One thing must be said: we need oil anyway, no matter how much solar panels and wind mills we build. Namely: wind mill bearings (even bicycles), chains, and even on carts behind the mule. And please don’t suppose that you can use vegetable oil everywhere. Try putting that in your gear box or rear axle of your car.

People don’t usually think how the western movie style coaches were lubricated. Probably with animal grease and/or vegetable oil mix. Then we really need the wheel smith quite often.

Meaning: the eco hype don’t speak about lubrication. This article was about oil (from plastic), and oil lubricates things. I’m for it, since we need moving things after inventing a wheel. Sorry for my clumsy English.

Plas2Fuel’s conversion process represents, I suspect, a true and dramatic “Paradign Shift” is plastics recycling worldwide. Early, possibly overly optimistic, projections suggest that as much as 20 to 40% of US solid wastes to landfills will be diverted and recycled with a “overall BTU recovery rate above 60%”. With a Portland, Oregon area 1,200 gallon per day revcovery plant in siting approval process in Februry 2010, the Plas2Fuel process is poised for dramatic success and recognition.

The possiblitlity that the Plas2Fuel process will be used to recover the 300,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean floating plastic debris is a particularly attractive engineering and environmental proposal. A $100 million floating conversion/recovery plant could utilize PV solar, wave energy technologies and a fraction of product oil to generate up to 25,000 gallons per day of high grade synthetic oil.

Don B. Hennig, PE

But ya, I love the idea. It is still oil, but at least it cleans up the plastic and reduces imports and drilling and, if only.... it could reduce Tar Sands expansion [they intend to QUADRUPLE it over the next 10 years] .

“I have to agree with Alanna. There are way too many people who really don’t care, or don’t want to be inconvenienced with changing the way they do things, so the amount of plastics that can be reused will stay pretty consistent. Might as well put it to good use and reduce the amount of virgin material used.
I recently decided to become as plastic-free as possible and am glad to have found this site. My recycling company is picky about what they accept, so I searched and found a place I can take the sour cream and yogurt cups and switched to butter in a box, among other changes. Thanks for what you’re doing!! “

This is a great intermediate step since it takes one of our problems and uses it to mitigate another of our problems while we work on the longer-ranged final solutions.

I didn’t see anyone mention ‘carbon neutral’. Perhaps it is an concept that doesn’t get enough press. In essence, making fuel out of carbon that is already on the surface of the planet is not pumping more carbon into the cycle. In fact, the process actually removes carbon not only from our landfills, but also turns it into useful charcoal, or carbon black which can be put into the soil and used by plants, or added to tires.

Carbon is in demand in the commercial sector and will become even more of a traded product as we perfect new technologies such as carbon nano-tubes (a very strong substance).

As long as it’s here, let’s make it useful.

Now … back to our regularly scheduled program of discussing how to reduce what we use … perhaps carbon nanotubes can be added to glass to make it thinner and less breakable?

i think you’re onto something with it. feeling like it’s ok to create more plastic waste because – hey! it’s not waste at all! it’s fuel! – sounds exactly like human nature, unfortunately.

The thing that has to change is the culture – either we’re gonna clean up, or we’re not. If we are going to use less plastic and less oil, finding something to do with the old stuff is good. If we’re not going to change our culture, we’ll use whatever technology we develop as a screen to hide how bad things are.