Producing fuel from plastic bags

Don't throw away the plastic bags you buy every day, as it may one day be used to power your car.

Scientists at the University of Illinois, USA, have developed a method to help 'process' plastic bags into diesel, gas and other useful petroleum products. These findings have just been published in the journal Fuel Processing Technology.

The amount of energy required to convert plastic bags into fuel products will be less than the amount of energy that this process creates while the compositions will be diverse and easily blended with diesel into fuels. common materials. Previously, product recycling processes were not feasible due to high energy consumption. According to the research leader, Dr. Brajendra Sharma, conventional products extracted from petroleum such as solvents, gasoline, lubricating oils, waxes, engine oils and hydraulic oils . can be 'processing' from plastic bags. He said: 'You can only get 50-55% of fuel from crude oil distillation, but from these plastic products which are derived from petroleum, we can process fuel with efficiency. up to 80% '.

Dr. Sharma's team has further studied by transferring the material obtained from the process of extracting plastic plastic into various petroleum products that can be used for a multitude of purposes. The researchers were able to blend up to 30% of diesel-derived diesel into conventional diesel and they had no problems with biodiesel compatibility, Dr. Sharma said.

This new finding also has great environmental significance. Hundreds of billions of plastic bags are discarded every year around the world, and it is estimated that only 1/8 of that is recycled. The rest ended in landfills or discharged into the environment. Plastic bags account for a large portion of floating waste in the ocean which is the cause of death for many wildlife species and pollution of the living environment.