Oil to plastic...plastic to oil?

[julius]

[video=youtube;qGGabrorRS8]

I'm highly skeptical about this. If it's just that easy, why did it just now happen?

 

[Entity]

I suppose it depends on energy costs. Does it cost more energy to make the oil than the amount that potentially exists in what is produced? If so, then it might be seen as a waste of energy. Of course, if you were using renewable energy to power the machine it wouldn't matter, but you'd be talking about an industrial sized amount of power to do it on a large scale, which could make the project very expensive.

 

[BrianFromWA]

without looking at the video, I did a materials study on this once. Only certain plastics are even going to be able to go to a liquid state...most will just char (property of the thermoplastic process). Entity's right about the energy usage as well. Even if it's possible to get it back, it's energy-prohibitive to change states back that way.

 

[BrianFromWA]

ok, I kind of see where he's going. If you're talking about subsidizing the costs in order to make it some kind of "plastic garbage cleanup and CO2 emission reduction" program, there may be some merit to it. But the pure "plastics came from oil, so lets send it back!" idea isn't close to being a good trade off strictly in energy or monetary costs.

Good on this guy for doing something about it, though.

 

[OSUBlazerfan]

Looks cool

 

[Paxil]

Plastic is made from oil isn't it? We already recycle it... probably costs more energy to turn back into oil that it would be worth. Am I missing something?

 

[BrianFromWA]

you can melt a thermoplastic back into a liquid, plastic compound...which you can re-use to make more plastic stuff. THis guy is the first who's made something that it seems can be turned back to oil that I've heard of. It's very expensive to turn it back to "energy". And if it's a thermo-setted plastic, it can only be cut up like rubber tires to be re-used, not melted.

I'd be very intrigued to see what sludge is at the bottom of this guy's machine after a melting cycle.