Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil | Hacker News Reader

Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

blest.co.jp

239 pointshochmartinez275 comments

Why do people keep falling for this? This same fraud used to pop up only every 10 years. Now it's 5 or less.

I'm a PhD chemist. Please consider this: While plastics and oil are both hydrocarbons they have this important difference. Liquid hydrocarbons have short carbon chains and lots of hydrogen. Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen.

That is why, when you heat plastic it decomposes into char -- as in charcoal. It is IMPOSSIBLE to produce oil, even theoretically, without adding a source of hydrogen.

A few centuries ago these same fraudsters would be selling you a way to change Iron into Gold.

Could you potentially do it with steam and the right catalyst?

Interesting, thanks. As someone with little understanding of chemistry, can you clarify why "adding a source of hydrogen" is not possible/practical?

Free elemental hydrogen isn't common. Most are stuck as water, or inside hydrocarbons in the first place (see natural gas), and using those sources basically defeats the purpose.

So therefore, it would take more energy to free that hydrogen from water than the recovered output would give you - which is fine, as oil is a dense storage of energy, and current technology is geared towards using it. However, it makes more sense to directly utilize the electricity that is expended freeing hydrogen in the first place.

There are still usages where it can be useful like planes and ships. And some small portion of cars. Right?

Is it hard to add a source of hydrogen? In the images they have here it looks like there is a vat of water and it explicitly says it produces H2O and CO2 gas waste (though calls the CO2 harmless). That would imply there is a source of hydrogen here. (Not an expert, just legitimately curious so I can better spot snake oil)

At that point, why not just use hydrogen as a fuel? Or better yet, just use batteries.

I can't fuel my car with hydrogen.

And there we have it, the solution we've needed all along - dirigibles.

You could, the technology exists. The reason hydrogen fuel cells never caught on is because the production of hydrogen doesn't make economic and environmental sense. Which gets back to the root of problem with the OP claims.

Hydrogen leaks through metals because it can diffuse through the lattice, and attaching it to carbon stops it from doing that.

Hydrogen is extraordinarily annoying to store and transport. Oil is kind of annoying, but not “heavy cans of pressurized gas that leaks through metal walls anyway and is explosive in a wide range of air concentrations” annoying. Nobody has figured out a workable way to deal with this, though they might at some point.

It’s also not an accident electric cars are so heavy—gasoline or diesel fuel are fantastically energy-dense compared to almost anything else you might want to use, even accounting for the intricate engine you need to haul around to take advantage of them. Not to say that you shouldn’t try and use something else, just that it’s a very real problem.

https://youtu.be/Zmtc22uPLd4

I’m not a chemist/someone else can offer a more detailed explanation (just love the excuse to post that song), but with most of these kinds of things the energy and advanced equipment required to go in a theoretically plausible direction for a minuscule amount of yield is usually absurd. Including turning iron into gold. (I think it might theoretically be possible to do that at this point as well, but if it is possible I’m sure it’d be astronomically energy intensive and wasteful to manipulate matter to that degree)

The way to turn iron to gold is ancient: smelt the iron, make a weapon with it, and use that to steal the gold from someone else.

teleochemistry

Turning iron to gold is not possible as a chemical reaction. They are elements. You need a nuclear reaction.

Ahh! So it is possible, just need a nuclear reaction!

It's quite simple: Gather a sufficient amount of iron (4 million times earth's mass will probably do). Bring it all in one place, it will naturally compact. Wait for the resulting supernova - you do want to keep your distance for this step. Lastly collect gold and other heavy elements.

Yeah. It's even better since you are starting with iron, don't have to wait billions of years for everything to burn first.

Exactly right. And to think there are still simpletons who dig in the ground for gold like neolithic primitives. Of course the doubters don't want us to know about this simple trick for turning iron into gold.

I have a vague memory of someone or some article saying there’s a way to get from lead to gold if you really wanted to with some combination of available nuclear tech, but it’d be completely absurd/ludicrously expensive (I think the context was somebody humoring what would be needed for atomic level assembly/star trek replicator stuff). I assume the same would apply to iron.

Yeah, but even worse. You need to add a lot of nucleons to iron just to get to (impure, radioactive) lead, and then from there to gold.

Iron (26) -> Lead (82) -> Gold (79)

How does that work?

Ha, woops. I was just assuming Gold had higher atomic number. But I don't know, maybe a convenient positron emission decay path.

You smash a proton into it and knock a light atom nucleus off. Works every time about 2% of the time.

For the stuff that doesn't end up as gold you can just keep hitting it with neutrons until it's heavy enough to try again.

You know, before tossing around your "PhD" in Chemistry maybe it'd be good to be sure you know what you're talking about first...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2019.0002...)

https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Amid-controversy-i...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01652...

I don't know if you meant to, but all three of those links are hilarious if you read them. The first one has `moving toward` in the title, which is academic speak for "it doesn't work and we don't know how to make it work". Otherwise it would be arrived at. Very similar to Betteridge's Law of Headlines for academia.

The second link is a news article that is very critical about the motivations, projected success, and sneaky language used by companies to justify pyrolisys. And this is coming from what is ostensibly a pro-chemical news source.

The third article is paywalled and I'm guessing 99% of us can't read it. However, the `Opportunities and Challenges` is again academic talk for "we looked into it and it's really really hard".

https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaap.2020.10480...

I found this link while searching the DOI of the third article. Sci-Hub seems to be a site that lets you access all sorts of scientific papers, because they believe everyone rich or poor should have free access to science. It was created by Alexandra Elbakyan, a modern day Robin Hood.

Or so they say, I'd never endorse you reading the paper without giving more money to the multi-billion dollar private publisher Elsevier.

Thank you for shedding light on this.

I'm not calling you out, but please check these clips and comment.

I dont know anything about this so I appreciate the opportunity to learn.

https://youtu.be/njIYHtFmcSs https://youtu.be/TFuTCpCVSbM https://youtu.be/1STaZYZ-P1w etc

You can steam reform plastic and get hydrogen for that purpose. It will imply that you have to lose a percentage of your plastic input, but if it is just plastic waste then that is not a huge problem.

Was going to ask about that - I mean, hydrocarbon chains, by definition, contain hydrogen, so surely you should be able to use part of the input as hydrogen source (leaving concerns of practicality, efficiency and price aside).

My understanding is that polyethylene, one of the most common plastics, has no double bonds, and the exact same ratio of carbon:hydrogen as shorter carbon chains. Simply breaking the polymer into short chains should literally give you oil. Why not?

Polyethylene is (CH2)n, where n is in the thousands or so, or 2.00 H per C. An octane (e.g., for gasoline) would be C8H18, or 2.25 H per C. Smaller-chain molecules are even higher H/C ratio.

So even polyethylene is short about .25 H per C.

Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen.

Which plastics? The most common ones, polyethylene and polypropylene, which this method is designed to process, are entirely hydrogen and carbon, with no double bonds. I don't dispute that additional hydrogen is necessary to crack the polymers into shorter ones, but your description of plastics does not seem to be completely correct.

> I don't dispute that additional hydrogen is necessary to crack the polymers into shorter ones

polyethelelene -> cycloalkanes doesn't require any additional hydrogen.

>I'm a PhD chemist.

This sort of "chrust me, I have kwalifikashuns" is rather fitting the overall poor quality of your comment.

There are a thousand things wrong with this application. Viability of the process is NOT one of them, as already attested in the literature. Refer for example to

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016523701...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31917892/

The reaction boils down to R'-CH₂-CH₂-R" → R'-CH=CH₂ + H-R". It's practically the reversal of the polymerisation that created the plastic on first place. It's specially obvious by the third paper that I've listed as example, since they're generating butadiene and olefins from polyethylene.

It is by no means on the same level as "selling you a way to change Iron into Gold".

>Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen

General purpose polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene do not usually have double bonds. Specially not in the main chain (that you need to cleave to get smaller molecules). You'll only get double bonds in the main chain if your monomers had a triple bond in its place, as one of the bonds is broken in the polymerisation. Most monomers however start with a double bond and the resulting polymers have single bonds. Here, let me show it to you:

(...) + R'=R" + R'=R" + (...) → (...) + [·R'-R"·] + [·R'-R"·] + (...) → (...)-R'-R"-R'-R"-(...)

This is common knowledge among chemists.

>That is why, when you heat plastic it decomposes into char -- as in charcoal.

Yeah, because the hydrogens magically disappear. The presence of nearby oxidants (specially one that you, QuackOfAllTrades, should stop consuming, for a better humankind) is totally unrelated.

_____________________

For actual criticism of the application:

You'll get nasty junk oil as output. That oil will have ONE purpose: to be burned down. If you're burning down the oil might as well burn the plastic directly.

This could be solved by fractional distillation... yeah good luck doing it at home.

What happens if some clueless individual tries to recycle PAN? Or even PVC, given how nasty organochlorines are. So there is both health and environmental concerns.

What's the catalyst being used? Plenty catalysts are environmentally nasty.

1KWh/kg is a lot of energy, and it will have an environmental footprint.

It is not trying to sell you a magical device that transforms iron into gold. Instead it is trying to sell you a device that converts good iron into crappy iron, and marketing the crappy iron as if it was more useful than it is.

What are you talking about? This works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

The carbon without hydrogen produced CO, and it is burned to produce CO2, and that is used to actually heat the mixture.

"This sounds too cool, let's check HN comments for the disappointment"

Before looking, it will probably be more pollution.

There is a reason that portion of the crude oil was made into plastic, and not sold as oil or fuel to begin with.

My first thought was "what kind of oil?". It matters. The clean burning, energy dense stuff was turned into fuel from the start. The rest of it is barely fit for a cigarette lighter.

But beyond that, not all plastics come from crude oil directly. Many plastics, especially baggies and consumer plastics of the type shown in these photos, come from liquids that are removed from natural gas.

Either way, you're certainly dealing with a liquid hydrocarbon of inferior quality. And at the huge energy cost of having refined it twice. I'd be surprised if this provided any net-positive energy. And it's certainly a dirty burning fuel with low BTU per volume.

Why not just burn the plastic directly at this point?

there was an infuriating segment on the local news last night that single-use/disposable coffee cups (e.g. keurig) are somehow "greener" because they supposedly use water/energy more efficiently than "traditional" ways of making coffee. of course, zero mention of where these things end up after their 15 seconds of fame.

https://wgnradio.com/the-business-of-food-with-steve-alexand...

it's like CO2 is the only impact to the environment that matters. you can always find greener ways to source the energy, but you're not going to find a lot of ways to reduce plastic trash.

Omg infuriating. Telling me my French press wastes hot water is absurd.

If you wanted to burn plastic for energy, you can already do it at a electrical generation plant.

You have to put more energy in to get oil out.

Um. And climate change.

Burning plastic however, has high temperature requirements to avoid giving off toxic fumes in the smoke, which I think you would reduce by doing a conversion to oil first.

Some of it doesn’t even burn: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-india-plastic-recycl...

Waste-to-energy plants are designed to reach those high temperatures, amongst other measures, to minimise and prevent toxic emissions.

They still produce a lot of CO2, though: plastic is still a fossil fuel. From a climate perspective, we’d be better to bury the stuff in the ground than to burn it. And ideally, we’d just produce a lot less plastic in the first place!

Are you suggesting to bury it in the ground so it can leach into groundwater and soil rather than even trying to capture and reuse the CO2? Are you serious or are you joking?

Digging a hole and lining it with clay and polymer, filling it with household waste, and then covering it with a polymer liner is significantly cheaper than what you are describing.

It's not great, there's no great solution, the problem is hard on multiple levels. If a solution made sense, people would already be doing it.

The solution is to not generate waste we cannot dispose of

I think this is the correct approach. No need to recycle what we do not generate. My only question is, how much legacy plastic would remain in the supply chain and what do we do with it?

> From a climate perspective, we’d be better to bury the stuff in the ground than to burn it.

Actually from a climate perspective we'd be better off burning the plastic, and reducing how much fresh oil we pump.

I'd rather "bury" if you will, the oil, instead of the plastic.

At the point where the plastic is already produced it's the exact opposite. It makes more sense to burn it and reduce our fossil fuel consumption. There may be edge cases where it's debatable, like in Iceland which already runs on 100% renewables.

Btw all these processes aren't as simple. For example decomposing polyethylene produces methane which can leak into the atmosphere where it's one of the worst greenhouse gases of all. If you burn it you "only" produce CO2, which is much preferable. The oil and gas was (semi)-permanently trapped before humans started digging it up without knowing the consequences. Putting waste into a surface dump and covering it with a few meters of soil and maybe some plastic sheets is not the same thing at all. This is not permanent carbon sequestration.

Everyone should consider there are many things we do not understand. In the media we're often presented "experts" who purport to know it all, but it's not true. And many laypeople have strong opinions despite understanding even less.

Not all energy is created equal though. There are applications where 1kwh of oil is more valuable than 1kwh of electricity.

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks that...

I remember nearly two decades ago a PopSci article about some guy who figured out how to use microwaves to convert plastic (any hydrocarbon) into oil and natural gas. More than enough to break even. He was converting tires and waste plastic.

Nothing ever came of it - IIRC, ownership disputes with the partner, and eventually the patent got purchased by some random company and blackholed.

Edit: found a source. Better than popsci. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12141-giant-microwave...

I'm surprised that people didn't replicate his work in countries that don't respect Western patents.

Because there is no way it was economical.

This is no different than a startup founder talking about his new AI crypto fund.

BS exists in every industry.

Those countries probably don't care about recycling.

If you can find an economical way to recycle plastic, it would be an insanely lucrative business opportunity. It has nothing to do with their views on the environment.

Shouldn't it be almost out of patent by now?

Just like the "water carburetor" and other miracles that never materialized, the problem is that the alternative is cheaper and simpler (which means cheaper).

It doesn't sound expensive to add water injection to an internal combustion engine, until you have to make it work in production, with end users.

YOU can make it work, because you are motivated, but what about the guy who buys it because it's cool and then forgets to fill the system. Sure it's easy to add programming to work around this condition, but is it easy to integrate and test?

Anyway, crude oil is very, very cheap, and very easy to integrate into a production process. Waste plastic in the recycling stream is dirty and heterogeneous in composition and size, which makes it hard to integrate into a production process. Not impossible, but more expensive, which means that no one will do it without outside compulsion (and maybe not even then).

Found some sources. See other comments.

> the alternative is cheaper and simpler

What's interesting is that it seems like the microwave version was the cheaper and simpler alternative. And the engineering problems were apparently solved, since they were building the product for their first deal, and were demoing the tech to the popsci reporter who visited.

> Back at the shop, Pringle is still zapping new materials. A sample labeled “bituminous coal” goes in and, 15 seconds later, Pringle ignites the resulting gas. “You see,” he says, “why they might want to kill me.”

In case anyone else is following along, a patent by Pringle has had a very intriguing set of assignments.

Started out with the corporation by Pringle and Co in 2009, rest is below:

2009: GREENTECH ENERGY SOLUTIONS LTD.

2010: UNIVERSAL ALTERNATIVE FUELS, INC.

2011: GORTAGCH DEVELOPMENT LIMITED

2015: GREENTECH ENERGY SOLUTIONS LTD.

Pringle also has a 2020 patent application pending that references the 2006 original filing.

[Edit] Thank you forgot it

2006: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7629497B2/ 2020: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200399541A1/en

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7629497B2/ (if anyone else was looking for a link, assignment information is near the bottom).

> It doesn't sound expensive to add water injection to an internal combustion engine, until you have to make it work in production, with end users.

Water / methanol injection was commonly used on various piston engine aircraft in the 1940's. It had several benefits, cooling the input air, preventing pre-detonation at high compression (due to lower octane fuel in some cases), lowering the combustion temperature, and such. It was practical and worked fine for high-performance aircraft, that saw regular maintenance after every flight.

It doesn't seem very necessary or practical for a ground vehicle though.

It was also available on early jet aircraft (and may still be used by some). Here's an interesting discussion: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36185/how-does-...

Some people do modify their vehicles for water injection, and at least one recent production car has it: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15340747/new-porsche-911-...

Yeah, water/meth injection is pretty common mod for forced induction cars to squeeze some more air in there without causing detonation. People often just tap the windshield washer reservoir and use that to hold the meth, since windshield wiper fluid is a more diluted methanol mix you can still use it for your windshield. I personally don't run it because running out of meth on a vehicle that is tuned for it can have disastrous consequences.

two https://www.bmw-m.com/en/topics/magazine-article-pool/5-litr...

It _is_ practical for cars, but a similar technology is easier and better: Exhaust Gas Recirculation.

The problem of water injection is engine corrosion and system maintenance. EGR further improves the exhaust gas composition by burning the CO and similar not fully oxidized parts. The main effect is the same, i.e. providing some inert material that expands after detonation using up the heat.

It's only cheaper because externalities are ignored. If we had proper legislation that took environmental externalities into account, it might not be cheaper anymore.

Yes, couldn't they just make some government subsidies to incentivize it? Then we could be rid of all the nasty plastic waste that keeps finding it's way into the ocean and everywhere else?

Was it this company by chance?

https://www.qualitystocks.com/global-resource-corporation-in...

I've been looking for a 'real machine' in the wild for some time now - have yet to see one.

Yup, that's the one. I think the tech got blackholed pretty effectively. https://archive.is/20120908120121/http://www.popsci.com/pops...

Possibly a dumb question, but how much plastic exists in tires? I figured they were mostly natural rubber. Naturally, that must be outdated.

From my own naive Google search on "how much plastic in the average tire", I see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires... says, highlighted by goog:

> By 1931 the U.S. chemical company DuPont had industrialized the manufacturing of synthetic rubber. Today tires consist of about 19 percent natural rubber and 24 percent synthetic rubber, which is a plastic polymer.

Interesting. Synthetic rubber is still just hydrocarbons, so it would get converted back to oil/natgas just the same as the rest.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_...

Edit: more context: the “inventor” is Frank Pringle who appears to have invented a number of too-good-to-be-true gizmos, including one for weight loss.

Edit 2: also he claimed to cure cancer with microwaves (the same year as the oil producing microwaves): https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/-b-global-resource...

Sounds similar to the thermal depolymerization [1] developed by companies like Changing World Technologies. [2]

That technology seems very promising, but they ran into a number of difficulties in practice. They build a plant to process turkey leftovers in Missouri, but the plant wasn't profitable, and the community complained about the smell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies

I went down this rabbit hole for a bit. The only obvious issue seems to be that burying (or burning if you're Swedish) plastic is really, really cheap. For the turkey waste, we're already good at rendering animal remains, so there just isn't a need.

Yes.

For CWT in specific, the original articles (in popular science magazines like Discover or PopSci) described the desire to process various kinds of plastics, much like the linked article talks about. The methane would be tapped off early, and used the power the production process, with the end product being various kinds of oils.

It wasn't clear why CWT decided to pivot to processing turkey waste. They were hamstrung by fluctuating prices for the waste stream, that (IIRC) could be used as an input for fertilizer production.

I believe they started on the wrong foot. They cheaped out on the welding process and so the whole system was losing pressure and stinky volatiles. They had to redo their entire plumbing and people still complained after they swore up and down that there were no more leaks. which might be improper detection or people are used to a smell and don’t believe it’s gone.

WOW! super surprised to see Blest on here. From my understanding I believe these guys went bankrupt a few years back. Maybe they are back from the dead?

This tabletop unit is more of a demonstration unit they don't really intend to sell. It is for educational purposes and really as a demonstrator for their large scale industrial units. This is why when you search for Blest Plastic to oil on Youtube you'll mostly find educational institutions demoing this unit and not much else.

One of the original engineers is apparently an independent contractor now?

He used to post a few Youtube videos of a similar unit to the tabletop version but he seems to have disappeared as well.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHLWZgFThQs

From: https://www.youtube.com/@Plastic2oiltv/about

> "Blest Co., Ltd. went bankrupt in 2017 and started a business as a freelance engineer. Currently, I am setting up and running a consulting company on plastic fuels."

So I guess this is not Blest (which I heard first time.)

Oh, I noticed the domain name being blest.co.jp.

https://blest.co.jp/eng/company/

> INCORPORATED March , 2018

So someone bought it and keeps it running? Interesting.

Great, now instead of turning the 95% of all extracted oil into greenhouse gases, we now can turn the 99+%. That is efficiency.

Well one hopes this is an enabler of a more-closed loop process for plastics. But… yeah.

we always could - burning the plastic always was an option, and effectively happens in a lot of places (incinerator). Recycling into oil would give us the option to use it as input to either new plastic or other hydrocarbon based products.

Now, whether this works as advertised is an open question.

This is a very mature industry. I'm skeptical it's economical at all.

It's also an area where the economics are changing - renewable energy is cheap during peak hours. So if you can build a process that can essentially soak up that energy you could try and do arbitrage. Whether that's enough to make that economically viable depends on the capital investment required, but it's at least possible in the near future.

The alternative is polluting the entire planet with micro-plastics for a 5% savings in greenhouse gasses.

This does nothing to prevent micro plastics.

Micro plastics are plastics that have escaped into the environment, which by definitions means we are no longer collecting them for disposal or recycling.

All this does is keep some recycling programs from shutting down, and most of those are collecting bulk #1 and #2 which as far as I’m aware are not the major source of micro plastic pollution.

Patagonia has a fucked up plan of using recycled polyester in everything lately and I don’t see how nobody is noticing that a major source of urban micro plastics is going to be coming from dryer lint. Which means synthetics and dryers are a bad combo.

I line dry all my exercise clothes, but most people don’t.

if you're worried about microplastics from drying your patagonia fleece in the dryer, worry about other things first. Car tires get ground up into microplastic and estimates range between 10 and 28% of the total microplastic pollution in the oceans [1]. And that's not surprising - the weight loss of a single tire over its lifetime likely exceeds the entire weight of your fleece jacket. Drive less car miles before worrying about patagonia clothes.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...

For tires, is anyone working on biodegradable or otherwise eco-friendly tire materials? Something that is biocompatible. Although you don't want tires breaking down and causing accidents... Tires have a lot of conflicting design requirements.

Bio tires would be great, but the more immediate, easy and efficient solution is public transport investment to reduce car use.

Tires made with natural rubber are nothing new, that's the way all tires used to be made. And I doubt it's any better for the environment, from either a microplastics perspective or a deforestation perspective.

Michelin had a tire formula a few years ago that was augmented with natural hydrocarbons. They claimed that it gave the tire better performance at 50% tread wear as well. But I found out recently they don’t sell the model I bought anymore so I’m not sure if the expectations matched the projections or what happened.

I'm wondering - how much microplastics come from _bicycle_ tires? I mean, surely it's a lot less, but how much less? Say, per bike km ridden?

I can tell you that my pair of bike tires is now 13 000km old, still going strong, and weighs about 790g each. It may loose maybe 100 or 200g over it's lifetime, but unlikely that it's even that much. Worst case estimate so far would be 790g/13 000km, or 0.061g/km per wheel - under the assumption that the whole tire is consumed.

For cars and bikes alike, it all comes down to how much work the tires are doing, which is to say, how much hard acceleration and hard braking occurs, especially to the point of losing traction despite grippy conditions (burnout/skid), in conjunction with how much mass is being moved.

E-bikes and e-scooters are going to be way worse than human power, per distance, because of the quicker acceleration/braking. My FWD scooter is always slipping on uphill climbs, but my RWD bike doesn't because the weight is shifted appropriately.

Lots of considerations.

We should worry about the global phenomenon of microplastics for sure, but most of what’s in my yard came from litter or from the dryer vent.

Also they used to use more natural fibers and now it’s almost all blends, except some of the work clothes.

How exactly do materials go from dryer lint to trash bag and then somehow end up in the ocean?

I can see a washing machine sending micro plastics down the drain resulting in some small percentage of those ending up in the ocean. Assuming some failure where raw sewage was dumped into a river or ocean.

Most, if not all dryers vent to the outdoors.

Some particles make it through the lint trap into the hot/humid air stream into the environment.

Normal wear of the garments will shed micro particles from just rubbing up against them.

So using a dryer is better for the ocean than air drying, good to know.

I would think air (line) drying would be better in terms of microplastics, since there is no tumbling.

Would it be safe to say that (mostly) frictionless line drying would shed fewer particles than tumble drying?

The dryer collects already loose or broken fibers in the lint trap for disposal. Air drying doesn’t which means those large broken fibers containing several orders of more magnitude more plastic than might escape from a dryer end up in the environment.

This is why new clothes result in dramatically more lint than old clothes by weight.

Isn't it possible that tumbling is the only significant source of breakage?

If that was the case old clothes would produces far more lint in a dryer because the dryer would keep damaging them. Instead the reverse happens with new clothes produces vastly more and it tappers off.

They do cause damage, but it isn’t the overwhelming source of damage.

Old clothes have a lot less fiber in them. Whether your math checks out would depend on the % of fibers lost per week rather than just the total number.

Washing machines also have lint traps, and the water treatment plant has to deal with a lot of solids from washing machines. I don't have numbers on what percent comes out in that case.

I am doing this comparison based on weight not individual items.

It’s really obvious is you’ve ever washed a full load of new clothes vs old clothes.

The dryer abrades the fabric. If you have a delicate or dear piece of clothing they always advise that you air dry it as the fabric will last longer. Those delicate bags for the washing machine are substantially about limiting abrasion from rougher clothing, and also about not accidentally running them through the dryer by tucking inside or clinging to something else.

Normal use also abrades fabrics, the point is normal use doesn’t collect these damaged fibers so they all just end up in the environment.

They end up in the environment regardless. Where do you put your lint trap material? where does the dryer vent to?

If you want to be that pedantic the clothes you’re using right now are already part of the environment as are clothes sitting in stores etc.

However, using the common terminology a sealed garbage dump isn’t part of the environment in question because sea life isn’t coming into contact with it.

Technically yes, if dryers can improve their filtration, and dryer owners can be trusted to maintain their filters ...

You don't need much of a failure. Many cities all you need is a really rainy day and it overflows into general ocean run off[0]. I'm pretty sure parts of Vancouver still just send sewage directly into the ocean. All of Victoria did for over a hundred and fifty years until during Covid they finished a treatment plant finally[1].

[0] - example - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sewage-overf...

[1] -https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-crd...

Only if it increases demand for oil.

Realistically, this oil would replace oil that would otherwise have to be pumped from the ground.

Ah yes, just like how fracking reduced the other methods of drilling oil from the ground.

So when there's unrest in the middle east, does the price of this converted oil suddenly spike as well? /s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34441324

Some issues:

1) Says it draws 1 kilowatt constantly and 'begins to produce oil in one hour', while also only holding about 1 kg max of plastic. How long does it take to finish processing the 1 kg of plastic into the 0.8 kg of oil? Is this a reasonable overall energy-return-on-energy-investment (and see #2 below, it will take additional energy).

2) If this is producing a typical crude oil, is further refining needed to create individually useful products? What's the average hydrocarbon length and the overall distribution of different lengths of hydrocarbons? Are there aromatic components of the oil (such as benzene, a known carcinogen)?

2) What kind of waste is leftover? Does it generate a polcyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-laden toxic glop, or what? How is this waste to be disposed?

Below the "spec table" they have an example run with household plastic waste.

- 3.5 hours @ 1 kW (may be an overestimate of power since it says as a guide)

- Converts 400g of plastic to 286g of oil, so with a "dirtier" source of plastic its a ~70% return.

Also more data here [0] with ratios in the 60-90% range.

[0] https://blest.co.jp/eng/experimental-data/

Edit: On that page it also says "As you look into the data you can understand our machine can produce high grade oil mixture of gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and little heavy oil. The oil can be used as recycled fuel for electric power generator without refining." The second sentence seems like a bit of a reach, that there would not be some intermediary step.

It is written in one of the pages - "As you look into the data you can understand our machine can produce high grade oil mixture of gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and little heavy oil. The oil can be used as recycled fuel for electric power generator without refining"

I am no expert, and so I have the question actually. How do we use that oil in reality?

Distill it into fractions and use the fuel like normal.

The obvious answer would be cracking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)

Crude oil is much messier than this. Still we refine it just fine :)

It will definitely burn. Diesel heater for water and air is one application.

oil usually has mixtures of hydrocarbons like this. Refineries use processes like fractional distillation to separate the components so that they can be used separately, or processes like cracking are used which convert longer chain hydrocarbons into simpler hydrocarbons.

Many diesel engines can burn a mix of those (of course, depends on the ratios). Or you can refine it into the pure fuels.

My question is, if it's aimed to power an electricity generator, why not just burn the plastic at a high temperature? (What I imagine there's no answer for, because it's what people actually do. They are probably using the generator only as a display application.)

So what is wrong with this? I am assuming it only takes soft plastic but still why we don't see widespread use of it.

I'm guessing the answer is, "Because you can already burn the plastic directly." Presumably burning this oil would have the same levels of pollution as burning the plastic in the first place, but also takes extra energy to produce.

Other than if you have a Mr Fusion you can’t run a car off of solid plastics. But, I assume some additional steps are required to make it usable. The site doesn’t detail the possible uses of the the oil, but generally liquids and solids can be used in different situations. The oil could also be used as lubricant rather than an energy source.

I don't know if most households have enough use for lubricants to be able to consume a quantity equivalent to 80% of the volume of plastics they're disposing of. My door hinges and bike-chains can only be so smooth. Even if it was converting it into usable motor-oil (which I doubt it is) I don't think I could consume that much.

I suppose if it's usable for a kerosine type of lamp maybe, but is it pure enough to not present respiratory issues? And why would I need a kerosine lamp?

Yeah I don’t think it’s the next Nespresso and they probably need to detail the use cases better. But I can see this useful in a machinist shop that might have a lot of waste plastic from packing materials etc.

Airplanes run off kerosene, so that's a sizeable market if this fuel is good enough

No chance the FAA lets people use homemade recycled plastic oil in their turbojet engines. Jet turbines are very tolerant of different fuels, but this is a bridge too far.

Many people still have ICE cars, you left that intentionally out?

I mentioned motor oil

No way I'm trusting oil made from random household waste plastic as the primary lubricant in my car engine. What are the lubricating properties? What are the breakdown characteristics? High temperature resilience? Presumably it would vary by batch. You are just begging for a seized engine.

An electric car can, in my area they burn garbage for electricity:

https://pinellas.gov/waste-to-energy-facility/

Flammable lubes are a big no no

They don’t detail much about the properties of the oil produced

Also, plastics can contain all sorts of nasty toxic surprises. Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity.

> Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity.

If we can assure that the output meets a standard should we burn it, then certainly we should be able to assure the output meets a standard should we refine/convert it.

And the conversion of plastic into oil will have cost much more energy, producing the same pollution in the end.

But at least we save some landfill space. Also micro-plastics contamination is everywhere.

In the USA, landfill space concerns are based on a hoax. Landfill space is a function of landfill development, and there’s no shortage of spaces to create landfills.

I am not talking about running out of space in general. I am talking about taking a hill covered with trees or farms, and turning it into a hill of garbage. Surely you can see why I would prefer a natural hill?

If you can burn it, there is no point in burring it. We're still taking a lot of stuff from underground and burn it for energy, why not burn the stuff we already have above ground?

Landfills amortize the carbon emissions. Keeping the plastic's carbon temporarily sequestered in a landfill puts it somewhere other than the atmosphere. Eventually we'll have to do something with all that carbon, but we're better off burying it until we get a better handle on emissions in general.

You can still burry the soot after you burned the plastic.

Most of the carbon is going to end up as CO2 in the air, though.

You don't need to burn it in an open field ...

You can used a closed system so that the waste is actually all captured. Or you can have a more continuous system that'll capture/scrub the output.

Unless you capture it, as Amsterdam has been doing.

CO2 capture is a scam, perpetrated by the petroleum industry to make people think it's okay to burn more fossil fuels.

You would be right, IF we were to not take out any other fossil fuel to burn. But to bury the plastic now it just means we will dig for an equivalent quantity of coal, oil or gas to burn. We will burn some stuff regardless, we might as well burn what we already have, instead of burying it and digging for new stuff.

Since this consumes electricity, the energy need could be filled by running the converter at peak hours for renewable energy, so effectively soak up excess energy to recover oil that's already out of the ground. Which would be a net win in terms of energy, possibly even financially depending on the investment costs for that device. Assuming it even holds up to the promises.

All these processes best done in centralized plants with quality controls, not in bench processors.

It is more efficient to burn it, generate electricity and charge a EV battery with it, than it is to convert it to fuel (consumes energy) and burn it in an internal combustion engine (very low efficiency due to small scale).

It's much easier to purify the burning waste products than raw trash. It is much less varied.

I don’t believe plastic burning is a widespread energy source.

Japan and I believe Singapore burn most of their plastic in incinerators to generate electricity. Coincidentally they are also among the highest plastic waste producers per capita.

Korea, Taiwan, and Switzerland are similar.

It happens in waste-to-energy power plants (a.k.a garbage power plants). They can be a great way to get rid of waste but they require a lot of filtering of the exhaust to be safe. Adequate filtering is universal in some countries (like Sweden). In the USA, waste-to-energy plants frequently have inadequate filtering, which can make them dirtier than coal plants.

Do you know if they have to reach a certain temperature ? I would think so because I assumme garbage produces a lot of fumes and gases that would better off burned for energy rather that ending in the air. On the other end I wonder what kind of temperature you can get with a dumpster fire

Incinerators in Japan must be above 800C to avoid generating toxic materials like dioxins. https://www.env.go.jp/content/900453393.pdf

> In the USA, waste-to-energy plants frequently have inadequate filtering, which can make them dirtier than coal plants.

Source? With EPA being so rigid about diesel cars it would doubt that. Unless the whole regulation was about keeping german car manufacturers in cheque...

In my city there is an incineration plant which produces about 94 GWh of electricity a year, covering 11% of city's needs.

I imagine it's easier to purify the oil and burn the oil with high efficiency, than to burn solid garbage and filter the flue gas.

Presumably the noxious byproducts are released during the oil recycling process? It would explain where all of that missing mass went. But if this is the case you'll still need to filter the gas so there is little benefit.

I think the oil it produced would be worth about £0.25 (GBP) (400ml assuming the price is the same as Brent crude and ignoring the cost of the input plastic or the machine itself etc). But the power to run it (3kWh) would cost about £1 (1GBP) at current rates at least here in the UK.

I might be wrong, I'm not sure whether the oil produced is equivalent to Brent crude (I picked it at random) or more valuable or less...

Still might make sense when solar/wind is at peak to make it as a longer time storage? While still getting rid of plastic waste.

But of what use is that mystery oil? All current petroluem products are highly quality controlled, both for lubrication and use in engines. You didn't get rid of the plastic, you converted it into a liquid which you must now dispose of safely. The only upside I see is that the plastic won't litter and turn into micro plastics in the ocean, but since it's already collected, then burn in a central plant ASAP IMHO.

You could probably use it in a diesel engine. People filter used frying oil from restaurants and run their diesels on that.

Yes, you absolutely can, especially in an old diesel engine, they can run on all kinds of oil. But the engine might not fare well, depending on the properties of the oil, and the exhaust might contain "interesting" stuff like dioxins, depending on what was in the mystery plastic to begin with.

I would say if this could be done by some utility company, that company could have diesel engines to generate power from that oil which could have filters and all that stuff.

I assume it still could be profitable because people who want to get rid of plastic waste would still have to pay. Getting excess power from grid is also something one would get paid for. Then turning on generators when grid needs power to get paid when there is a power shortage.

But as I write this out I imagine that it would require massive amounts of investments for setting up such operation and getting all kind of permits or environmental studies and god knows what. Let alone getting deals with electric companies - so I think that would be something that some electric company would have to set up. They would most likely have most know-how for such setup.

Meanwhile, the power company in this city burns plastic (and all kinds of waste) in their co-generation plant and gets electricity and residential heating.

If you’re going to burn it for electricity in a stationary location, skip the middle man and burn the waste itself.

Also old diesel engines are bad for air quality and efficiency

There's an argument to be made here for refurbing the best of the container ship engines after the ship hulls reach end of life.

The higher end engines are three storey high multistaged diesel engines with filters, scrubbers and some of the highest bunker oil -> power efficiencies on the planet.

They're ideal for generating baseload power and worth the rejuvenation effort.

Most (80% was the number I saw) large bunker-oil engines with scrubbers installed simply dump the removed sulphides into the sea as wastewater instead of venting it into the atmosphere. Not to mention the colossal amounts of carbon-related pollutants.

Solvable problems via a retrofit to be sure, but overall I'd rather than the HFO's are simply not burned at all.

Last I checked oil was the primary ingredient in making plastic. This could be a way to recycle plastic that is not recyclable by normal means.

plastic is a byproduct of the petroleum production process.

Much of the feedstock for plastic is from natural gas, not from oil. Fracked gas in particular has a lot of ethane, which is converted to ethylene and then to polyethylene. The rise of fracked gas in the US caused PE production to move here.

> But of what use is that mystery oil?

You can probably power the next few runs of the machine with it.

The key may be economically transporting the waste plastic as feedstock. Guess it may be much more expensive. Even assuming 5 cents/ kwh of solar this makes economic sense as storage system otherwise. I presume in the future we have autonomous robots that clean the cities of plastic and feed it to such machines which run on surplus renewable energy

You still have people paying for their waste disposal, so I would assume transport cost should be covered by that.

Also makes sense in Japan (and Korea, and maybe other places I don't know about), where the populace is very mindful not just of making sure garbage ends up in a can, but as well separating it based on the type of garbage.

Contrast with the US, where people decide to save a few bucks a month by dumping their garbage bags along the side of the road, or tossing garbage out the window of their car.

When running on spare hydro, wind or solar power which cannot be accumulated or returned to grid, it can have some uses.

I'm not sure the economics works on something like that. Once you buy all the equipment, employees, and commercial buildings, it simply isn't going to be profitable to only run your factory 10% of the time (How often does solar power go wasted? Not actually sure).

Maybe it would work if this was only one step in a larger processes. When energy is free, use it to make a ton of this crude oil and then process the crude with less energy intensive methods when electricity is expensive.

If this is a thermal process, then intermittent cheap energy can be stored in thermal masses (firebrick, for example) much more cheaply than in batteries, and the heat used later. That way that later stage can be kept operating more continuously.

More worth than crude. Crude also needs processing. The output from this bench processor is probably somewhere around the red fraction here:

https://petroleumservicecompany.com/blog/oil-barrel-42-gallo...

Thanks!

I would imagine that its not economically viable at scale. First, it might be too energy-intensive for the value of the end product, and second, the plastic you can get is still the plastic that you're able to separate from trash, which it might be better to just recycle it normally. These are just peanut-gallery guesses though, I don't know for sure.

The very small scale ensures it isn't economical.

If thermal decomposition of plastic is to be worthwhile, it would be on the scale of oil refineries (which it would likely resemble.)

It might be worthwhile to separate plastics now, not for conversion now, but to stockpile for later processing by this or other means. Just put the stuff in plastics-only landfills designed to ease later mining. Fixed carbon will be more valuable after fossil fuel use ends.

This would be rather useful in remote locations which find themselves with surplus plastics (remote islands with no landfill options for example), surplus renewable electricity and big old diesel engines. Those are unusual circumstances, but they are out there, and if there were organisations willing to fund the electricity aspect, the issue of plastic litter could be reduced in many places (and that includes ghost nets and other seaborne plastic). The resulting oil could pay back some of the cost of production, and be sold at a discount to the heavy diesel engine users in the area, on the condition that they uprate their emissions equipment. This may or may not have helpful effects in local markets.

More information here:

https://blest.co.jp/eng/faq/

This seems to be intended for PP/PE which is basically a long-chain hydrocarbon anyway, but does make up the bulk of plastic use. It seems to be a very stereotypically Japanese product.

The current wisdom is that PP is one of the least problematic plastics wrt to leachate contaminating the contents. HDPE is also fairly well regarded. In theory LDPE is also considered 'food safe' but if you can smell the plasticizers evaporating off of LDPE (which I absolutely can) then what's it doing to your food?

I read something about PE in the environment recently but I can't recall if it said it was the hardest to break down or the easiest. I'm thinking the former though, since I came away from that article feeling better about PP and worse about PE.

but if you can smell the plasticizers evaporating off of LDPE

It's more likely you're smelling unpolymerised ethylene. LDPE itself doesn't require plasticisers --- it's already extremely flexible without them.

If they do it via "pyrolyse" (burning plastic without oxygen) there is this Quantafuel [1] doing this in "large scale".

[1] https://www.quantafuel.com/

It's pretty close to the same principles a petroleum refinery operates on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking

Ordinary physical recycling of plastics (melt them down) runs into problems because plastics get mixed and mixed with contaminants and because the molecular chains get damaged and break down over time.

There are two approaches to chemical recycling.

One of them is to reverse the polymerization process and produce the monomer. This can be purified and used to make virgin quality plastic.

The other one is like what you describe and produces outputs similar to a petrochemical factory that can be used to make all sorts of things.

Both of the above processes are still terribly expensive and environmentally dirty but they are the subject of very active research and they might get practical someday.

3) use the best-effort stream of materials to manufacture bulk materials where a small quantity of chemicals that refuse to bond to each other doesn't compromise the product.

Those plastic park benches and decking material products are using a lot of plastic to overcome statistics. But the perverse incentive is that a product that uses a lot of your material per consumer looks much better on paper than it is in real life. Instead of twenty shirts or fifty detergent bottles we made one bench, that goes to the landfill when it's done because it's not cradle-to-cradle.

SCWO (supercritical water oxidation) is pretty much only used for superfund projects because of the expense of the machinery. It basically burns materials in oxygenated water, turning everything into water, carbon dioxide, and salts/acids.

The salts and acids are a problem that prevents commercial use, because it turns out corrosion, heat, and pressure are the 'pick two' of ceramic materials. Last I read someone was trying to work around this problem by building a heat and pressure optimized vessel and coating it with a corrosion (and?) resistant glazing. I imagine getting the thermal expansion for the two materials to be identical is a right difficult problem.

I am dubious of the photos that show coloured plastics turning into clear oil.

Does this process really break down all the many types of dyes?

No idea how this thing works but why wouldn't it destroy all "dyes"? It breaks every other bond, why not dye bonds?

I'm also curious that the liquid is clear, though, because you'd think this thing creates a soup of organic chemicals each with different color responses.

> No idea how this thing works

I just have a suspicion that this thing doesn't work, and the claims on the website aren't real...

Well this machine has been around for a decade or so I think

Here is some organization in Alaska demonstrating the operation but like I said in my other comment in this thread, the tabletop unit is more of a demonstrator model that is meant for educational purposes and their goal is to upsell on the industrial units.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhvogn49riI

Breaking polymers down is a thing though. Not my area of expertise, but they try to make feedstock organic or of it. Lots of research to make it cheap and better control off the outputs.

But I wouldn't expect a crystal clear liquid output. Again, not my area.

Great, another reason I'm pissed off about plastic recycling! I've been collecting my plastic for as long as I can remember and recycling it, then they tell us only about 12% has EVER been recycled.

Now we can break it down to get the oil back! A$$holes!

Don't recycle. If its going to get dumped anyway put your plastic recycling in the garbage. Then it'll end up in a nominally regulated local dump and not in a Vietnamese river.

Btw anyone who has even a cursory understanding of polymer physics suspected that plastics recycling was a scam. The whole scheme was either to greenwash industry throwing the moral responsibility to the end users or to condition us to recycle when they finally figured out how to do it.

For what it's worth, extracting energy out of plastic is probably best way to deal with it.

You forgot the third option... Grind it up, and put it in inappropriate places... Like "ooh, we can mix it into asphalt"...

Mixing some material that you don't want and can be quite toxic into something you're gonna leave in the environment just seems like a bad idea...

Let me think... When else did we do that? Oh yeah - when we mixed coal fly ash into bricks[1]! Everyone wants mercury poisoning from the bricks their houses were made from - and it was a very cheap way to dispose of otherwise hard to deal with toxic waste!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash_brick

What percentage of plastic do you think is even collected? It's a weird stat to compare the household recycling of bottles and containers (which even in the US gets recycled at a non-trivial rate) and all plastic ever (lawn chairs, toys, complex mixed materials etc.)

Almost none. If you aren't sorting the plastic by type (the number in the package) it probably won't get done and will be routed to a landfill (or river) in Asia.

Big corporate consumers of plastic can recycle because they guarantee that its all one type of plastic (say a fisherman's nylon net). So recycled plastic does exist. But mostly of it isn't.

Be careful where you get stats like that. If the stat says that "12% of plastic (ever produced globally) is recycled" that doesn't mean your local recycling program is terrible.

I just got a notice from my trash company that only 10% of their collected material is contaminated / not recyclable.

The problem with plastics (polymers, really) is that if even 1% off collected polymer of type A (say PE) is off type B (say ABS), then their melt wont mix.

If the mix doesn't melt you get spinal decomposition, as microstructure that looks like lamella. It is very weak compared to plastic A or B. Therefore you cannot simply melt plastic back together unless you have an almost 100% pure feedstock.

But melting things together is the easiest and cost effective way to recycle anything really. Metals aren't as finicky and they are relatively easy ways to separate them in a dumb fashion (big old electromagnet).

With plastics you can just break down and make (relatively bad) feedstock or burn it for energy (actually a good solution).

Burning plastic, however, has the risk of burning chlorinated or fluoridated plastic and that really sucks.

Polymers are amazing, but they also suck.

I'm getting to the point where I think plastic recycling was always a scam to make people use more plastics without any guilt. That said, putting plastics into landfill not such a bad thing; we've taken oil from the ground, made it into plastics, then putting it back in the ground. Better than burning it. There is a lot of space for landfill, and not very much oil. The problem is when it doesn't end up in landfill, but ends up in the sea. Which by virtue of there being more and more plastics (since they're guilt-free now) there is more and more of.

Here's some math:

3.5KWh rough estimate of power requirement (not including embodied energy of device or repairs).

Oil contains 10,000 kWh per cubic meter (1 million ml). 10 million Wh/m^3 = 10 Wh/ml

Device outputs 380ml of oil, so output is 3800 Wh/run. Depending on the fudge factors on the input power this device yields less than 1.1 units of oil per unit of electricity.

Even if they increase the efficiency at scale, this device's entire value seems to be in in removing a waste product, not in generating an input stream. A device that can 'pull' hydrocarbons from the air might actually beat this on the grounds of efficiency for inputs.

Surely it's still not good to put that plastic in the atmosphere though, especially while spending extra energy. If it can't be recycled the next best thing is to bury it.

If we pump it back into the oil fields (and stop using oil!) then it is essentially a carbon credit. The cost of doing that would be an excellent basis for the cost of a carbon credit.

It would be a percentage of what was taken out though, given it takes energy to convert plastic back to oil; it would likely get mixed with other oil products instead so that the companies can cash in on government subsidies for using "green" technologies.

We could also just bury the plastic, like we do now. Most plastic cannot be decomposed by bacteria, so most of that carbon will be sequestered from the atmosphere.

In the waste hierarchy, burning plastic with energy recovery and gopf fikters comes after recycling and before well-managed landfill.

This becomes less true as alternative non-fossil energy becomes more dominant though, since you're not displacing dirtier fossil fuels.

What, no, burning it is surely better than digging up previously buried stuff to refine and burn.

Only if we approach a 0 drilling world would it make sense to bury plastic instead of burn it.

It would be nice if they listed safe use cases for oil from squished plastic…

I couldn’t imagine you want this reaching smoke point.

BRB drinking water derived from urine to wash down the bug protein bars I ate earlier. I’ll be sure to wipe later with 2 square inches of newspaper that I’ll later dispose in my apartment’s communal compost heap…protect the planet!

what oil would you ever want to reach its smoke point?

Cooking oils when stir frying, obviously this isn't safe for that.

Japan imports almost all of its oil, so maybe it makes sense in that market though the scale seems impractical to me.

* https://www.worldometers.info/oil/japan-oil/

400g plastic becomes 286g of oil (less than 75%), what is the 80% in reference to?

https://blest.co.jp/eng/experimental-data/

Everyone is talking about using this oil as fuel and the shortcomings. Could you cook with this oil? Or lubricate some tool/equipment in your garage?

would you cook your dinner with gasoline?

Certainly, in some settings.

https://www.amazon.com/Gasoline-Stove/s?k=Gasoline+Stove

Seed oils that are now widespread as cooking oils were originally used as machine lubricants.

Fascinating and makes sense. I've recently gone down a rabbit hole on the uses of linseed oil pre fossil fuels, but it's too gummy to ever be used as a lubricant. Do you know off hand which seed oils were used for lubricants?

Castor oil was famously used as a lubricant in early WWI-era airplane engines. The fumes would blow in the pilot's face and are also a laxative.

Haha that's amazing! Hopefully the pilots weren't too phased. Thanks for sharing

Did some further digging and it looks like it does have a tendency to gum. From wikipedia, "The viscosity of castor oil at 10 °C is 2,420 centipoise,[28] but it tends to form gums in a short time, so its usefulness is limited to engines that are regularly rebuilt, such as racing engines. Lubricant company Castrol took its name from castor oil."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil#Lubrication

So was olive oil, in addition to the use in food.

Yes my point. They still are.

Soybean oil is used in a wide range of lubricant and functional fluids applications:

  Gear oils and lubes
  Chainsaw bar oil
  Compressor oil
  Two-cycle engine oil
  Metalworking oils and
  Wire rope, chain, and cable lubricants
  General purpose and penetrating lubricants
  Transformer and transmission line cooling fluids
  Greases - automotive, machinery, rail curve, track
  Food-grade, industrial, and elevator hydraulic fluids

https://www.stle.org/images/pdf/STLE_ORG/AM2019%20Presentati...

Obviously this is a backwards example (food-grade oil used for non-food applications), and my question was using this plastic oil for food applications.

In china, its common to cook with "gutter oil" which is sewage, filtered and refined. Humans are amazing.

It doesn’t seem to be common, but there seem to have been some scandals around that, and an increase in regulations. Really gross!

It's more common to unsafely reuse oil than pull it from the sewer. This is done everywhere to some extent (bad grease at a fast food joints, etc), but China does it on a bigger scale.

How do people ever consume that without immediately getting sick?

I think people here are confusing "cook with" to mean either "the fuel source to cook" or "the oil in the pan to aid in cooking".

Unfortunately, no. See also, "frying with transformer oil".

Because it's refined oil.

"Gutter oil", digou you is any illegally recycled and refined oil. It's not necessarily from actual gutters: the "gutter" can be figurative. To be clear, does include, rarely and in the most egregious cases, literal sewer skimmings, but is also buying used cooking oil from food vendors (like from deep fat fryers and grill traps) and animal carcass rendering. Then refining and selling that oil for food use rather than as biofuel or other industrial uses. It can even apply simply to just using once-virgin frying oil for longer than regulations allow.

My dad served in the army as a cook in Vietnam. He used gasoline stoves to cook dinner for the troops.

"White gas" used for cooking stoves (think Coleman stoves, laterns, etc) used to be unleaded, additive free gasoline. It's not gasoline now (according to wiki: cyclohexane, nonane, octane, heptane, and pentane.) Naptha also works in those stoves but doesn't last as long. Apparently you can still run the stoves on gasoline if you'd like.

Truffle oil is 2,4-dithiapentane derived from petroleum, so if you like truffle fries you might not mind

How about coffee?

Heres a video of one of the original engineers brewing coffee with "plastic oil". Does not look healthy given that there is so much black smoke.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbonK7vBCZI

What kind of Oil it generates? Where it can be used?

This is like the Juicero of alchemy.

I have a better idea: reduce plastic consumption. I know, I know, totally OC donut steel.

I'm all for it. How do we as consumers do that in a practical way?

It's all about small decisions. I'll list some examples but keep in mind that they're just examples.

* Prefer markets that overall use less plastic, even if this might bring you a small inconvenience. For example if market A sells groceries in bulk (bring your own bag) and market B sells the same groceries in styrofoam trays, then you buy it in market A, even if it's a bit further from your home.

* Actively refuse unnecessary plastic. For example, where I live bakeries often put bread inside paper bags, and the paper bags inside plastic bags; so I usually tell the workers there "no need for the plastic bag". I'm still creating some garbage (the paper bag) but it's way less than I would otherwise.

* Homemade alternatives for store-bought products. It doesn't even need to be the same product, as long as it fills the same role for you - like homemade fruit juice versus soda, homemade tomato sauce, or buying Parmesan in chunks and grating it instead of buing it pre-grated in small packages. You'll need to take your tastes into account, but some replacements might be even cheaper or better than what you're replacing.

* Reusing containers so you need to buy less tupperwares. Like ice cream pots, soda bottles, even margarine pots. Where I live there are even jokes about how ice cream pots never contain ice cream, but cooked beans.

"Unnecessary" plastic that you can avoid with small decisions only accounts for a small proportion of plastic waste. Product packaging often can't be avoided for most people and I don't find it particularly useful to shame consumers for what is largely out of their control.

> Prefer markets that overall use less plastic, even if this might bring you a small inconvenience.

Great. If you can. I live in Canada and over 90% of our grocery sales come from the largest 8 food retailer corporations. The majority of the stock has excessive plastic packaging. Even the vegetables are often shrink-wrapped or in sealed plastic bags.

> Actively refuse unnecessary plastic.

There's very little plastic that you have a choice about. Most people bring their own reusable bags because single-use plastic bags are banned in Canada. It's not enough.

> Homemade alternatives for store-bought products.

It's typically more expensive and more time consuming to do so. If you are not in an income bracket that you have to worry about meeting your bill payments, sure this is great. I jar a lot of my own stuff and I avoid soda anyway. Not everyone has the freedom (time + money + space) to pursue this.

> Reusing containers so you need to buy less tupperwares.

Sure. You can do that. For me I probably re-use 1 in 5 of any single-use containers that I buy and I haven't bought tupperware in years. It's kind of like trying to slow down a runaway train by blowing at it, though.

3.5kwh to run

Love how the site ambiguate oil

One step closer to Mr. Fusion!

isn't "Be-J" the tipoff?

1kW/h for 3 hours or 3kw.

400g plastic to 286g oil.

Seems extremely carbon negative.

> kW/h

(tears hair out)

Maybe the machinery takes 3 hours to spool up to generating 1kW?

No, it gradually increases its consumption at a rate of 1 kW every hour, thus at the 3-hour mark it's consuming 3 kW.

Gosh. Better make sure you put it on a timer switch or that's going to get expensive.

Still not as bad as kwh/hr. That one is showing up on some car UIs now.

Why can’t we just use the right unit for energy - Joule? A battery capacity should be stated in MJ / GJ.

An hour is a popular unit for me personally. I measure my work and plan my day in hours (since pretty much all clocks use hours, not kiloseconds).

I don't use seconds very much (with the exception of Unix epoch seconds, or a short experiment).

I can't divide by 3600 in my head. I can, however, multiply by 1. Therefore, Watt-seconds (AKA Joules) are not as useful to me as Watt-hours and kiloWatt-hours.

Natural gas is consumer priced in GJ and seems to work fine. Eventually we would just develop and intuition about number of K/M/G J in various battery sizes without the complex/ugly kwh unit.

I hear this occasionally, but what are the benefits relative to kwh?

It basically comes down to stating things in their simplest and most correct form. It is like using 75/25 to express the number 3. When expressing an energy value, use the right unit (Joule) not a derived unit multiplied by another quantity to get back to the original.

That's at least dimensionally correct.

It can't be carbon negative if you burn the resulting oil. The carbon in the atmosphere goes up.

Ths technology is pointless. The carbon can be sequestered as plastic.

But they don't like doing that because it does break down over time and starts leeching into the soil underneath.

Which can be caught and prevented, of course, but nobody wants to build a landfill like that.

I too think it should be sequestered, ideally in fairly stable conditions; worst case, it stays there for the next thousand years and the plastic breaks down into whatever it does (entropy etc). But in a good case, they discover a means to effectively reuse, recycle or break down plastics, so that the sequestered plastic can be processed.

But it's not economically viable, not when it's cheaper to export it AND get paid by counties and the government (in the form of subsidies) for the box-ticking exercise of separating it out and calling it recycled.

Huh? Everyone already builds landfills like that. They have to be clay lined anyway and leachate collected for a number of reasons.

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