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.
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
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