Posted:
27 Feb 2014 04:46 PM PST
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.”
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.
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