Yahoo News Plan to recycle plastic waste into clean fuels
Every minute of every day, a truckload of plastic enters the world’s oceans, according to figures from Greenpeace – with eight million tons entering the water every year.
But could plastic be recycled into useful clean fuels – and never enter the ocean at all?
Research from Purdue university suggests that at least some plastic – polyolefin waste – can be turned into useful products, boosting the recycling industry by making it profitable.
Professor Linda Wang of Purdue University says, ‘Our strategy is to create a driving force for recycling by converting polyolefin waste into a wide range of valuable products, including polymers, naphtha (a mixture of hydrocarbons), or clean fuels.
‘Our conversion technology has the potential to boost the profits of the recycling industry and shrink the world’s plastic waste stock.’
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‘These plastics degrade slowly and release toxic microplastics and chemicals into the land and the water. This is a catastrophe, because once these pollutants are in the oceans, they are impossible to retrieve completely.’
The conversion process turns more than 90 percent of polyolefin waste into many different products, including pure polymers, naphtha, fuels, or monomers.
The researchers hope to optimise the conversion process to produce high-quality gasoline or diesel fuels.
Some plastics can last for up to 1,000 years in the environment – and plastic bags have been found 36,000 feet below the surface, at the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench.
