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Plastic waste into FUEL.
- This topic has 14 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 2 years ago by
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In the state of Jalisco , a mexican engineer runs a small center where he process plastics into fuel . He has a youtube channel where you can found 6 videos with content of how this process is develop. Unfortunately is in spanish but i offer my time and skills to help you understand in order to make furter conversations around this topic.
I share the link below.
Greetings!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkDfHdlQ3Z6zNBk4tfnpfrA/videos
It looks to be a simple system. Yet Buring fuel to make fuel to burn, is not helping to keep the CO2 down. it is a solution, yet maybe not burn and create other products 🙂
I´m agree , but I also think that this kind of iniciatives add more value to the plastic market and of course to the recycling too. So its not all good news but great marketing. Don´t you think? We need more people collecting plastics.
Greetings from India.
We are working on a project to set up a similar workshop. We are just starting to buildup community engagement and building the plant and machinery.
In our process, we do not “Burn” the plastics, but “melt” PP at a high temperature, in the absence of oxygen.
It feels really good to connect. 🙂
Hello Soumya! That’s great news! I hope we can have a factory like that in Mexico soon. In my country are not currently investing on recycling only in oil refinery. What’s your current strategy to build community? I’m interested in read your experiences , it is awesome to know more people taking the right steps.
Greetings! 🙂
@soumyaadhikary , I think there is a lot of interest in what to do with plastics that are hard to recycle (PET, etc.) on the small scale. Do you have an overview of your design or the expected size? If you have an estimate of how much energy it will take to produce a kilo of fuel, that would be a good comparison to the total energy needed to produce fossil based fuel.
The world will be using liquid fuel for a while, might as well get rid of some plastic in the process.
Sounds like an exciting project.
I agree, but I also believe that this type of initiative adds value to the plastics market as well as to recycling, of course. So it’s not all good news but a great marketing experience. You don’t think so? We need more plastics gatherers.
In the podcast that @frogfall posted on 2/2/20 ( http://onearmy.world/community/forums/topic/plastics-related-stories-in-the-media/page/2/ ) there is a brief mention of the villagers burning plastic as cooking fuel instead of wood. Providing them with a liquid petroleum fuel instead, has to be well worth the effort.
I think that is an excellent point @s2019 – there are lots of places where poor people will just burn whatever combusts, locally, in order to cook. They might have no real option of incinerating plastics at a high enough temperature to destroy toxic byproducts – so an option to obtain a relatively clean-burning liquid fuel, for cooking, would be of great benefit.
Unfortunately, if it was run as a normal business – then the people would probably still be unable to afford the resulting fuel. They would resort to burning plastic again, which they could collect for free.
However, if a village-scale pyrolysis plant was run as a cooperative – allowing people to “earn” liquid fuel in return for collecting waste plastic – then that might be a viable operation.
As for the issue of “burning fuel to make fuel”, as mentioned by @craigglewis – one way to reduce the resulting atmospheric carbon would be to power the pyrolysis by using concentrated solar thermal energy. It could be another application for the GoSol / Lytefire system.
A simple batch pyrolyser could be filled with waste plastic in the morning, and a day of concentrated sunshine would produce a single batch of liquid fuel.
Attachments:
If there are people now making new discovers like ( Linda Wang for Purdue University) where their proccesses lead to convert plastic into fuel more cleaner than in the past ( but still gasoline) or companies making new types of bio-plastics ( for still producing plastics bottles difficult to recycle). We will observe the competition or battle where recycling waste into new objects vs- re-using plastic for any form of energy or even for other type of plastics, will take the market faster than we expect. Of course the matter of the air pollution/ zero carbon cities aim of the countries will not be approched. We need to make grow this market faster with alliances.
Of course my source:
On the brink of a recycling revolution ? by John Carey.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26479025
Hi malevil
There is a better source for that article at:
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/4/612
From there it is possible to download a full resolution PDF, with no need to register.
Solar concentrators are always interesting and there are many designs. It would be nice if they posted some engineering and performance data for the lytefire system.
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