Drawbacks to the Blest plastic-to-oil system?

Ran across this vid and my initial reaction (as I’m quite the contrarian) is that there’s no free lunch. I’m sure there are drawbacks, but if it were powered by solar, what are they?

It’s a interesting alternative to plastic recycling. I wonder what is more efficient, and the quality of the recycled plastic compared to ‘new from oil’ plastic. It may be better to convert (new/pumped) oil to plastic for it’s useful life then convert that plastic to oil to be burned. Then the standard plastic recycling model.

This cannot be. If it’s economical to turn old plastic into oil, and it’s economical to turn oil into new plastic, then it must necessarily be at least as economical to turn old plastic into new plastic.

The trump strategy here is to take all of the old plastic, recycle it all into new plastic, and then only use oil-sourced plastic to fill in the gap in demand. Only in the extremely unlikely case that demand for new plastic is smaller than the supply of old plastic to recycle does it make sense to turn plastic into oil.

It can be IF something is lost in the process. If the oil from plastic is missing components that the oil from the ground has. The oil from plastic may be fine to burn, but plastic may be better using the raw material of pumped oil.

True, I was assuming that the oil produced was basically identical to oil from the ground. That’s probably not a bad assumption, though: Crude oil isn’t all that complicated a substance.

The ‘free lunch’ aspect must come from the low cost of using recycled plastic as the raw material. It’s supposed to take 1 kilowatt of energy to produce 1 quart of oil, and I recall something like 1 gallon of oil producing 40 kilowatts of energy, so that shouldn’t be a drawback. So unless it takes less than 1 kilowatt to produce 1 quart of oil using conventional means oil refining then there shouldn’t be any drawbacks if the oil produced is useful for other purposes.

I think it’s pretty obvious the technology must have serious economic limitations, or it would be rolled out at a large scale to make a profit from plastic trash, instead of being used as a demonstration to kids to bring home the value of waste. What those limitations are is not possible to tell from the amount of information in the video, at least for me.

Looks like it has.

Looks like somebody’s made a larger version of the Japanese guy’s converter. It’ll be interesting to see if it manages widespread adoption. At this moment, it doesn’t seem like they’ve managed to sell any of their units. In theory, they could just go into oil production for themselves - get paid to dispose of waste, and get paid for oil.

I have a feeling we’ll see widespread landfill mining in the near future, because the aluminum content of landfills already approaches that of bauxite ore, and because it may well be cheaper in the future to convert old 2-liter bottles back into oil than to get oil out of the ground.