How to: Convert Plastic Back into Oil

It’s already been invented.

http://www.gizmag.com/envion-plastic-waste-to-oil-generator/12902/

I’ll tell you why it hasn’t been done before: too many people getting rich from crude oil. It is one of many inventions/technologies suppressed by big industries with too much to lose. Not that I’m cynical.

@Jon – Thanks, nice find. I’m surprised there are not more of them.

@singingloonie – Hmmmm…I’m doubtful that it was “suppressed” since entrepreneurs would try and create a business converting the plastic back into oil. Perhaps it’s more lucrative to recycle the plastic? I don’t see how recycling could possibly be more lucrative than creating oil though.

But is there a net energy gain?

It’s been done plenty of times, I’ve seen examples of the process for many, many years now.

I suppose they could suppress by not accepting the converted oil to refine; however, if you converted, refined, and sold your own Gas it would remove the big guy factor.

Already been done before. Some of the problems are the production of undesirable carbon chains and the input energy.

Example:

http://www.polymerenergy.com/

why isn`t it in mass production?

Simple: it`s cheaper to extract petroleum from crude oil, and uses less energy that way. By converting plastic to fuel, it also means there is less plastic left to recycle, meaning more oil is taken out of the ground to produce more plastics.

There’s nothing to be cynical about. “Too many people getting rich from oil.” What a loon-bag thing to say! Obviously it’s not done, because in order to do it it requires tons of energy. Energy to make the bag, then to turn the bag back into some type of readily consumable energy. That energy has to come from somewhere and entropy quickly becomes the deciding factor on economic viability.

In nature all of this energy nature provides by crushing and cooking organic matter under thousands of feet of earth over centuries. That is why it’s not “sustainable” because we eat up oil faster than it can be naturally processed and replaced by earth.

That’s why the ecologically respectful recycle. It’s much easier, and more financially sound to convert plastic back into re-usable plastic than it is to waste tons of energy converting it into something you end up burning.

The fact is, you can convert ANYTHING with carbon in it to oil.
http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Anything-Into-Oil1may03.htm

BUT, it still requires energy to do so, which means the tech is only a stop-gap. It will allow us to make petroleum based products when oil is too expensive to drill (ahheehm, everything that has plastic in it), but it is silly to use it for gasoline or diesel. Why not just use the energy source you’re using to make the oil in the first place and use less energy?

That’s why. Science and business. It simply is a waste of money, time, and perfectly good plastic.

I like how this guy’s mission is to show impoverished countries how to take something they have a lot of, trash, and make something they may need, but can’t necessarily obtain, oil. Now to make this work using sustainable kinetic energy!

It might more energy to convert the plastic to oil than to drill oil, but there are MANY other factors to consider… such as transport. One of the problems with “green” energy is storage of surplus energy. Either you have too much during peak hours, or you don’t have enough during lulls. An easy (and cheaper) solution to expensive storage, is to have small “manufacturing” occur during peak hours. This could be on a community scale or just in your own home. Roast and brew coffee, dry cloths, heavy computation, make toilet paper, convert plastics to oil, refine bio-diesel… etc etc etc. Coarse then the problem isn’t energy storage, its space for all your specialized small manufacturing equipment.

Anything that threatens, however remotely, the interests of ‘big oil’ will never see the light of day. I understand that when the big recession hit the oil companions had to lay off several dozen Senators and Congressmen go!!!!

Analogy:

Saw you need to build a model of the eiffel tower for a school project, and you don’t have any popsicle sticks, but you do have a whole lot of AA batteries, so you build it out of batteries. (go with it…)

So you get a B+ and you are done with your model, and you plan to throw it in the garbage.

But then you meet 2 crazy scientists:

The first scientist says “What are you doing? you can use all those batteries to make a different model NEXT year!”. (He’s right, you could ‘recycle’ the parts and reuse them next year, and this IS a good way of reducing your dependancy on batteries, should you ever run out)

The second scientist says “Even better, those are actually BATTERIES, take em back apart, and you can use them as an energy source!” (Also true, and again, reducing your dependency on batteries)

Either way, the point is that what you have is still useful, and the only bad choice is actually throwing them in the garbage.

HOWEVER, if you decide to turn them ‘back’ into batteries and use them to power a killer robot, then sure, you are making the fullest use of your resources, but maybe the world would be better off if fewer people were putting batteries into killer robots

(In case you missed the point at the end there, think ‘final cost’ not ‘efficiency’)

Although it may cost more to turn it back into oil, I think that is still better than the millions of tonnes that ends up as garbage never to be recycled. People know that oil is valuable, and with this machine it is actually tangible. You get instant results. I would like to have one for my home… where can I buy one?

The benefit here is not in terms of Net Energy Gain or not. The benefit here is to be reckoned in terms of Waste Management. Staggering amount of plastic are disposed as waste and conversion of that plastic to something which is usable is better than burying them in landfills or just burning them.

Jon, if you look closely, you might notice this model is a little smaller. Easy enough to do in a lab- the Japanese model is being used in the field.

Everyone’s posting about how it’s already been invented, and how it’s not economical. But! If you notice in the video how small it is, and how he says it can fit on a plane.

Low socio-economic countries are using them from his promotion, that’s fantastic. How much do these things cost? Could he mass produce them for people in homes? That’s where I think the market is. You have it in your home like your dishwasher, recycle your plastics, fuel your whatever. What with the green trends, they’d be popular. As for the energy cycle, get solar panels. I like to think solar/wind evergy cheats the first law of energy a bit. Hehe.

Forgive me for being dramatic, but everybody seems to be missing the point here. Plastic is not a unitary, singular device. There are many kinds of plastics, and they are derived from many different processes. These processes are destructive (in the sense that the chemicals molecules reform and loose constituent atoms as waste) and as such mean that every micro-unit of plastic in existence (recyclable or otherwise) has only a finite “usable” life span as a plastic. Most plastics can only be reformed and reused a handful of times before they begin to loose cohesion and breakdown into waste material in the recycling process.

In other words, even recycled plastic ends up polluting the earth with burned off carbon waste. There is simply no way to effectively dispose of plastic safely once it has been manufactured.

Additionally, because plastics that are made to be recycled have a higher wholesale cost than non-recyclable plastic (at least in terms of packaging), more and more product and produce manufacturers are opting for the cheaper, non-recyclable alternative. Have a look around next time you’re in the supermarket and see for your self, there is less and less recyclable packaging now that the economy is under threat.

The time we are living through at the moment has been called the Anthropocene (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13335683) because the impact of our industrial waste on the planet will be so significant it will be recorded in the geologic record as its own epoch. Our far future descendants will be able to identify our time on this planet precisely thanks to a visible layers of radioactive plastic, PCPs and carbon deposits. Already we are seeing geologic changes; plastic granules the size of sand make up an easily detectable proportion of every stretch of beach on the planet. Given the total prevalence of the stuff, it does make sense to put it to some efficient energy use while we are facing the imminent shortage of the raw materials. And rather than releasing it into the environment in a form that not only can’t be bio-degraded or diluted for many hundreds of years, but becomes more toxic and dangerous as it breaks down into smaller pieces, we could be supplementing an existing energy source, thereby reducing the overall atmospheric emissions from the two uses for petroleum to just one.

If we don’t make use of the tech now, you can guarantee distant future generations will, and they will be mining for the Anthropocene vein of rich chemicals to do it.

Sorry folks but this is economical and you get far more product than energy input required.

Facts are few use electric to power the system but the not easily sold, stored gases, about 10% of the input.

The cool thing is people, obviously not many who posted on this article, could build and make their own. So much dismissal without a lick of knowledge to back it up.

While it might not be perfect, it’s a lot more eff, cost effective than 90% of other ones.

No I don’t do this but might as the ROI and EROI are excellent with selected plastic grades.