Slashdot Mirror
JBI's Plastic To Oil Gets Operating Permit
Whammy666 writes "JBI, Inc. announced that it has entered into a formal Consent Order with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Region 9, which will allow the Company to immediately run its Plastic2Oil (P2O) process commercially and begin construction of an additional processor at its Niagara Falls, New York P2O facility. JBI has developed a process that takes waste plastic destined for landfills and converts it into diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas with very little residue. The process is said to be very efficient thanks to a special catalyst developed by JBI and an attention to process optimization. That plastic water bottle you tossed in the trash could soon be fueling your car instead of sitting in a landfill for 1000 years."
... after studying the chemical composition of oil: "This stuff is way too valuable to simply burn it".
right...
If it ends up in a landfill right now, you're doing something wrong. Some countries (Scandinavia) have recycling quotas >90% already.
Fleur de Sel
power used for one kilogram conversion is a minuscule 1kilowatt.
Power is meaningless here. Energy is what shall be considered. And the physical unit for energy is the Joule (J), or possibly the kilowatt-hour (kWh).
Usually I don't try to explain that anymore, but here it's different, it's Slashdot...
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
I think you would have to get paid in order to take the plastic - putting plastic in a landfill is not free. So 1 tonne of plastic costs $x to store in a landfill - residue costs $y to store in a landfill - so $x-$y would contribute to your margin.
Your view on the world is criminally simplistic. The great pacific garbage patch is several thousands of miles away from the west coast of the US. Furthermore this stuff is highly fragmented into tiny pieces. Processing this would be really painful. Even if youd set up your plant right there floating in the ocean transportation would hardly justify the cost of harvesting. I really wish you would have a point but I dont see this happening for a long time. If you compare this to the gulf of mexcio where you can easily drill for oil in your backyard there is no way this would work. Its sad put this probably isnt a solution. The big benefit for this technology could be that we just stop dumping our trash into the ocean in the first place. But for whats there already we might have to come up with something else. Like somebody said in this thread: Just dont buy bottled water and try to avoid plastics if you can find a reasonable alternative. Its actually pretty hard, I have been trying to do this for the last year and often theres just no option: e.g. keyboards, toothbrushes, tupperware and so on...
Yes you are. The 1/4 litre is refined oil products not raw crude oil. During refining many components in crude are separated and depending on the economics of the refinery various products are made, be it diesel, kerosene, jet, bitumen, extracted impurities such as sulphur, mercaptain, and if there's a chemical plant nearby often propylene and other feedstocks to create plastics through polymerisation. If there's no chemical plant around hydrcarbons like propylene are either minimised or converted to more profitable products.
:)
So while 1/4 litre of refined product is needed to make a bottle, much more crude is needed, however that crude contains other quite valuable products that also generate money, so there never can be a generalised direct link between the price of oil and the price of a finished product as it heavily depends on the economics of the individual refinery.
I work at a refinery which is currently burning propylene and butylene through the flare because the unit which uses that feed is down, and it's cheaper to burn it than to try and sell it to a chemical plant. That doesn't directly affect the price of bottles in the local shops either
The output is mostly diesel, it also creates propane, methane, and a few other things, that are captured for either further processing, or use in its current state. Apparently JBI has been running a demo unit for a while under a demo permit, and has tankers full of fuel ready for further use. Posting Anonymously, because, well, because its safer that way...
You make an invalid assumption that oil==bad.
In modern SULEV cars the air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air going in, due to the catalytic converter neutralizing lung-damaging poisons like NOx and CO as the air passes from intake to exhaust. Ditto oil-burning electric plants. I consider that better than letting the solidified oil (plastic) lay in the ground or float in the ocean for a thousand years until bacteria breaks it down.
Converting our waste to oil will also allow us leave a few million tons of crude in the mantle rather than dig it up. The ideal would be to reach a point where we don't need to dig-up any oil, and can just run our society on the accumulated plastics of the last ~100 years, plus solar power.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall