By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Imagine, if you please, turning scraps of plastic into usable fuels. Some creative minds are making the idea into a reality, and it's happening right in Niagara Falls, New York State, USA.
Currently, some 30 million tons of waste plastic in the U.S. goes to landfills. Plastic is made from oil, and now a company called J.B.I. based in Niagara Falls has found a way to convert the plastic back to oil.
This is no ordinary ribbon cutting of a new business. This may very well be the inauguration of a new era that converts waste plastic, like packaging from meat plants and scrap from auto factories, to usable gasoline, diesel fuel, home heating oil, and natural gas for cooking and heating.
JBI President and CEO John Bordynuik said, “The fuel reproduces cleaner than the fuels currently found in industry, due to the fact that plastics is already a highly refined hydrocarbon.”
Plastic items we are all familiar with at home can become raw material for the process. The plastic is shredded first and then heated up into a gas. The processor, through a special catalyst, cracks the hydrocarbon chains in the plastic and separates out usable fuel.
“There's your fuel there That's it. This is heating oil right here. This is Number 2 Spec Fuel Oil,” said Bordynuik.
It gets filtered and then pumped right into a tanker truck outside the plant. A factory in Canada will use the product to make plastic pipes. Niagara Falls is hoping the plastics-to-oil manufacturing process will expand and create more green jobs.
Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster said, “Every waste hauler in the United States, Canada, and a lot of other places, is going to have one of these units located on site, because now they can take plastic they would otherwise pay to landfill, and they can convert it into fuel to run their vehicles.”
The creative development for the process started in this lab less than two years ago. A couple of pints of oil could be produced a day. The current plant produces 109 barrels a day. In two more years, the goal is to produce 20,000 barrels a day, and there's no shortage of plastic.
Bordynuik said that in one week alone they receive 18 pallets of plastic, which is about 40,000 pounds. While that is a lot of plastic, to JBI it's a lot of fuel. In fact those 18 pallets equal out to 109 barrels of fuel, the equivalent of 4,400 gallons of diesel.
The natural gas that is produced produced is used to heat and run the process and JBI created 40 green jobs to run the plant.
Green jobs are the jobs of the future and we do well to invest in them.
This is – yet again – proof that we do not have to go the biofuel route; a route that is no good for the environment, and in more than one way, and to us.
Turning plastics into oil (again) and then making that into fuel is real recycling for it goes back in a cycle from plastic to its base material, oil. What could be better aside from doing without petroleum-based products?
© 2011
