Microwave Turns Plastic Back to Oil

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A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas. With a finely tuned microwave a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers)- Global Resource Corporation (GRC). 

1. Description

2. Why

3. How

4. Future Trends

5. Related Links

Description

Plastics are durable and degrade very slowly. One of the main advantages of this material is the low price and incredible versatility, which led to a rapid expansion of plastic compounds in almost all industry areas.Now, a US company has pushed the idea of recycling plastic further than any other producer, with a novel technology that turns plastic materials back into the oil they were made from and gas.
Why

The problem is that plastics are made of oil and should petroleum prices continue to rise, so will the cost of plastic. Not to mention the fact that oil is not renewable. The same property that made plastic so popular, its durability, is making it hard to get rid of, thus turning it into one of the most important pollutant chemicals in the world.Global Resource Corporation (GRC) said that the only requirements are a finely tuned giant microwave oven and lots of plastic. The result is the initial raw material, combustible gas and a few leftovers.Autofluff is the stuff that is left over after a car has been shredded and the steel extracted. It contains plastics, rubber, wood, paper, fabrics, glass, sand, dirt, and various bits of metal. Hawk-10 can extract enough oil and gas from the left-over fluff to run the Hawk-10 itself and a number of other machines used by Gershow.

How

The conversion process relies on microwaves, actually 1200 different frequencies of the microwave range, each acting on a specific component inside the plastic material. When a microwave of specific frequency meets the corresponding hydrocarbon material, it breaks it down into diesel oil and combustible gas.The Hawk-10, the official name of the device, is not different from commercial microwave applications and comes in various sizes, from an industrial microwave oven to a giant concrete mixer.
"Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process," says Jerry Meddick, director of business development at GRC, based in New Jersey. "We release those hydrocarbon molecules from the material and it then becomes gas and oil." Whatever does not have a hydrocarbon base is left behind, minus any water it contained as this gets evaporated in the microwave.Simplified recycling:

  • Take a piece of copper wiring
  • It is encased in plastic – a kind of hydrocarbon material.
  • Release all the hydrocarbons, which strips the casing off the wire.
  • The process produce fuel in the form of oil and gas.
  • It also makes it easier to extract the copper wire for recycling.

Running 9.1 kilograms of ground-up tyres through the Hawk-10 produces 4.54 litres of diesel oil, 1.42 cubic metres of combustible gas, 1 kg of steel and 3.40 kg of carbon black.

Future Trends

No process is 100 percent efficient, so there are some leftovers, the compounds that don't have a hydrocarbon base. But these form only a small fraction of the final product and the overall efficiency of the conversion makes the new recycling technique appealing to most industrial areas. Gershow Recycling, a scrap metal company based in New York, US, has just said it will be the first to buy a Hawk-10.Gershow collects metal products, shreds them and turns them into usable pure metals. Most of its scrap comes from old cars, but for every ton of steel that the company recovers, between 226 kg and 318 kg of "autofluff" is produced.It makes extracting reusable metal more efficient and evaporates water from autofluff, the Hawk-10 should also reduce the amount of end material that needs to be deposited in landfill sites.

Keywords

Hawk-10, Giant microwave, Global Resource Corporation, Plastic to Oil.

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