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Blest Corp.
Plastic waste goes into one side of the Blest conversion machine, and oil is collected in a container on the other side.
A Japanese inventor has created a machine suitable for home use that can turn plastic waste into fuel, a technological feat that could give us something to do with all the grocery sacks piling up under our kitchen sinks.
The plastic in bags, bottles, caps and other packaging products is made from oil. Akinori Ito's machine turns it back to its original form via a carbon-negative process. It heats up the plastic, traps the vapors in a system of pipes and water chambers that cool the vapors and condense them back into crude oil, explains the website Clean Technica. The crude is suitable for use in generators and some types of stoves. It can be further refined into gasoline.
The machine is sold by Ito's Blest Corporation and is praised for its efficiency: It can convert a kilogram of plastic waste into a liter of oil using a kilowatt-hour of energy. The current system costs $10,000, but Ito hopes the price will fall as demand and production rise.
Ito's machine isn't the first to convert waste plastic into fuel, but is gaining kudos for its size: It's built for home use. Other solutions are larger, such as the Envion Oil Generator, which is capable of processing 10,000 tons of plastic waste annually. Each ton of waste translates to three to five barrels of crude oil that can be further refined to commercial fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. A demonstration plant opened in Washington in 2009.
John Makely / msnbc.com
A front loader pushes around tons of collected material at the Ocean County Recycling Center in New Jersy. A new machine can convert plastic waste into fuel, which could prevent it from going into landfills.
While burning the oil created by these machines releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus contributing to climate change, they are solutions to the growing piles of waste plastic. According to Envion, about 50 million tons of plastic waste is generated each year. If all that was converted back to oil, it would also help reduce reliance on foreign oil, the company says.
More stories on green energy:
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- Green power from algae
- For recyclers, one (complicated) word: Plastics
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).
Leave a Comment:
It's actually 1 kilowatt hour of electricity (3.6 megajoules) required to convert 1 kilogram to 1 litre.
Note the difference between power (kW) and energy (kWh).
You're right about that ... the input should be expressed in terms of energy for a given output. I've made the fix. I'm wondering if the machine can turn a kilogram of plastic into a liter of oil in an hour with a power level of 1,000 watts. But that's a separate question.
I notice no one mentions the EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) value of this process. Uness that value is greater than one, it's an energy loser.
The machine neees 3 hours at 1 kw per hour - 3 kwh.
The article was very sloppily researched. He skipped mentioning that it does not work on plastic soda bottles or PVC plastic. To give people the idea that we would use this indoors in our homes is reckless.
Let's see... It cooks whatever you put into there to over 500 degrees C and outputs a product similar to but not the same as heating oil. Any impurities (or the wrong kinds of plastics) get let behind (maybe melted in the bottom?
The compnay that makes these things do not sell them for home use. Their little machine is primarily for education and research. They sell larger machines for commercial use. And they also sell the refining equipemnt needs to make the output useful as fuels.
awesome, I want one, how close is this for a bio-diesel truck?
How much plastic would it take to create a gallon of bio-diesel? What would be the plastic usage needed to support generating fuel for a single vehicle, if vehicle averaged 25 mpg with fuel and average weekly driving is 200 miles? Would it even be possible to generate enough fuel through "normal" consumption of plastic products?
Love how MSNBC still says things like "contribute to climate change." lol. Hasn't this been debunked over and over. come on.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the Earth is warming, the question is how big a part, if any, do humans play in the current warming trend.
No warming for ten years and we are now entering the 30 year cooling part of the natural 60 year warming/cooling cycle. But there is a lot of evidence where temperature data has been manipulated to show warming.
You can argue that current temperature need to be adjusted downward because of all the heat that is captured and re-radiated from man made structures like roads and buildings. But there is no reason for adjusting past warm temperatures to make them cooler.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/data-corruption-at-giss/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/14/the-met-office-link-buries-the-cet/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/14/adjusting-the-temperature-down-under/
You give 4 links, most of which are from global warming deniers. Hardly convincing. I'm of the belief that most of the warming trends are probably natural, with some smaller percentage being attributed to human activities. I find it funny that many see conspiracies in this stuff. What do these scientists gain from making stuff up? What is their gloabl agenda? You really have nothing to worry about anyway. There will never be any meaningful legislation passed in this country unless something catastrophic happens, which it probably won't; and even if it did, the money behind the companies that produce most of CO2 would still prevent it from happening. Money rules the land, and the CO2 producers control alot of it.
Now if they can make plastic bags from vegetable product instead of fossil fuel, this would even be better. Just think, you could have cooking oil and bio-diesel.
Hey, that would be great!! Divert yet more of our croplands to produce oil or ethanol. Yup. Let's burn our food for fuel.
Dnimwitt...you don't use food crops for this. And if you do, you use the waste.
Whether or not this ever turns into some personal recyling device really isn't as important as the value of the research. We are really only beginning to scratch the surface. Imagine at some point we can take the CO2 out of the air, free the oxygen and recreate new hydrocarbons. If you think about it, the hydrocarbons we make into fuels, weren't always there, they were created through organic processes. Of course energy was involved in those processes, but most of that was free energy, namely the Sun.
The game changer breakthroughs will come when we can recreate those same processes using solar energy. Hydrocarbon based fuels are convenient as they pack a lot of potential in relatively small packages. The key will be in making them 100% recyclable. This may sound like a daunting task, but it is through research like this that discoveries are made that could, at some point lead in that direction. But even in the short term, this kind of thing has benefits in that it allows for reuse of what would otherwise be waste. Even if it's an energy nuetral process, it has benefits.
Kool, beats pitch'im out the window, of the car.
Can we even use crude oil for anything? If I had this I'd end up with a product I have no use for that probably had many impurities that would make it poor for use as a fuel or lubricant, so basically useless at this point. Its needs a built in refinery.
"50 million tons of plastic waste is generated each year"
Nifty invention, hope improvements, etc make it a real winner. Seems like finding ways to reduce plastic packaging on the front end is the true game change way to go.
Very nice. It's a start thats for sure on creating oil from a form of garbage. Just hope the US Government doesn't decide to buy his operations and burry it. Don't let the US kid you, they love oil. It's huge profits. I'm still wondering what happened to the guy in Canada who had a Capictor type battery that would be used to power an electric car. Charges super fast, and not all that waste that batteries create. This was about 5 years ago, haven't heard anything since. Very interesting. A Capictor to me is the only way to go for the future of electric cars. Key is quick charging and less waste, and probably last longer then your battery.
I saw this machine as a smaller prototype on television a while ago. Pretty interesting but requires a lot of plastic to make a small amount of fuel.
This could be promising for municipalities that now require recycling. However, some mechanism will be necessary for dealing with the chlorinated and fluorinated plastics that will inevitably find their way into the waste stream.
Every grocery store should have one.
Oh come on, this will create jobs. Just think of the dumpster divers that will be needed. Trash rights can be sold. Dumpter guards will be needed. EPA folks will have to be hired and ohsa will have to approve safe dumpster diving equipment. Hang on you colledge grads. The youth will have jobs or that Obama told you.
Is this similar to PLAS2FUEL CORPORATION of Tigard, Oregon? This is an exiting technology and to have co-originators competing so soon can only mean good things.
I think that it's great that people are working to find ways to deal with the plastic problem even if we have a long way to go. Global warming or not. Human created or not. The Earth is our home and she provides us with all we need to exist: water, oxygen and food, to name the most obvious. Shouldn't we all do our part, great or small, to cut down on our waste products that harms her?
This is Awesome! Recently I saw some pieces on shows like CNN and the journal with Joan Lunden on PBS that were talking about issues and solutions for industrial recycling. This kind of thing takes it to the next level. Of course it’s not as good as eliminating oil altogether but it will help get rid of some of the waste for now. Plus, it looks like the contraption that fueled the back to the future car.