Plastic2Oil

Plastic2Oil is an innovative biofuel manufacturing plant that has moved beyond the pilot stage and is now expanding its operating capacity and expanding to additional locations. It is different from other biofuel plants in important ways. Most biofuel facilities in the USA use corn to create ethanol, which is wasteful of an important food source and may consume more energy creating the ethanol than are found in the ethanol they produce. The many efforts to produce cellulosic biofuel from agricultural waste, wood, switchgrass, and other organic sources are still in the experimental stage.

Plastic2Oil converts waste plastic into low-sulfur biofuel that they sell primarily for off-road diesel fuel, although they have the flexibility to create a variety of fuels. According to the US EPA the USA generated 31 million tons of plastic waste in 2010, representing 12.4 percent of total municipal solid waste, and of that plastic only 8 percent was recovered for recycling ( http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/plastics.htm ).  Plastic2Oil uses types of plastic that are not even collected for recycling.

Plastic2Oil is actively using the free market capitalist system to work on several important environmental problems at the same time: reducing green-house gas emissions; recycling an important waste stream from manufacturing, agriculture and municipal solid waste; and reducing the need to convert valuable petroleum resources into a fuel to burn.

Fieldtrip class in the Plastic2Oil production plant, listening to a description of the Plastic2Oil process by John Bordynuik, Founder and Chief of Technology , who invented and designed the process to convert waste plastic to end-user specific biofuels.

The production process is able to use a wide variety of ‘plastic’ inputs, this photograph is of new equipment constructed for the plant expansion that is used to remove heavy metals and other components of the recycled plastic at the start of the production process.

Hat tip to MBOT