Shopping bags can be turned into fine diesel fuel, according to the recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Illinois. It is welcome news as the plastic bags, which are often the cause of litter on both sea and land can be put to good use. According to the study, the discarded shopping bags can also be turned into so many other products, including natural gas, naphtha, hydraulic and engine lubricating oils, waxes and gasoline.
Better use of plastic shopping bags
Non-biodegradable plastic shopping bags are often discarded indiscriminately, littering both sea and land areas. Scientists at the University of Illinois have recently reported that they have successfully converted these plastic shopping bags into diesel fuel and can also be turned into other petroleum products as well as natural gas.
What is more significant is that the diesel fuel from the plastic bags contain more energy, which makes it ideally suited to be blended with existing biodiesels and ultra-low-sulfur diesels. Other useful products such as lubricating oils, waxes, solvent, gasoline and natural gas can also be produced from the bags.
The process
Senior research scientist Brajendra Kumar Sharma, the lead scientist for the study, described the pyrolysis process, which involved heating the plastic bags in a chamber that is free from oxygen. They conducted the study at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, a branch of the Prairie Research Institute of the university.
The lead scientist further explained the difference between the normal process of crude oil distillation and their own process. He said that with regular distillation, you can only get about 50% or 55% of the fuel. Plastic bags are petroleum-based products. With the pyrolysis process they were able to get as much as 80% fuel.
Recycling
It looks like this is a better way to recycle the plastic bags, help the environment and at the same time save on fuel. At the moment, only about 13% of the plastic bags are getting recycled. The rest end up as litter in landfills or otherwise clogging waterways.
Previous attempts at pyrolysis
This is not the first time that pyrolysis has been used for plastic-bags-into-crude-oil conversion. However, what Mr. Sharma’s team did was to take the study further. They fractioned the crude oil into various petroleum-based products. They then tested the diesel fractions to check if the result complies with national standards on biodiesel fuels as well as diesel fuel with low sulfur content.
In one of their distillate fraction combinations, the resulting product met all the specs of U.S. diesel #2 grade after an antioxidant has been added. It was better than regular low-sulfur diesel, according to Mr. Sharma. It has the same energy content but has a higher combustion rate and better lubricity. They found no problems with compatibility even when they added 30% of the plastic bag diesel product to regular biodiesel.
The report for this new research is already published in the Fuel Processing Technology journal.
Photo credit: Taken by SunTsiuKee111 under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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