What’s the one thing that, you will see, in every
household, or in your work-space or in any place you go? PLASTIC. And Surprisingly, you can even find it at the bottom of the 11 km deep Mariana Trench, the
deepest part of the explored ocean.
We now live in an age of plastics, where around 6.3
billion tons of plastic are produced worldwide. Much of this waste can be
recycled into new products, but some of it known as end-use plastic,
which has no second life, ends up in landfills or in Oceans every day. It is
estimated that around 8 million tonnes of plastic wind up in the oceans every
year & if things continue at the current rate, then by 2050 the oceans will
hold more plastic waste than fish. The most personal example of plastic waste
in the ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's a collection
of plastic and floating trash which mainly comes from countries in Asia.
There's also a North Atlantic Garbage Patch which is also
growing.
This isn't great but it gets worse. According to
recent study carried out by the University of Newcastle found that we're eating
our own plastic waste, we eat about 250 grams of plastic which is enough to
make a credit card annually & the most common source of this plastic
consumption comes from is Salt, Beer, Fish, Bottled & Tap water which we
use for Drinking.
Apart from all of this the main problem with
plastic is that it just doesn't break down. Due to this reason plastic requires
about 500 years to degrade. Which is the main reason why it’s very necessary to
reduce the use of plastic. But due to its wide range of applications and
economical price than any other, it’s very difficult to stop producing and
using Plastic. Even there are some methods that reduce plastic waste, methods
such as Landfill & Incineration rather
than helpful do much harm to the ecosystem. Recycling may be useful but what
about End-use plastics. So in order to reduce this plastic waste, we need a
sustainable and effective solution that reduces plastic waste and won’t affect the
ecosystem.
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| LANDFILLS |
One promising alternative which can be helpful
is, Converting plastics to fuels. Just like it sounds, with
the efficiency between 70 to 90%, these technologies convert used non-recycled
plastics into oil fuels and also into other petroleum-based products.
The
process called Pyrolysis, where instead of burning the used
plastic, the plastic is heated without oxygen in a closed chamber at a high
temperature of about 385°C to 500°C, producing hydrocarbon vapors rather than
oxidizing the material which is hazardous to us & to the Ecosystem we live
in. Just when you burn it with a flame the only by-product is a non-hazardous
char the pigments and fillers from the plastics. Which can be used in making
man-made tiles or pigment for decorative concrete. When this plastic is
converted into hydrocarbon vapor gas, these gases are then cooled and condensed
into different products, such as crude oil. Which then can be refined by adding
a catalyst to help break the chemical bonds into fuels and the feedstocks for
other Petroleum products and also into fuel oils to produce electricity.
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| PYROLYSIS METHOD |
These technologies of converting plastic into Fuel
could provide us with the ability to divert valuable materials from landfills
and create an abundant source of alternative energy. Which means, we won't need
to take as much fossil fuel out of the ground. Hence, reducing Billions of
Tonnes of Plastic which would have been thrown into the oceans, Rivers and in
Landfill & will result in can be a good source of income, as well as
generate lots of jobs in the countries, improve the economy. Plus these
technologies could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70% when compared
to traditional forms of crude oil extraction.
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