Plastic Recycling Technology
Everything you need to know about plastic recycling. The truth about plastic recycling is to be revealed. Plastic is everywhere, it’s in everything your phone, this camera, the landfills, the mountains, the forest, the beach, the ocean, it’s everywhere.
Everything is a carbon and hydrogen chain. You spend your time moving electrons around, changing bonds, and hating life. Orgo is extremely important because all life contains organic molecule carbon. I mean, molecularly: humans, plants, dogs, cats, pizza pretty much everything contains carbon.
Plastic polyethylene is a long chain of carbons and hydrogens with some strong double bonds between chunks. Petroleum? It’s also just a chain of carbons with some hydrogens around it! Both of these things are polluters, and both come from hydrocarbons of natural gas and crude oil.
Plastic for Recycling
It might seem like alchemy, but what if there was a way to take all the crappy plastic, rearrange the atoms and turn it into a fossil fuel? Guess what, fam. Now there is. This paper is blank, we just wanted to do something dramatic.
Anyway, a 2016 paper in Science Advances announced they were able to turn polyethylene, into energy, potentially solving two polluting problems with one variable.
In their study, the researchers took plastic from bottles, food packaging, and shopping bags (recycling plastic number 2 or 6) and mixed it with a catalyst breaking the long chains of hydrocarbon plastic into an alkane.
Alkanes are a class of hydrocarbon. We often burn alkanes for energy, like methane, propane, or butane. By their chemical calculation, they got 56-percent of the plastic to degrade into alkane oil products namely DIESEL.
These scientists turned plastic shopping bags into diesel, with a wax byproduct. That waxy byproduct can be sold and used for resins and coatings, and the catalyst is reusable after the chemical reaction is completed.
Plastic Recycling Process
To be honest, this does feel like alchemy. But it’s needed. There are a lot of other plastics out there that we need to deal with. The polyethylenes in this process, remember, are only 2s or 6s, but dozens of other plastics accumulate in landfills and oceans.
According to the American Chemical Council, if we can figure out the trash-to-energy pipeline, it could create 9 billion dollars in economic output and create tens of thousands of new jobs.
And they’re not the only ones advocating for this; in Australia and the United Kingdom, various startups are converting polystyrene (number six), as well as twos, fives, and sevens to biofuels! Global plastic production is ridiculous.
In 2013, according to Worldwatch, 299 million tons of plastics were created. 10 to 20 million tons of that ended up in the ocean, with millions of tons ending up in landfills. In Europe, they found 26 percent of the plastics consumed were recycled.
So, in the U.S, only 9 percent. Take polyethylene, for example; as a product, it comprises 60 percent of all the plastic trash in landfills!
Once there, it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but never truly disappears.
Not to mention, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, when you pay for fuel, you’re only paying for a little bit of the cost.
New Process
Both the fossil fuels themselves, and also the side effects of the mining and extraction, transportation, and burning of those fuels harm the planet and things living on it. This new process is still creating diesel, but it’s not drilling, extracting, refining and transporting, new crude oils.
If we could break this fossil fuel chain by circling some of that back on itself, that would be HUGE. Could this solve our energy problems?
Not yet. Though the researchers call this “unprecedented,” the ability to change post-consumer plastics into diesel and waxes isn’t as efficient as just getting new diesel.
Currently, the rate of plastic to catalyst is 30 to 1, but according to Phys-Org, the researchers’ goal is 10,000 to 1. But while this is the first step, there might come a day when we look to landfills for fuel.