The plastic waste is heated in a boiler to about 700 degrees Celsius, after which it evaporates. The gas is then cooled down and turns into a diesel-like liquid one hour later.
A kind of pyrolysis, I assume, and very energy intensive. Does this process really produce more stored energy in the output product than it took to run the reaction?
The source material is industrial waste that the owner is receiving for free. Neither economics nor ecological concerns favor this approach notwithstanding the free source of plastic chips.
Yeah, that's my worry. I like the idea of pyrolizing plastic to dispose of it (and get energy), but -- a petrochemical company was just proposing to do this, in what presumably was a much better-controlled process, and there were (justified) protests, because the process was going to send horrible quantities of serious carcinogens up the stack. Which makes me wonder what horrible byproducts this might inadvertently be making.
How do you get 2.7kg of carbon by burning 1kg of plastic? Am I thinking too simplistically about that?
Also he's currently using industrial plastic chips, high quality homogeneous material, if you were using plastic garbage you then run into contaminants, full bottles of whatever, labels, glues different types of plastic - not all plastics will liqify etc etc etc.
Well done for the proof of concept though.
So he's trying to increase his greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible?
Plastic waste is carbon that isn't going into the atmosphere, not very fast at least. Turning it back into oil and then burning that is the very opposite of what we should be doing with it.
> On the other hand, the CO2 emissions from fuel production and combustion are not praiseworthy. First, there is the burning of plastic on the roof. Making 1 liter of diesel requires burning 1 kg of plastic, which results in 2-2.7 kg of carbon emissions. Second, there is the combustion of diesel fuel while driving, which emits 2.7 kg of carbon dioxide per liter. Together, that becomes 4.7 to 5.4 kg CO2 per liter. Consequently, with a fuel economy of 7.14 liters per 100 km, the Volvo emits 33.6 to 38.6 kg of greenhouse gases per 100 km.
> In contrast, the emissions of the average fossil fuel-powered car in Europe amount to 25.8 kg/100 km, including crude oil production, fuel refining, and vehicle manufacturing The emissions of a small electric car like the Nissan Leaf amount to 10.9 kg/100km in Europe, including the emissions of electricity production.
The article make some other interesting points:
> Much of the plastic waste that the Volvo 240 burns burns anyway. Not in cars but in incinerators. That is the case for 44% of plastic waste in Europe.
> The carbon emissions are the same. So is the air pollution, although it’s easier to put a flue gas scrubber on thousands of incinerators than on millions of cars. The main difference is that burning plastic waste in incinerators to power electric cars allows many of us to externalize the side effects of car driving. An incinerator can be (and always is) located in a poor neighborhood, where it causes high incidences of cancer and other health problems despite air pollution control.
And moreover, this isn't really meant to be for widespread adoption:
> In contrast, Schalkx’s Volvo internalizes all the side effects of driving automobiles. The car is not a pleasure to drive, at least not regularly. It is dirty. Its interior stinks of plastic, which cannot be healthy – Gijs keeps the car windows open no matter the weather. Furthermore, he needs to spend a lot of time collecting plastic and making fuel, and all these disadvantages make him think twice before he gets behind the wheel.
There's plenty more interesting points, and the article is relatively short and worth the read.
Sure, it calls it out to some extent, but overall both the article and the art piece itself seem to imply that this is a somewhat good idea, and definitely imply that plastic waste is a comparable problem to global warming (or even more pressing, given that the art piece massively sacrifices carbon emissions per km for the massive gain of burning some plastic).
The reality is that plastic waste is a much, much lesser problem than global warming. Burning plastic to power cars, even a statement, is insane given that we have already blown past the 1.5 degrees warming and are on a trajectory that will probably lead to much more than 2 degrees, which is now the most optimistic target for 2100 - and even this assumes 0 net emissions in 10 years, which is obviously a fantasy.
Overall this is an idiotic art piece that entirely misses the point of what we should really care about in environmentalism.
> overall both the article and the art piece itself seem to imply that this is a somewhat good idea
Literally this is not the case, and should be evidenced by the quotes I highlighted. It's more an intellectual deep dive on an interesting concept. It's not advocating that people ought to do this. To quote TFA:
> Carbon emissions are not the only worry. Because of the chemicals added to plastic, burning it to make fuel creates a lot of nasty air pollution. Nobody in their right mind would propose a switch to cars fuelled by plastic waste. However, it is instructive to examine the motives behind this unanimous conclusion.
Low-Tech Magazine's niche is low tech self-sufficiency, which is the main talking point of the article. Here from the first paragraph:
> During the Second World War, many motorized vehicles in continental Europe were converted to drive on firewood. 1 That happened as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels. Wood gas vehicles were a not-so-elegant alternative to their petrol cousins, but their range was comparable to today’s electric vehicles. In Germany alone, around 500,000 wood gas cars, buses, and trucks were operated by the end of WWII. An even more cumbersome alternative was the gas bag vehicle.
> It’s unlikely that Schalkx will drive 12,000 km per year, and so, ultimately, he will produce less pollution than the drivers of more sustainable-looking cars that face none of these problems.
> Somehow, the Dutch authorities, who are not known for their permissivity, officially approved the car after inspection. Schalkx drives tax-free and – thanks to his car being an oldtimer – can enter low-emission zones, where he parks alongside the latest electric SUV. Justice is not yet out of this world.
To me this seems to be an overall endorsement of the project as an environmentally friendly idea.
It's a bit of a wild interpretation that the author claims that making driving unpleasant is an effective way of reducing carbon emissions. The second quote seems more a wry observation from someone who has disdain for wealthy people.
And of course you can cherry pick the one or two positive notes from the article but then you'd have to ignore:
> the CO2 emissions from fuel production and combustion are not praiseworthy
> Nobody in their right mind would propose a switch to cars fuelled by plastic waste.
> The car is not a pleasure to drive, at least not regularly. It is dirty. Its interior stinks of plastic, which cannot be healthy
I'm not sure how this could be an overall endorsement.
Low-tech or traditional methods don’t mean they’re inherently better for the climate or environment though. The Victorian era coal smog was very low-tech and yet we can probably agree that it would be a bad idea to return to that.
like if they called it “trash-burning monthly” it wouldn’t be surprising that you open the cover and find that’s exactly what’s inside, but it’s also not a good thing to encourage even in a hobby sense, really. And there is a lot of the world that has done some pretty awful things environmentally for a very long time.
If it makes you feel better I have hobbies that are environmental disasters too. I don’t feel great about the knowledge that mercury/chromium/selenium intensifier or pyrocat exist, even plain old fixer isn’t great (although people will take it since it’s full of silver and worth recovering).
(In film, this will bind to the un-fixed silver and help pull a little more in, or even strip the fixed silver and re-precipitate another metallic salt instead. Obviously takes a pretty aggressive reducing agent to bind to precipitated noble metals, so more aggressive the action the better it works… and those agents also love to bind to your nerves. So it’s pretty much literally “the better it works the more poisonous”. Mmm, organometallic chemistry, isn’t it grand?)
> Low-tech or traditional methods don’t mean they’re inherently better for the climate or environment though
How is this in contradiction with what I'm saying? To quote my own post:
> Low-Tech Magazine's niche is low tech self-sufficiency
Neither I nor the writer of TFA think the venn diagram of low-tech self-sufficiency and environmentalism is a perfect circle, and that should be pretty obvious.
> it’s also not a good thing to encourage even in a hobby sense
That's not what TFA is doing. Do you really think there's going to be any consequential amount of people taking this up after reading the article? Maybe a few hackers will think it's fun, but the article spends a lot of time emphasizing how undesirable this idea is in practice.
> and all these disadvantages make him think twice before he gets behind the wheel.
So.. it's a toy and not a tool. It tries to invest interest around this mans childish ambitions, but it fails to produce anything of lasting or shared value.
It would be a useful tool in a post-apocalyptic scenario:
> During the Second World War, many motorized vehicles in continental Europe were converted to drive on firewood. That happened as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels. Wood gas vehicles were a not-so-elegant alternative to their petrol cousins, but their range was comparable to today’s electric vehicles. In Germany alone, around 500,000 wood gas cars, buses, and trucks were operated by the end of WWII. An even more cumbersome alternative was the gas bag vehicle.
> Nowadays, there’s much less firewood available than in the 1940s, especially in industrialized regions. So, what would be the solution to the disruption of gasoline or electricity in the Third World War? Dutch designer Gijs Schalkx found another fuel supply, which is abundant: plastic waste.
It could be useful, at the beginning, but sooner rather than later you’re running out of fuel. A wood gas car is infinitely renewable. Wood gas may not work as well in cities, but in a truly post-apocalyptic world cities are the first to go anyway.
In an SHTF situation, such as a country at war? I can sooner believe that, since plastics are more energy-dense than woods. It’s still not all that useful, but at least there is some minor niche it could possibly achieve.
> The emissions of a small electric car like the Nissan Leaf amount to 10.9 kg/100km in Europe, including the emissions of electricity production.
Why are they measuring carbon impact per mile for manufacture? Is this based off some assumed period of ownership after which the car magically is useless and the battery can't be recycled, etc?
I’m far from an expert on recycling of plastic. However, the options I see are as follows:
- it sits in a landfill where the plastic eventually (many years down the line) breaks down into microplastics.
- it gets sent into to a recycling facility (fuel/time/energy spent to transport), then it may or may not get “burned” or processed with other like plastics and eventually recycled (iirc, plastic can really only be recycled through this process a few times)
- it gets sent to city recycling facility but repackaged and sold to some other state or country for processing (+more fuel consumption/time/energy). Then depending on the country, or state it’s processed in same fashion as option 2 and thus incurring more GHGs
- or maybe it somehow ends up in your local street, rivers, lakes, oceans and eventually degrade into microplastics and eventually into the food/water you live on
Plasma gasification is the cleanest mechanism to convert plastics to energy while rendering byproducts inert, there just isn't much will to implement. Energy output can contribute towards direct air capture of carbon to mineralize, the rest can be from renewables.
You can gasify many materials besides plastic (garbage/waste stream). Filter out metals, brick, rock, glass first. Perhaps site near existing landfills in order to balance the ingest stream between ongoing waste and the waste mine. I have heard the phrase that the landfills of today are the mines of tomorrow, but I think they're more like Superfund sites, all to require remediation in the future at some point (hence the importance of projects that can reasonably degrade these materials into inert byproducts).
The first one is much better than any of the others. Global warming is a far more pressing problem than microplastic pollution. Plastic is in fact one of the few materials we have that can sequester carbon in a relatively inert way, so burying it in a landfill is infinitely better than burning it.
I want to believe landfills of plastic are a form of carbon sequestering, but that depends entirely on whether anything leeches out of it over time into ground water.
Your premise implies that he wouldn't have burned anything if he didn't burn plastic. This is largely false for most of the population. You're going to burn _something_ somewhere, whether coal or natural gas at the power plant or most likely gasoline in your car. You might as well burn things that need to be cleaned up anyway.
Yes, we should absolutely burn gasoline before burning plastic. Plastic should be buried, not burned. Of course, ideally we should be riding electrified public transport consuming renewable energy instead of ICE cars - but not everything that's less than ideal is as bad. And burning plastic is probably one of the worse ways of powering a car. Maybe coal-powdered would be worse, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The article itself how much more CO2 this art project produces compared to a gasoline car.
Plastic is just fuel that spent it's wild teenage years as something useful. We should burn our garbage and use the energy for useful things.
Pumping our environment full of artificial hormones and getting everybody full of random plasticy bits is bad. Until we have so much renewable energy that we don't need fossil fuels, burning garbage displacing burning coal/oil/gas is a net positive.
On the flip side, a lot of plastic toxicity is burnt away in the furnace. The rest, is what filters are for. Seems a lot easier to deal with it at the co-generation plant than in a garbage heap.
Proper sequestration of plastic garbage in well managed garbage dumps is much better. Turning plastic into fuel and then burning the fuel is far less energy efficient than burning extracted fuel, so it's worse in the most critical way right now: it releases more greenhouse gas.
Of course, it's much better to produce less plastic in the first place.
I think if we compare burying plastic to properly controller industrial incineration in combined production that is both electricity and heat is likely better option. As that means we do not need to extract and process the fuel we would use for same purpose.
Now refining plastic to fuel used in other ways or small scale burning is likely just idiotic.
I very much doubt this. Burning plastic is much less energy efficient than burning oil. However, plastic contains a similar amount of carbon/kg as oil. So, sequestering a kg of plastic while extracting a kg of oil is better than doing it the other way around.
Even if we look at production costs, extracting and transporting liquids from the ground is also less energy intensive than transporting and processing solid plastic waste.
In my area they burn garbage for electricity[1] which a lot of the content will be plastics, they collect metals from the ash. As mentioned it still releases carbon in to the atmosphere but better than this setup since the emissions controls are much better as they are with most power plants.
With an electric car you are not limited to any one fuel, whether it be solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, nat gas, oil, coal or plastic / garbage this is the big win decoupling fuel from transport.
> Because of the chemicals added to plastic, burning it to make fuel creates a lot of nasty air pollution.
Even a tiny whiff of burning plastic makes me nauseous for hours. I want nothing to do with that. If I seal clothes in a plastic tub for a few years, the clothes take on a plastic smell that also makes me nauseous. It doesn't wash out, so those clothes get thrown out. Long ago I got rid of all the dishes made of plastic. Even plastic cups impart a plasticy taste to water.
I've seen YT videos of people building these stills to break down the plastic to 'diesel.' Normally they claim that they're 'recycling' the plastic and imply its an ingenious way to help better the environment. But there's a few things worth noting here:
1. The still needs a way to generate heat to work. A primitive method done in some poorer countries (and in DIY stills) is to use wood to heat it. Guessing the way his still works here relies on fossil fuels to incinerate the plastic (maybe butane or his own fuel -- but if using his own fuel then he would have needed to bootstrap it.)
2. I realize the article mentions this but unless you read the entire article carefully you may not notice this. A lot of people are just going to assume that the designer found a way to recycle plastic without realizing how insanely toxic what they're doing is. Even in the incinerators designed for this purpose scientists have found chemicals in their ashes that never break down from combustion.
3. The author of this article makes frankly a bizarre logical leap by saying that since plastics are already burnt in incinerators doing this isn't that different. They neglect to mention that incinerators are still horrible ways to dispose of waste and that plastic specifically can be recycled into other materials without burning it into a toxic mess.
Overall, the still will generate an extremely dirty fuel capable of being used by ancient engines. For the modern gentleman who gives absolutely zero fucks about the environment. A possible next step from this project would be to figure out how to run a car on nuclear waste so that your car can be a fukushima/chernobyl on wheels.
The article suggests that the fuel is made completely on site (on the roof of the vehicle) from discarded plastic chips from a neighbor's business. But some numbers do not add up.
> Making 1 liter of diesel requires burning 1 kg of plastic, which results in 2-2.7 kg of carbon emissions.
Does that number (1 kg) include the plastic consumed in the burning process, whose heat is then used to define (opposite of refine) the plastic back to liquid? How does 1 kg of plastic contain 2 kg of carbon? Or is the O2 in CO2 so heavy that "carbon emissions" weigh significantly more than the source hydrocarbon?
> Second, there is the combustion of diesel fuel while driving, which emits 2.7 kg of carbon dioxide per liter.
Atomic weight of C is ~12. Atomic weight of O is ~16.
C : CO2
12 : (12+16+16)
12 : 44
1 : 3.666
so turning 1kg of pure C into pure CO2 by pulling O2 from the surrounding air creates 3.666kg CO2
Plastic also contains some H (weight ~1). Depends on the kind of plastic. Assuming water bottle plastic, AKA PET, AKA Polyethylene terephthalate, Its molecular formula is (C10H8O4)n.
So starting weight of 10x12+8x1+4x16=192, and we assume complete burning so CO2 + H2O end products.
1 C10H8O4 + 10 O2 = 10 CO2 + 4 H2O
1x192 : 10x44
192 : 440
1 : 2.29
perfectly burning 1kg of PET produces 2.29kg of CO2
Fair question! Carbon had an atomic weight of ~12, oxygen has an atomic weight of ~16. So carbon is responsible for 12/44 part of the weight of CO2. If we assume plastic to be 80% carbon, then 1kg of plastic would produce (0,8*44)/12~= 2,9 kg of plastic.
So probably plastic is less than 80% plastic :). But then number makes sense, similarly for diesel.
The carbon atom has an atomic weight of 12, while each oxygen is 16, so you have 32 weight of oxygen per 12 carbon.
The hydrogen in hydrocarbons on the other hand, doesn’t weigh much at all. Atomic weight of 1. But with a high school knowledge of chemistry I couldn’t tell you what all is in those plastics.
That's a decades newer engine design, in a smaller vehicle, and a much smaller engine. I'm not sure if everyone here realizes this is a late 70s or early 80s Volvo.
The late 70s/ early 80s Volvo diesel uses a 6 cylinder version of the VW 4 cylinder engine used in the old Golf/Jetta, and is a historical precursor to the more efficient engine in your TDI. It was incredibly advanced and efficient for its time- it's competition, the Mercedes 300TD wagon, only got 22mpg at the time, and gasoline station wagons of that size would be lucky to get 15mpg.
Incredibly - mind blowingly good for a full sized station wagon from the 1980s… most vehicles this size were getting 15mpg at the time. The 245 has massive storage area and with the optional 3rd row seat can seat 7.
TFA aside, this website is so simple and beautiful it makes me wish more websites were like this, nowadays it's rare to find pages that you can delightfully read on mobile unless you have adblocking installed, and even if you can block the ads many times you'll be spammed with sticky videos or other annoying widgets that just scares the reader away from the content -- which is not the case on this website
Are there metrics on how many `kg` of plastic waste required input wise -> how many `l` of "diesel like liquid" output? how many "kilometers per liter" is the car getting on the diesel / how many "kilometers per kg of plastic"? Curious on yield/waste/efficiency/etc.
> That includes the fuel used to heat the plastic waste on the roof (1 kg of plastic gives 0.5 liters of diesel, so the fuel economy is 7.14 liters per 100 km).
It's _much_ better to burning trash in special facilities, where it is burnt down to CO2, rather to some kind of soot that will pollute the atmosphere. It will also be more efficient in terms of energy production.
Some countries don’t have the space for landfill and need the energy. If we’re moving towards renewables and less plastic/plastic alternatives then I think this is an acceptable intermediate use of plastic waste.
I'm quite sure that it would be better to burn gas or oil and find some other country to bury the plastic for you. Burning plastic is just very inefficient, and expensive if you don't want the thickest toxic smog.
In countries like Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands it’s kind of done indirectly through waste to energy systems where plastic waste is burnt. I think there’s a few systems in place to mitigate the environmental impact.
I recall reading about some of them looking into it but running into issues ensuring a "clean" recycled plastic supply at the scales they need. Can't seem to find the article in my history but there's a ton of varied results I'm seeing from searches talking about the idea of recycling plastic. Example: https://www2.afpm.org/forms/store/ProductFormPublic/sum-21-3...
I think one of the main issues was, at least in the US, chlorinated plastic (e.g. PVC) ends up in the bulk supply of used plastics through negligence/malice/whatever and even at a few percent ends up creating some pretty corrosive compounds which are difficult/expensive to remove before they damage the equipment.
We kind of already do - just instead of making diesel, the plastic is burned to generate electricity. Since machines to harvest a difference in temperature or exothermic processes scales with size, one could argue it's more efficient to burn it in a massive, very efficient furnaces instead of converting the plastic into diesel that is then burned in an engine that must be operational at a far larger range of RPMs.
My understanding is that higher temperatures also mean some toxic byproducts get processed. And you can install scrubbers and other technologies to clean rest from exhaust... And with combined production also capturing waste heat after electricity production efficiency is comparatively good.
> In contrast, Schalkx’s Volvo internalizes all the side effects of driving automobiles. The car is not a pleasure to drive, at least not regularly. It is dirty. Its interior stinks of plastic, which cannot be healthy – Gijs keeps the car windows open no matter the weather. Furthermore, he needs to spend a lot of time collecting plastic and making fuel, and all these disadvantages make him think twice before he gets behind the wheel.
Although I will agree this is ridiculous, as most anti-car ideas tend to be. If he’s privileged enough to consider whether he should use his car, then perhaps he should consciously live without one.
A kind of pyrolysis, I assume, and very energy intensive. Does this process really produce more stored energy in the output product than it took to run the reaction?