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Topic Tag: remote communities

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Hey Precious Plastic People, with our project IN MOCEAN, we want to establish sustainable solutions for plastic trash collecting / recycling for remote coastal areas with little to no infrastructure. For those areas, where you have the possibility to sell things to e.g. tourists, the existing Precious Plastic machines are great, but we were also wondering what could be done in areas where there is no market to sell recycled plastic items. As some of you might know, plastic can be recycled back into fuel with a process called pyrolysis. Very basically speaking, you can produce diesel and gasoline along with some side products like charcoal and parrafin and some gases (sorry, not a chemist, please provide more detail if you are ;)). The advantage of this type of recycling: after the fuel is used, the plastic is gone...Of course, there are emissions when the fuel is being used, but you would have those at some point in the plastic's life circle no matter what...(well, unless you just let it sit and break down to micro plastic which is not really a great alternative, either). And the fuel would have been used no matter what, but instead of using fuel from "fresh" natural recources, you recylce it from plastic trash that already exists. Another advantage: even in the most remote places in this world, people use fuel for e.g. generators, fishing boat engines and such, so there is a demand for the product that's being produced. To cut a long story short: I am researching at the moment about this topic and want to do some testing and try to build a pyrolysis machine that is: a) cheap (around 500-800$) b) easy to build with no special tools / know how c) small enough to be transported by a sailboat There are already some working examples out there, so it should be possible to build one. I can imagine that making fuel from plastic could be a more controversial topic than making baskets and beams...but I thought I would throw it out here in case somebody is interested in the topic or has some insight to share. Also, I am wondering about legal issues...since fuel is taxed in most countries and I doubt that you will just be allowed to brew your own... Another topic for the research list ;). Let me know if you would be interested in the project, then I would share whatever I find out during this project here. Cheers, Nike
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