[Jetson Daily]

Plastic Bags

Can be Recycled

Into Diesel Fuel

 

Posted: 27 Feb 2014 04:46 PM PST
title

Researchers at the University of Illinois, or more
precisely the Illinois Sustainable Technology
Center, have discovered a process that can turn
used plastic shopping bags into a compatible
drop-in diesel fuel and a number of petroleum
products. The recycling process also works to
recover most of the initial manufacturing inputs
that go into producing plastic shopping bags.
Given that each year an estimated 100 billion
shopping bags are thrown away in the US alone,
this is great news indeed.

According to the researchers, the recycling
process actually produces a lot more energy
than it requires, along with resulting in the
creation of transportation fuels such as diesel.
The latter can then be blended with existing
ultra-low-sulfur diesels and biodiesels. The
other products that can be obtained by this
shopping bag recycling process include natural
gas, naphtha, gasoline, waxes and lubricating
oils, namely engine oil and hydraulic oil. As
the lead researcher, Brajendra Kumar Sharma,
put it: “You can get only 50 to 55 percent fuel
from the distillation of petroleum crude oil.
But since this plastic is made from petroleum
in the first place, we can recover almost 80
percent fuel from it through distillation.”

oil
team
To recycle the shopping bags, the researchers used
a process called pyrolysis, which has been used
previously to transform plastic bags into crude oil
products. The process works by heating the plastic
bags in an oxygen-free chamber to obtain the oil.
However, the University of Illinois research team
has managed to refine the material created through
pyrolysis into different petroleum products, and
have achieved their goal of producing a fuel that
meets the standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel
and biodiesel fuels.
The results of their study revealed that the fuels
which result from their process can be blended
into regular diesel at rates of up to 30%, without
any compatibility issues or any necessary
changes. In fact, nearly all properties of the
produced fuel were within ASTM D975 and
EN 590 diesel specifications, while the
derived cetane number (the measure of
the combustion quality of diesel requiring
compression ignition), and lubricity were
superior to conventional diesel fuel.
These findings are very promising, since
they could prove to be the answer of how
to successfully and effectively recycle plastic
bags. However, before the process can be
used to recover the initial inputs from
manufacturing plastic bags and reduce
the amount of petroleum required for
 diesel and other fuels, it must first be
successfully scaled up to help in dealing
with the massive amounts of discarded
shopping bags. The challenge of getting
people to recycle their shopping bags,
however, still remains.