

Machine Converts Plastic Back into Oil - ygd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Lg_kvLaAM

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makmanalp
The nice things about this are:

a) From what I know, re-melting down plastic only works so many times till you
hit a quality barrier, this can make use of the plastic that _that_ process
can't use.

b) This can make use of trash that otherwise would not have been recycled. It
seems pretty agnostic about what plastics it accepts which is good, but on the
other hand it also makes me wonder about byproducts in the oil and if or how
they are extracted / disposed of.

Of course, at this point the price of waste plastic is cheap but it seems like
if this caught on, then the oil suppliers would raise their prices for the raw
plastic manufacturers, who would then have to raise prices for bottles and
such, which in turn would probably lead to bottled drinks costing more. Which
might even incentivize people to buy less of things with plastic packaging!

This price increase doesn't really apply much for the ton of existing plastic
waste that we already have though, which can be obtained cheap, converted back
to oil, then sold. All in all, this sounds great!

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astine
It looks like it distils the oil which would mean that it is purified. It also
would mean that the machine needs to cleaned regularly.

~~~
makmanalp
Distillation isn't magic. It works because different materials have different
boiling points. When it's salt and water it's really easy since the boiling
points are totally different but when it's something like this we're talking
about hundreds to thousands of possible compounds all in the same mixture
(also, there might be different compounds each time because of the different
materials), melted up together. I doubt it's purified.

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s2r2
Where's the catch? Energy efficiency? Patents?

Someone please fill me in why this is not-as-great-as-it-seems (or is it?)

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auxbuss
Possibly the cost of energy to heat the plastic. But at some point that cost
is mitigated by the environmental benefit. Many could argue that that point
happened some time ago.

The cynic might point to destabilising the oil cartels and the general world
economy underpinned by oil.

Funny you bring up patents. It's seems we already live in world fearful of the
darn things.

Still, great video, and kudos to the folk who developed it. I really like the
fact that the thing is so small and easily portable; killer feature.

~~~
s2r2
I wonder if it being small is a problem. Converting some plastic to some oil
is pretty nice, but does it scale? I have no idea

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senki
From the description of the video: "The Japanese company Blest has developed
_one of the smallest_ and safest oil-to-plastic conversion machines out _on
the market today_."

The first hit on Google for "Plastic to Oil" is
<http://www.polymerenergy.com/>

They say: "System capacity can range from 200 tons to 400 tons of plastic
wastes processed per month. Overall plant capacity can be easily scaled up by
adding additional modules."

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geedee77
The real gain that I could see from this is that we could have a device like
this in every home, similar to a waste disposal unit. Then, if the refinary
tech is small and safe enough, we could create our own fuels (for vehicles or
generators as the video suggested). That way we'd cut down dramatically on the
CO2 footprint of fuelling these devices.

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philwelch
Processing plastic into oil just to burn oil as fuel is fundamentally still
wasteful, because of all the great things you can do with oil (produce more
plastics, for instance) you're still _burning it for fuel_. The presence of
this technology might seem to turn useless plastic waste into useful fuel, but
on the contrary--if you can turn plastic back into oil, and then back into
plastic over and over again, the long term value of oil for making plastics is
even greater, and so is the potential loss of burning this reusable,
recyclable resource as fuel.

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chopsueyar
I got a kick out of this.

Being able to turn oil to plastic and back, that is true recycling...instead
of converting plastic bottles into Old Navy fleeces (decycling).

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thefool
I wonder how much energy is need to create the oil vs. how much energy is then
contained in the oil.

I'd assume that the net energy gain is positive, but it would be interesting
if they said how positive.

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senki
It's efficiency is ~85%, according to the Wikipedia.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization>

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mr_twj
Pretty sure this is Blest company's site:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.blest.co.jp/&ei=xzBxTNOFG4e2sAOq9an8DA&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dblest.co.jp%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den)

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mml
Throw as much as you can into our magnificently superabundant landfills today.
Future generations will thank you for it. The current recycling craze with
today's tech is wasteful and harmful to the environment.

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lotusleaf1987
Doesn't Envion do something like this?
<http://www.envion.com/evp_envionoilgenerator.html>

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troymc
It seems Environ is making a large-scale system whereas the system in the
video is small-scale. As a small-scale system, it's a business opportunity for
an individual in a developing country with lots of plastic waste - they could
apply for a loan from Kiva to get started.

