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Plastic Could Fuel US Move Away from Foreign Oil

CEO John Bordynuik with a jar of fuel produced from waste plastic in JBI’s factory in Niagara Falls, New York. (VOA/D. Robison)

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Daniel Robison

October 30, 2012

BUFFALO, NEW YORK — The next big thing in fuel could come from repurposed plastic. However, only seven percent of plastic waste in the United States is recycled each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A company in Niagara Falls, New York, is working to increase that percentage, with an eye toward reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Plastic-eating monster

It's a machine known as the “plastic-eating monster.”

Every hour, thousands of kilograms of shredded milk jugs, water bottles, and grocery bags tumble into its large combustion chamber. The waste plastic comes from landfills and dumps across the United States.

John Bordyniuk, who runs his namesake company, JBI, Inc., invented the new process for converting plastic into a range of fuels.

A load of shredded plastic gas tanks, removed from junkyard automobiles, awaits its turn with the plastic-eating monster. (VOA/D. Robison)

First, many different kinds of unwashed plastics are melted together.

“The viscosity looks like milk," Bordyniuk says. "Almost like when you’re heating milk on the stove. Looks exactly like that, except it’s black.”

Bordyniuk uses a patented catalyst to vaporize the inky fluid and reduce the plastic to its most basic elements.

“Plastics are just long hydrocarbon chains," he says. "What we’re doing is re-forming them into links and chains that we want so they have a high fuel value.”

The system powers itself, with eight percent of the plastic waste running the process. Bordyniuk hired outside testers who concluded that nearly 86 percent of what goes in comes out as fuel.

Several grades of fuel

At the other end of the plastic eating machine, JBI executive Bob Molodynia looks on while a stream of thin brown liquid pours into an oil barrel.

“You could tap this right now and it’s ready to go," Molodynia says. "That’s a number six fuel, that’s what a lot of what US Steel uses, a lot of major companies, that’s what they pay the big bucks for, right there.”

Many different types of unwashed plastic waste are melted together in a combustion chamber. Here, John Bordynuik, CEO of JBI, Inc., pulls a sample to determine what kind of fuel he wants to produce. (VOA/D. Robison)

JBI creates several grades of fuel for a variety of industries and sells them for up to $100 a barrel through national distributors. Each barrel costs about $10 to produce and JBI produces several thousand liters of oil a day.

The company has signed deals to set up operations next to large plastic waste dumps.

Bordyniuk believes plastics will become a significant source of domestic fuel that reduces the country’s dependence on foreign oil, while at the same time reducing the amount of plastic waste sitting in the country’s landfills.

Green process?

But just how “green” is this process when it produces fuels that pollute just like any other?

“Maybe the sequestration of carbon into a plastic bottle dumped in a landfill is better than converting it to liquid fuels and releasing, mobilizing a whole lot of carbon,” says Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He says plastic-to-oil technology is still new and evolving, and there’s not enough data to determine whether or not the process is friendly to the environment.

And the jury’s still out on whether converting plastic to oil can even be considered “recycling.” So says Carson Maxted with Resource Recycling, the plastic recycling industry’s trade journal.

A handful of plastic-to-oil companies have cropped up in the past decade, each with its own method. Maxted says JBI is among the budding industry’s top tier partly because the company does something few other firms have been able, or willing, to do: utilize virtually all types of plastics

"They’re getting value from something that would otherwise go to the landfill, the plastics that are not easily recycled, they’re of low quality or of mixed plastic types, or that they’re dirty," Maxted says. "Things that wouldn’t be accepted into a recycler.”

And since there’s no lack of plastic waste or demand for oil, Maxted says JBI’s recycling technology has the potential to transform both industries.

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by: TERRY OKOMOR from: Nigeria

October 31, 2012 7:55 AM

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Energy cost/product is highly efficient here, kind of cool.
should be supported

by: John

October 31, 2012 2:11 AM

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Sounds like recycling to me. Must admit I prefer the US Navy's programme to make jet fuel from CO2 and hydrogen extracted from seawater though. Still, you do need a nuke or some other external source of energy to synthesise the fuel.

by: Barrie from: Calgary, Alberta

October 30, 2012 7:32 PM

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It is unfortunate that every technological advance seems to bring out dissenters. Mr. Bordyniuk is experiencing the same attitudes as did Marconi, who was sent to an insane asylum when he publicized his discovery of wireless communication. It almost smells like some of the naysayers are afraid of losing their standing in either the plastics or the recycling industries.Certainly, testing and monitoring of the process and products are necessary, but the initiative, even if it turns out to be sufficiently flawed that it is unusable in large volume, should spur further research which will, I am sure, in one or more processes which can pass all the tests for commercial and environmental success.

Just the use of all kinds of plastics, especially being able to eschew the need to clean the input materials, is a major step forward, as much of the cost of collecting used materials has been the cleaning and sorting of the different grades of plastics.
It just occurred to me that the posting of grades on containers might be discontinued if sorting were to be unnecessary, but the types of plastics are important for other reasons (I am not technically competent to try to explain them, though).

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