trash, but there's no enforcement mechanism, and given a choice between taking that old NiCd phone battery or fluorescent light tube to the recycling center, and just putting it in the trash
I've heard anecdotally that in Japan, there are people who basically go through trash at transfer stations, and will hunt down (based on personally identifying information in the trash) those folks who don't sort their recyclables out and reprimand/embarrass them -- short of something vaguely creepy like that (and in the U.S., social ostracism and humiliation aren't going to work as punishments), I'm not sure any consumer-sorting programs are going to work.
Without draconian enforcement, I think the sorting has to be -- or at least has to be backed up by sorting -- done at the transfer station or dump.
From a different perspective, sorting garbage based on predetermined criteria seems to be like something that, once you get over the initial investment in the system that does it, is probably better done by one giant machine that sorts the garbage for 100,000 people, than each of those 100,000 people having to take a few minutes a day to think about it. From a purely economic perspective, the opportunity cost of everyone's time probably justifies an automatic sorter, and when you factor in the recovered value from the recyclables [1] and the possible "dump mining" aspects that it creates later, I'd think it would be a good investment.
[1] The value of the metal and Type 1 plastic, anyway; the higher-number plastics don't seem to be worth recycling right now, at least based on what I've read.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So, just like, a wave, right?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Great.. and just when we were starting to look at alternative fuel
So what happens when plastics are recycled off of gold/copper wiring and sparks are among the by-products
from article:"Not only does the process produce fuel in the form of oil and gas, it also makes it easier to extract the copper wire for recycling."
So I think that they had this in their mind when designing this. You het the copper and the oil. If the process would produce sparks, it is propable safe by design. I mean: sparks, combusting gas + oil = law suit, not much of a business plan.
Might be interesting to watch.
Not surprised by this at all.
...
There are countless stories of ancient technology where enlightened beings create things or destroy them by utilising special harmonic vibrations.
We have pyramids and whole cities being constructed in the remote jungle covered mountains of Peru by a small number of 'dwarfs' who move massive blocks of granite around using a nothing but a 'chiming rod'. (Sound being a vibration in teh audible spectra).
We have the armies of King David knocking down the walls of Jericho by blowing specific notes on the sacred horn of destruction. (Sound again being a vibration in teh audible spectra).
We have ancient Indians flying around in Vimyana airships and laying waste to massed armies with blasts of specially coded light waves. (Light being a vibration in teh visible spectra).
From ancient Inuit culture, we have heroes who can 'hummm' inaudible songs to summon a great whale from beneath the ice caps of the frozen north, and command the whale to do their bidding. (Subtonal vibrations in teh sensory spectra)
We have the ancient Malinese who claim to have built a city UNDER THE OCEAN in a single day, by banging two large fish together. (A vibration in teh olafactory spectra perhaps ?)
And the ancient Australian aboriginies, where the rainbow serpent created the mountains and the rivers and then literally sang day and night and linear time into existence. (A vibration in teh temporal spectra ?).
So why should we be surprised that vibrations in teh Microwave spectra hold the power to perform the modern alchemical trick of turning old barbie dolls and art-deco floor coverings into diesel fuel ?
Thats hardly progress - I would be impressed if they came up with a giant titanium chiming wand that could remotely construct a magnificent city on the Moon in a couple of hours, or a 100 square mile flawless pyramid of solid ruby on the surface of Mars over the space of a long weekend
They're doing it by hand in China. Here's a slashdot posting, referring to a photo journal about just such a thing.
Just need to have non-stupid options. Every four or five months, I check with my state's waste management website for how to handle the tricky stuff (like fluorescent tubes and button batteries), mostly because that's about how often I lose a CFL. Their answer is that I must drive halfway across the state (it's a small state, but the way the roads are, half-way across might as well be all the way across). Also, I have to make a special appointment for the privilege.
I might consider doing this when my CRT monitor finally fails, but somehow I doubt that burning 12 gallons of gasoline for a single compact bulb is less harmful to the environment than tossing it in with the regular trash. And if it's not, then there's no point in my continuing to use them, as the 12 gallons of gasoline puts the lifetime cost well over that which regular light bulbs would've been over the same time period. They fail to break often enough that just accumulating a bunch of spent CFLs is really an option. It'd take me ten years to fill a small box with 'em, and frankly, I don't want to store hazardous waste for that long.
The items aren't exactly very large or numerous. I fail to see why they can't just put one or more small bins at the transfer station for them. How much space would a whole town's worth of expired button batteries need to take, anyway?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
So we have more oil to burn. Great. Okay, it's perhaps better than burning plastics directly, with all the contaminants like chloride, fluoride, heavy metals, in it. But it will add to our CO^2 production. At least garbage that is stored properly will not add to the global warming problem. If this microwave process is economically viable, oil prices will go down, and that unfortunately means we'll just burn more.
This idea is labeled as recycling and therefore good. But this is not the kind of recycling we need. It's not clean energy. We need alternative fuels and reusable non-polluting products.
assignment != equality != identity
These numbers are attributed to Jerry Meddick, director of business development at Global Resource Corporation. I'd guess mr. Meddick originally said to the reporter "running 20 pounds of ground-up tyres ... produces 1.2 gallons of diesel oil, 50 cubic feet of combustible gas, 2.2 lb of steel, and 7.5 lb of carbon black", using units he's familiar with.
Okay, a publication calling itself scientific is not going to publish figures in non-SI units. I appreciate the effort of conversion, but it's not much better to publish figures in "base 0.454", as it were. Reading in base 10, the above quote best represents (in a roundabout way) the steel yield of the machine: to get 1 kg of steel, put in 9.1 kg of ground-up tyres.
What if you want to express the total yield per unit of ground-up tyres? Use a unit amount or a power of 10 amount of tyres and calculate the rest from that:
For every 10 kilograms of ground-up tyres, the Hawk-10 produces 5 litres of diesel oil, 1.6 cubic metres of combustible gas, 1.1 kg of steel, and 3.7 kg of carbon black.
This is much easier to comprehend: if a ton (1000 kg) of ground-up tyres were delivered to a Hawk-10, it would produce approximately 500 litres of diesel oil, enough to run my 1999 Ford Focus on my 100 km per day commute 5 days a week for 20 weeks.
Now, where's that microwawe...?
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Well... if you see a new word in German, it usually is an english word and you're back to square one.
Free as in mason.
One of the great and wonderful things about English is that spelling reflects quite accurately the history of the word. Sure, there are some pronunciation ambiguities that are a little difficult to learn, but even ESL learners get over that hill remarkably quickly.
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word. Get the sound wrong and people will correct you almost immediately, so what's the problem?
In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.
So, regular spelling: great for primary school kids; not so great for everyone else who wants to use language at a more advanced level, for things like communication and literature.
Look at super markets, lots and lots of items in small tiny packages. Can I bring my own 4 gallon container and fill it up with shower gel? NO.
Why not? Why cannot items be prices per volume, not per packet.
Or if super markets provided recycling bins so you can bring back old containers/wrapping and pay the consumer back with a store credit that will
reduce garbage dumps massively. Id like to see a 30cent discount on a shampoo bottle if I bring back the old one. At least this 'discount' system bypasses
taxes so you dont get taxed on the recycling (* until some idiot politician acts like a mafia boss and goes, lets rape and steal *)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Lai and Singh's work have not been supressed: rather it has shown to be hard to replicate. And there is another explanation to the statements in the article: they mechanism of work is not as the inventors think (not at all unusual) and it is only the heat that gives the result. The article is far too thin in details to know for sure.
Let me tell ya little story bout a man named Fred,
Jersey Engineer barely has time to eat bread,
Then one day he was cookin up some food,
after a 20 minute call it was a bubblin crude.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I've said for years it would be a great job for prisoners to do the sorting. Have the household garbage run down a conveyor belt and have them pick out the useful bits.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
How much microwave power do you need to reconstitute oil back into dinosaurs?
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
You can do more with oil than just burn it, such as turning it into plastic.
successful at mining piles
of slashdot's garbage!
How you found one post
out of so many boggles
my mind? Slashdot search?
What's neat about this is that it takes waste products that would end up in a land fill and converts them to a usable form again... with a surplus over the amount of energy needed to do so. Not much, certainly not enough to supplant alternative fuel sources... but enough to drive the conversion process and power a few other machines nearby.
This will be great for factories all around and farms and other types of businesses that end up with a lot of waste material. Maybe we can make those 75% self-sustaining... which means they won't be depleting more raw materials as quickly. This is a good thing.
Even if the only use is for our Municipal trash companies to run their fleet of vehicles off of the trash they collect... we've won a huge gain. Maybe trucking companies could do the same... converting their used tires to fuel every month (they go through a lot of tires).
This is equivalent to farms using their biomass to convert to biodiesel or ethanol for use in their farm equipment. It's not a commercial enterprise but it reduces waste and improves their efficiency which means they can pass the savings on to the rest of us (or stop needing subsidies from tax dollars).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
They came from the same root but not really. "Gigans", the Greek(imported into Latin) word that it all comes from refers to a specific stock of really big gods. It was pronounced "gig-ans" by the Greeks and Romans. But then came Vulgar Latin and the decline of the Latin lagnguage coinciding with the fall of the Roman Empire, which pronounced the "c" and "g" weirdly when it's before i or e. When the SI used "gigans" as a prefix they reverted to the correct Greek pronunciation rather than the corrupted Romance pronunciation, because they're not idiots.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Not ideal, to be sure. And it IS what their first customer appears to be doing. Still, this is better than burying the plastic in a landfill and pumping more oil out of the ground to be burned. I guess baby steps are better than no steps at all.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.