He and the corporation he works for or own has developed a machine to turn plastic garbage back in to oil! Little tiny machine. http://http://www.care2.com/causes/global-warming/blog/machine-converts-plastic-trash-into-oil-video/ The video is well worth watching.
It’s not the solution to getting off of fossil fuels, but a fabulous way to get rid of the surplus plastic garbage problem in ALL countries.
In your face, Exxon!
I wonder how much energy this uses. Do you get more out than you put in?
Awesome machine. Fixed link here.
Couple of questions:
a) I’m not a chemist, but is it really that easy to turn plastic polymers back into oil?
b) how much power does it use to make a litre of oil? And what’s the carbon impact of that energy?
He does sort of address the latter question towards the end, pointing out that emissions from gasoline aren’t the only thing that have a carbon impact on its use - it’s the infrastructure of transporting the gasoline around too. Would be interesting to see the maths.
Isn’t that impossible?
Nonetheless if it was to become economical to turn plastic back into crude and then re-refine the crude into its constituent hydrocarbons that would undoubtedly solve a few problems about plastic pollution and the decline in available crude for plastic production.
Absolutely not, we have laws of thermodynamics, not suggestions.
Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.
This is still really awesome if you think about it. If you like hoarded all the plastic crap you have, you wouldn’t have to go and spend craploads on petrol for your car. This is gonna be a thing. Please for the love of god let this become worldwide and not go the way of the electric car.
Nah, it’s totally possible. You just have to count the plastic garbage as having zero energy. We know that’s not really true, but for the purposes of human energy needs, it is. When you say “Does it get more energy?”, what you really mean is “Does it get more USABLE energy?”
It should be pointed out that this guy isn’t the first person to come up with the basic idea of cooking plastic into gasoline:
The machine makes oil, not gasoline. To make gasoline that would be suitable for use in your car, you’d have to do further refinement and put in additives. By the time you had made the oil (and that machine looks like it uses a LOT of electricity - it’s basically an oven) and set up your own refining process in your garage ANd come up with a legal and safe way to get rid of the byproducts, you’d have spent far more money on the gas than it costs at the gas station.
And you’d also have ordinary shmoes refining substances that are both explosively combustible and hideously poisonous. I don’t think this idea will scale down well for making gasoline. 
We get more energy out of burning oil and wood than we put in to gathering it, so of course it’s not impossible. All matter has potential energy in it. We’re getitng all this energy we use from somewhere. The “production” of energy is really about releasing potential energy and turning it into useful energy. If you come up with a method to refine it in such a way that it can generate more energy than the refinement process… well, that’s how we came to use kerosene, gasoline, heating oil, wood, coal, etc., etc. Not to mention uranium.
Furthermore, it wouldn’t necessarily be the case that it would be a bad thing, if the extra energy put into refining the plastic were made up for by avoiding even less desirable externalities, like plastic waste.
So then it’s impossible to get a net energy gain by pumping oil from the ground and refining it?
There’s energy stored in the chemical bonds of the plastics. When those plastics are converted into oil is that energy retained? If so, does the energy available in the fuel refined from that oil exceed what went into the whole process (plastic -> oil -> fuel) or not? I have no idea, but I don’t think that it’s so obvious that the laws (and I’m quite aware that they are not “suggestions”, thank you very much :rolleyes:) of thermodynamics rule it out.
Does this mean that, at some point in the future, we’ll be able to pay slightly more to fuel our cars with post-consumer recycled gasoline?
The potential energy in stable long chain polymers is significantly negative, which is easily demonstrated by trying to burn plastic bag versus the ease with which oil and gasoline ignite.
Without looking at the technology in detail, it looks like either bombastic overstatement or outright scam.
Stranger
Stranger
I think he got the idea from the fusion engine of the DeLorean time machine.
I read your link and have to wonder why a big deal wasn’t made about it? Looks like the same principle. From your link:"Gershow Recycling, a scrap metal company based in New York, US, has just said it will be the first to buy a Hawk-10. Gershow collects metal products, shreds them and turns them into usable pure metals. Most of its scrap comes from old cars, but for every ton of steel that the company recovers, between 226 kg and 318 kg of “autofluff” is produced.
Autofluff is the stuff that is left over after a car has been shredded and the steel extracted. It contains plastics, rubber, wood, paper, fabrics, glass, sand, dirt, and various bits of metal. GRC says its Hawk-10 can extract enough oil and gas from the left-over fluff to run the Hawk-10 itself and a number of other machines used by Gershow.
Because it makes extracting reusable metal more efficient and evaporates water from autofluff, the Hawk-10 should also reduce the amount of end material that needs to be deposited in landfill sites."
So the technology is in place and doing at least some good. Perhaps not as much good as it looked at 5:30 in the morning one half a cuppa coffee, but it’s great to see some people and companies moving in the right direction, not just talking about it. 
Thank you for all the extra info, I am not a chemist type as I think you can tell and can use all the enlightenment I can get.
I am not a chemist either, nor apparently a linkist. Thank you for fixing it!
People have been trotting out various machines like this for the last 20 years, seeking funds and then we never hear anything more about them. I remember the last one was supposed to take garbage in and put out oil, water and metal solids.
My take is that they are nothing more than the modern equivalent of the medieval Alchemical “cabinets” where you would put lead or base metal in and allegedly get Gold out of them. Scam then, scam now.
My guess is that the reason you don’t hear about these machines is that they use five times as much energy to make the oil as the oil produces. You’ll note the video for the Japanese invention doesn’t really mention how long the process takes, and it’s clearly an energy-intensive machine.
I don’t doubt for an instant that you can get oil out of plastic, but if you use five thousand assloadjoules of energy doing it, it’s a neat science experiment but a practical uselessness. I’m not sure they’re all scams as Chimera seems to imply; I’m sure some of these inventors are sincere. They get the machine making oil, and think holy CRPA I CAN MAKE OIL!!! and they’ll just refine the process until it’s energy efficient, and guess what, it never is.
In the case of the Hawk-10 there’s a bunch of PR-sounding announcements about it in 2007 and nothing since. If someone invented a machine that turned plastic waste into oil in a manner that actually produced a net gain in fuel, they’d be working three shifts at twenty giant factories to make them.
If the current trends continue – finite resources being used up while trash piles grow – at some point the cost:benefit ratio might become attractive.