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posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the save-the-plant-collect-the-whole-set dept.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you put plastic in the recycling bin for collection? It probably goes straight into the garbage tip with the rest of the trash. Up to a short time ago, countries like China offered a decent price for usable plastic, but those deals have dried up, leaving many countries with millions of tonnes of plastic and few solutions to deal with it.

Now, Australian company Licella says it has created a system that can recycle all types of plastic, even to the extent of creating oil that can be turned into bitumen, petrol or back into different kinds of plastics.

His Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor (Cat-HTR) does just that through a form of chemical recycling that changes the plastics at a molecular level using hot water at a high pressure to turn them back into oil.

[...] Dr Humphreys said the Cat-HTR technology he and his co-founder patented was different from existing plastic-to-oil technologies like pyrolysis, which is a process that involves heating materials at a very high temperature.

Unlike traditional physical recycling, it does not require plastics to be separated according to type and colour, and can recycle anything from milk cartons to wetsuits and even wood by-products.

It also means plastic products can be recycled again and again.

But he said the bigger problem to address is our over-consumption of plastic.

The process of turning rubbish into fuel may sound familiar to sci-fi fans. In the film Back to the Future the time machine car uses garbage as fuel.

The industry has been widely described as in crisis, with a[n Australian] Senate report last year stating that "enormous quantities of recycled material, particularly materials collected through kerbside recycling, are now being stockpiled at great risk to the health and safety of local communities. Moreover, quantities of otherwise recyclable material are being sent to landfill".


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:05PM (#922992)

    you could just extrude it into shapes that make good artificial reefs.

    Truly I'm not so sure the problem is one of "plastic in the ocean", so much as it is a problem of "plastic, in the wrong shape, in the ocean".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @06:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @06:33PM (#923090)

    Trouble is Parrot Fish would turn reef into rubble in not that long.

    Then we are right back where we started.

    I think the big problem is plastic tends to float.