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Loading...Machine Converts Plastic Trash Into Oil (Video)
Our society is addicted to plastic.
Whether it’s shopping bags, water bottles, or the rings from around a pack of soda cans, excessive plastic waste is choking our streets, landfills, and waterways.
Recycling provides one way to keep this waste from spoiling our environment, but it’s energy and time intensive, and usually only results in more plastic products that will eventually be discarded.
Akinori Ito, the CEO of Blest, a Japanese company, wondered why we didn’t take the deconstruction process a step further: turning mountains of plastic waste into a new source of oil.
Blest produces the machines in various sizes suitable for more industrial purposes or simple home use. There are already 60 in use across Japan at farms, fisheries, and small factories with some beginning to ship overseas for the environmentally conscious and curious abroad (Motherboard.tv).
Read more: blest, energy, global warming, japan, machine, oil, petroleum, plastic waste, recycling, sustaintmc
Image Credit: Flickr - katerha
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may
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This sounds good. Isn't oil using in plastics production?
I bet this invention will quietly disappear, the oil companies will see to that.
I worry about the energy burned in the use of this technology, and the pollution after the fact. Perhaps if we look at this as the first generation of this machine, by second or third generation it should be a barn-burner (no pun intended) if Big Oil lets the man live long enough to get it there.
This machine is amazing. If every country did this, there would be a lot less trash. It could give developing countries oil locally, so that it would not have to travel such great distances to reach them. I am impressed with his educating children so that they realize that plastic is not trash.
Actually, Amber, it looks like he's using Thermal Depolymerization (TDP); that technology was invented by an American, Paul Baskis, and the patent is owned by an American company, Changing World Technologies (http://www.changingworldtech.com/). It doesn't just work with plastic, either -- *anything* made mostly of long-chain hydrocarbons, from tires to turkey guts, can be turned into oil in a TDP converter. Sadly, CWT is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy at present as a result of a catastrophically ill-timed initial public offering (their stock hit the market just as the market was bottoming out).
Not to knock Ito or the Japanese in general -- while Japan may have produced fewer completely novel technologies than the U.S., Japan's engineers have an absolute genius for taking technologies invented elsewhere and making them smaller, lighter, less expensive and more efficient, and it looks as though that's what Ito has done with the TDP process.
this is AWESOME!! I want one!! Japanese people are so smart. they've invented so many awesome things like this for the environment. what has America made? nothing...
Awesome!
Wow! an increidible machine! I want one!
Well, thank you for a nice article. It gives one a temporary way out feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Now how about a follow-up article about the practical applications? How about the questions of whether an individual can get their hands on one of those machines? Would the cost be prohibitive? Are there byproducts from the garbage burned or do the entire plastic items completely return to oil? Etc., etc...
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