Turn garbage into oil

A Japanese inventor built a machine to produce crude oil from waste plastic.

Crude oil condenses in the tank of the machine built by Akinori Ito.(Photo: Blest Company)

Many things needed in people's daily lives - like plastic bottles, plastic bags, wrapping paper - are made of oil. So Akinori Ito, a Japanese inventor, came up with the idea of ​​bringing those products back to their original roots.

MSN said that the machine that Ito built heated plastic to temperatures so high that it evaporated. The product of evaporation is led through a pipe system and compartment for cooling. Extremely low temperatures cause vapor molecules to compress and turn into oil. The oil that the machine produces can be used in generators and some types of furnaces. One can even refine it into gasoline.

Ito's Blest is selling it. He said it could turn a kilogram of plastic into a liter of oil that only consumes one kilowatt of electricity per hour. Currently the price of a machine is $ 10,000, but Ito expects prices to fall as demand and the number of machines are increased.

Ito's machine is not the first device to turn plastic waste into fuel, but it is the only device designed for people to use in the home. Some other machines are much bigger. For example, a machine manufactured by Envion in the US can handle 10,000 tons of plastic per year. Each ton of scrap can turn into 3-5 barrels of crude oil.

Envion calculates that America produces 50 million tons of plastic each year. If all waste plastic is turned into oil, the US will no longer have to import crude oil from abroad.