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
I've been watching GRC for a while now... Last I heard their prototype microwave was functional, and they were taking orders. The prototype uses a vacuum chamber: fill the chamber with used tires, apply vacuum, turn on the microwave, and *poof*, out comes the hydrocarbons.
Every 20lb tire yields a gallon of diesel fuel, ~50 cubic feet of "propane" (butane and... something else), recyclable steel, and carbon black. Haven't seen anything recently, just a new patent for using microwaves to desalinate seawater...
This thing looks useful too - there's a ton of plastic warehoused in the world's garbage dumps, and it won't be long until they start getting mined.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
From their website, it shows that 1 kilogram of plastic converts roughly to one litre of oil.
So the big question in my book is, how much does 1 kilogram of scrap plastic cost, and how much power is needed to do that conversion.
If we say that one litre of oil is worth ~$1, 1 tonne of plastic is ~$200, and power used for one kilogram conversion is a minuscule 1kilowatt.
You have ~$0.30 in direct costs, but after factoring in the plant, machinery, tankers, etc etc etc, the margins on this process must be hair thin.
OH, thats right, lets not forget the government subsidies!
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.
No yet, I think. The "garbage patch" is a huge area of the ocean which consists of a mixture of plastic particles and sea water. Getting the plastic out of that corrosive sea water, in an inaccessible location - that's going to be a lot more expensive than recycling plastic which would otherwise be transported to a landfill. You'd probably start mining closed landfills first before you'd consider the garbage patch.
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
Ah, but have you talked to the people who are actually doing your "recycling"? Most of the towns around here contract with a firm in New Hampshire. That firm sells the plastic to the highest bidder, which is as it should be. Trouble is, there are few bidders for it.
Currently, as I understand it, most of the recyclables are going into the previously empty shipping containers making the return trip to China after bringing over all the stuff we import from there. Once it's in China, it can be recycled in methods free of US environmental laws, and the bulk of the plastic is simply burned for fuel because it can be done over there in a land without environmental law.
We're not actually "recycling" a lot of what we recycle. We're saving it from going into a landfill, and we're not polluting air in our close vicinity, so we're calling it good.
I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not quite as good as you might think.
I do it because the recycling company breaks even on it, so it doesn't cost me money like bags of actual garbage do.
Projects like this are cool and uncool at the same time, from an environmental perspective. They are cool because we've found a use for old plastic. They are uncool because they lengthen the time before we find more environmentally-conscious alternatives to both burning shit in our automobiles for propulsion AND encourage the use of disposable plastic bottles under a commonly-held myth that recycling them makes it all better.
Remember the chant of the treehugger. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". We're putting waaaaayyyy too much emphasis on the last of those, when "recycle" should be the absolute last resort because it's horribly inefficient and only marginally effective at best. Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I think that is the main point: You take a barrel of oil and you get to use it twice. And while the whole world is fretting about CO2, the idea of reducing the footprint of plastic trash from 100% to 1% is nothing to sneeze at. Add the other ongoing research to create alcohol out of cellulose (another major portion of trash), and all of a sudden you are virtually "mining" trash by reusing the plastics and paper, making recovering of the aluminum and steel easier. This also decreases water pollution in the long run.
What matters is that using plastics to create oil isn't going to INCREASE CO2, as those cars would be burning something or another to run regardless of source. What also matters is that this would DECREASE the need for agriculture to be specific for fuels, which pushes food prices up and increases the amount of fertilizer (and other pollutants) in the system. It isn't a silver bullet that fixes pollution, but it can be part of a better overall energy policy.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!