# Plastic from oil-- Oil from plastic

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 28, 2014, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264 "2014-07-28T18:32:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bardos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bardos/32/1069_2.png) [@bardos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bardos)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2014, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264/1 "2014-07-28T18:32:42Z")

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Is this a possible recycling possibility?

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**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2014, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264/2 "2014-07-28T18:47:15Z")

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Sure, bury it and wait a few million years.

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**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2014, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264/3 "2014-07-28T19:09:44Z")

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I’ve seen Youtube videos of people making oil from plastic; it’s possible but prohibitively expensive.

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**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2014, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264/4 "2014-07-28T19:54:57Z")

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I’m sure they can recycle them like that, but what would the point be? You probably would spend more money and energy converting old soda bottles and sandwich bags into oil than you’d get burning that oil.

If there’s an efficient process and/or there’s unlimited energy, then it might possibly make sense, but only if the soda-bottle oil process is more efficient somehow than say… running some sort of coal-to-liquid or gas-to-liquid process to produce motor fuel.

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**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2014, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264/5 "2014-07-28T20:03:15Z")

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Plastics can be depolymerised, but the transformation requires an energy input - the process can be made profitable if the source materials are cheap enough (a portion of the recovered oil/gas is burned to fuel the conversion).

But if you’re burning virgin oil/gas already to generate electricity, it’s probably more effective to burn the plastics directly, and cut down on the former.

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**Author:** ![AaronX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7bcc69/32.png) [@AaronX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AaronX)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2014, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plastic-from-oil-oil-from-plastic/694264/6 "2014-07-29T09:25:14Z")

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Thermal depolymerisation [Thermal depolymerization - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization) is one such process. Unfortunately one factory that tried to use this process on turkey guts went bankrupt.

I wonder if it’s worth, instead of going crude oil \> vehicle fuel, doing crude oil \> plastics \> vehicle fuel, a detour of sorts. Since plastics are hugely useful and we already have so many facilities to process them, and same for vehicles, it might be more efficient to “temporarily” use fuels as plastics instead of creating entirely new materials.