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.""

Comments

Hooray!

[Spudtrooper]

Finally, a use for all those AOL CDs!

Re:Hooray!

[Spy der Mann]

Finally, a use for all those AOL CDs!

... and the term "CD burning" acquires a completely new meaning.

Re:Hooray!

[mynickwastaken]

It is not working. I put a AOL CD in my microwave owen and it turned directly into fire.

Re:Hooray!

[phagstrom]

Using an AOL CD was your first mistake. They are not made of plastic, the are forged of pure evil.

Re:Hooray!

[razorh]

Using an AOL CD was your first mistake. They are not made of plastic, the are forged of pure evil.
even better! do you know how many mpg you can get on PURE EVIL?!?

Re:Hooray!

[SEWilco]

even better! do you know how many mpg you can get on PURE EVIL?!?

Only 5 MPG. Running over old people and firing the cannon really slows you down.

Re:Hooray!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Using an AOL CD was your first mistake. They are not made of plastic, the are forged of pure evil."

Boy is that true. I microwaved an AOL CD, it turned into pure evil, and a bunch of little dudes came in and took me on a wacky adventure!

I've been saying for years

[afidel]

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.

Re:I've been saying for years

[Colin Smith]

That sounds to me like a recipe for high inflation. After all, the only thing that causes inflation, is inflation: things get more expensive so people demand a pay rise, and then having to pay workers more makes things get more expensive.

Actually not. Money, is a commodity.

It acts just like any other commodity. If there's too much coffee, the value decreases. Money works in exactly the same way. Inflation can only occur if there's too much money in the economy, the value of the individual dollar/pound/euro decreases and everything else appears to increase in cost. All that's happening is that the currency is devaluing, which you then see on the currency markets as well.

The dirty little (non) secret of our current monetary system is two fold. First, "the national debt" and second "fractional reserve banking".

The first point is that the government and central bankers create money from nothing and create a national IOU to balance it. The government borrows money from the bankers and they write down this debt and demand interest on it. The money has been borrowed into existence. This money is then paid to government employees, contractors, suppliers etc where it enters the economy.

The second stage of this is the fractional reserve banking system. This is perhaps the biggest scam ever created. The fractional reserve banking system allows commercial banks to loan out to people more money than they have in reserve. Hence "fractional reserve" Typically they can loan out up to 20 times more than they have in deposits. That is they only have to have on hand about 5% on average of what they are allowed to loan out.

So this money comes from the government national debt, into the economy, lands in the banks deposit accounts and is then multiplied about 19 times as loans. 95% + 95% of that 95% and so on till it reaches 0. It's a recipe for creating both massive debt and massive inflation.

Which the central banks and government attempt to control using the base interest rates. Essentially what it does is divide society into the creditors and the debtors. Every dollar that someone owns is one dollar's worth of debt, owed by someone else. There are other implications also with constantly and repeatedly paying 5% interest on money.

1. The bankers will ultimately be the sole and inevitable owners of everything. They set the rules of the game years ago.

2. Everyone has to work an extra 5% harder each year for their cash, because they have to try to pay this debt. This has implications for everyone and everything. All businesses, taxpayers must constantly expand their efforts by that 5% every year to service this interest. Think about it. This is an exponential increase. 100%, 105%, 110¼%, 115¾%, 121½% and we have to try to keep up. It explains why capitalism has become so rapacious. The debts have to be serviced and to even pretend to do so requires an exponential increase in the economy.

3. The debt can never actually be paid. There isn't enough money in existence to pay of the debt, ever. Because of the interest on the initial creation of the money. You borrow $100 into existence but owe $105 at the end of the year, the extra $5 doesn't actually exist, it was never created, so you borrow some more. And so we divide into the people who have managed to pay the debt and people who are saddled with mounting levels which are literally impossible to pay.

It didn't used to be this way. A trade used to mean that two people exchanged something of value. A chicken for a duck. Both of them benefitted. Even when money came along, it still meant that both parties benefitted, they were exchanging items they valued more, a chicken for a dollar, it wasn't required for someone somewhere to lose out. That all changed during the last century. Our money became debt based. Every dollar/pound/euro/yen/yuan required a debt, paying interest to the bankers, interest on money they created from nothing.

It can actually be narr

Interestingly

[GammaKitsune]

I've gotten my microwave at home to break my food back down into component carbons. Or at least something pretty similar to coal.

Re:but...

[Iron Sun]

The article doesn't give exact figures, but it does say:

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.

That addresses the energy issue, but still leaves open the question of how much it costs to maintain the equipment. You'd have to think they've got some sort of business model worked out if they've progressed to the point of selling to customers.

I knew it!

[weinrich]

"Take a piece of copper wiring," says Meddick. "It is encased in plastic - a kind of hydrocarbon material. [stick it in our microwave] and we release all the hydrocarbons, which strips the casing off the wire." I knew the microwave manufacturer's were lying to us all these years! They kept telling us not to put metal in our microwaves, and now I know why: they just wanted to keep this money-making technology to themselves. You Bastards!

Irony

[vertigoCiel]

Powering the next generation with the accumulated shit of the previous one. Brilliant.

Already done in a bioreactor

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> plastic... broken down into... combustible gas

Try feeding your dog a (small) Lego. It has the same effect. For almost a week.

Re:but...

[ricree]

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.

They claim that it is capable of pulling out enough fuel to have a surplus, but even if it isn't it could still be viable as a means to recycle plastics. I don't know how economically viable that would be now, but the raw materials for plastic are likely to rise, while the price of these machines will likely fall. Even if it is not viable now, who is to say it will never be. All in all, it sounds plausible.

Need an enforcement structure, though.

[Kadin2048]

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.

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 ... 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.'

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.

Please use base 10, not base 0.454

[jsiren]

TFA quotes somewhat odd numbers:

(...) running 9.1 kilograms of ground-up tyres through the Hawk-10 produces 4.54 litres of diesel oil, 1.42 cubic metres of combustible gas, 1 kg of steel and 3.40 kg of carbon black (...)

WTF? Why 9.1 kg? Is this a multiple of a non-metric unit converted to metric? Or the weight of a standard car's tires? The weight of one tire? Should I know this?

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...?

Re:In any case...

[Ant P.]

You can do more with oil than just burn it, such as turning it into plastic.