Alternative energy often means the better-known sources like solar, wind power, or biofuels. A new form of alternative fuels recovers energy from post-consumer or post-industrial plastic wastes that cannot be recycled efficiently. Technologies for creating these fuels attempt to solve two big problems: the overabundance of unrecycled plastic in landfills, and the creation of domestic energy sources. Several of these plastics-to-fuel (PTF) conversion processes are on the verge of commercialization in the US.
The waste-to-energy (WTE) industry began by approaching polymer wastes as a problem to be eliminated, but failed to come up with financially feasible methods, Jay Schabel, CEO of PolyFlow, told us. Previously, the only purpose for creating fuels was burning them for heat, but the quality and selling price of those fuels is low. Schabel says:
You can't sort your way to financially sustainable success. With a toothbrush made of different plastics, for example, the materials you can recover can never justify the effort it takes to sort them. So if a technology had a high cost of sorting on the front end, and produced a product with a cheap selling price, it couldn't survive.
Common household items made of mixed plastics, whether clean or contaminated, can serve as a feedstock for PolyFlow's pyrolysis-based plastics-to-fuel conversion process. (Source: PolyFlow)
Plastics-to-fuel energy recovery methods offer a different approach by creating technologies that can become profitable. These technologies are aimed at the non-recycled plastics (NRPs) that would otherwise go into landfills, since the highest-BTU waste stream available is polymer.
In conventional WTE plants, municipal solid waste (MSW) is burned and the heat is used to produce steam in a closed-loop process, Jeff Wooster, global sustainability leader for Dow Performance Plastics, told us. That steam either produces process heat for operations like paper mills or utilities, or it's converted to electricity. This produces lots of energy from plastic and a fair amount from paper and wood, but very little energy from other sources.
WTE processes are the least efficient for plastic, said Greg Wilkinson, past president of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. "Recovered fuel is more selective. Here, you take some components of the waste stream and turn them into fuel for narrower uses."
Joseph Stalin was said to have said " he who votes doesn't count, but, he who counts the votes counts " obama takes this seriously, by assigning ACORN spinter groups responsibility for census, which includes voter protocol, he plans to be relected by whatever method it takes, being in control of the country gives him the authority to investigate whomever he selects, and investigate, or not all compli]aints regarding election fraud, like the 2008 election where thousands of voter fraud compliants went uninvestigated by Holder His Attorney General. Our future looks bleak unless there is intervention to eliminate criminality from government---Palin was planning to end lobbie influence in law making, McCain planned to end affirmative action, or biggotry in he muticultural nation we are, micromanaged by affirmative administraitors assigned their jb because of color rather than job integrity, the significant variable of any position of authority. This mistake has caused chaos with uqualified personnel forcing their misinformed opinions on americas citizens, This should not be interpreted as racial, its simply doing he right things or doing the wrong things.
Many countries reuse virtually all paper, plastics glass, metal, and have no landfill. Thorium reactors more economical and safe are thorium reactors, by bombarding thorium compounds with neutrons it becomes radioactive parallel to unanium, when problems occur, shut off the wave resonant frequenct and amplitude of neutrons, and radioactivity ceases to exist, plus thorium is more abundent than uranium, using the reactors currently used to supply electricity---Gasoline from coal becomes cheaper to distill from liquified coal when petroleum reaches 34 dollars a barrel. Hitler fueled his armed forces with coal gasoline and diesel, politicians lobbies, cash bribes, manipulating the epa, prevents us from doing the right thnigs
Glenn , what do you think the solution is? Isn't obvious? One just collects the neighbors, local business plastic waste that they don't use. They are already available in Japan for home use.
PV has dropped a lot. You can get them for $1/wt until the trade war over them with China heats up and prices will go up some, 20-30% so if you want them, buy now.
But shop well and learn what it takes or you'll pay 2-3x's too much. sunelec.com is a site to start and probably buy from as their prices are hard to beat though others match them.
Where is the Gov in this Droid? It doesn't need it at all. From what I've researched and Ann's numbers it's clear it's profitable to do.
What I want is the huge subsidies to big oil, coal which are in the order of $500B/yr from health to oil war, etc costs. If that we in them where it belongs, paid for by those who cause the problems, costs, then RE is clearly cheaper now in many cases and sites and needs no subsidies.
You need mandate to keep us from going off a cliff when oil spikes. Just how much do you think an oil recession costs? We've had 5 over 35 yrs or so.
We need to get millions of small energy producers, say 1 every 10-20 people to collect, convert the closest viable RE and sell it to the others instead of our money going to protect oil dictators and international oil companies that do their expensing here but keep profit overseas. What thanks for protecting them. For 50% of that money we could be energy independent in 5-7 yrs.
I see many small 1-5 person businesses because collecting is the biggest cost, one must be close to the supply so must be kept small, making a nice profit. Since oil will only go up over time, it only gets more profitable.
Jerry dycus; One of the 'small' units produces 1 gallon of oil per hour. Another 'small' unit consumes 22 lbs of plastic and produces 2.7 gallons of oil per hour. How would you feed one of these ? How much plastic waste do you think a household would generate ? And would it be the best 'grade' of plastic to feed one of theswe systems ? I think this is a great concept, but I don't think it would be a good fit for household use, yet. Also, I have looked into wind turbines, but not really seriously - the wind where I live is not enough to power one. I like the idea of solar for household water heating. I don't know if the efficiency of photovoltaic cost-justifies a single-home system.
Dennis, I'm not sure which technology you mean that "burns," but the main one mentioned in this article, pyrolysis, does not. Despite the Greek word for "fire" at the root of "pyrolysis," when applied to the chemical conversion of plastics the term doesn't mean burning or incineration. As the article states, "Pyrolysis is the thermochemical decomposition of a material without the presence of air or oxygen." As just mentioned, even WTE, which does burn, is by law an entirely closed-loop emission-contained system. Today, this is a non-issue, at least in the US.
Tim and naperlou, these technologies, primarily pyrolysis, could not be widely used previously because they are just on the verge of scaling up. One of the reasons it's taken so long is because of widespread misunderstanding of what pyrolysis is and what it entails, on the part of both law-makers and citizens/voters. Much of this has been due to confusion about its name and what it means, and to confusing this technology with those that do, in fact, burn. However, even those that do, like WTE, are, by law, entirely closed-loop emission-contained systems.
Personally - I wish we could get the government out of all this. The whole economics and marketplace interaction between various green and "non-green" technologies is confused by introducing government money and mandates into the mix. Plus its picking winners and losers. Solyndra comes to mind.
That said, this is interesting technology with high potential. Right now, the company I work for ships all sorts of plastic scrap over to China. Whatever we cannot recover and use internally goes there. I have no idea what they do with it.
My guess is the situation at my company is just a microcosm of the plastics industry and would be curious to know how many other plastics processors do the same. Maybe at some point it would pay for processors to recover energy from their scrap - if reusing the plastic itself isn't feasible.
Thanks for the additional links Ann. I've been following JBI for the last year. There's so much controversy around the way the comapny's being run, that it's interferring with the day-to-day progress.
It's a great idea given the world situation. If they can get more gov't contracts, wider appeal and use will follow.
The old phrase "follow the money" applies here though. I've noticed over the last few years, it seems to be in most industries and countries best interest to keep the price of oil high-even artificailly high. That's quite a shift from previous decades.
No doubt that we need viable alternatives but, as usual, the "how" and not the "what" needs to be examined.
Doubt the govt would invest in this, even if it does make sense. Green "investment" is, IMO, about securing the votes of a particular group. This tech creates and burns (horrors) petroleum products. Combustion of any kind will be anethema to them.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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