[Gasification] Oil from plastic

David Coote dccoote at mira.net
Wed Jul 17 19:26:54 CDT 2013


Yes, but what's of interest is the emissions when the substance is burnt in a particular combustion system. Or, in some cases, ripped to elemental shreds in a plasma arc :)

So waste-to-energy plants in Europe are permitted to burn all sorts of materials but they have combustion systems designed appropriately, all sorts of post-combustion ash and other emissions control and also operate in an environment where they are highly regulated and monitored.

Picking up on the soap/glycerin theme, earlier this year I used my undergraduate training as a chemist to make soap. One interesting discovery made during the experiment was the low tolerance for caustic solutions exhibited by the coating on a bamix stirrer. We now have a dedicated soap-making bamix and a recently purchased unit for the more conventional use.

Soap turned out well and has seen operational use at our bathroom and with a number of friends. As we point out when we give people a few bars you can tell this soap was made by scientists as it has a rather sludgy colour, doesn't feature any petals, exotic salts, mineral clays or other interesting additives and has had no contact with ribbons, cutely written cards or other packaging beyond the brown paper bag we supply. And as the soap was made in moulds such as plastic food containers and fruit drink bottles it doesn't look like shells, animals, etc

As soap it does have a nice feel. This is at least partly due to the presence of glycerin. A chemical engineer friend of mine who used to run the soap making division of a large multi-national confirmed that they would remove the glycerin created during manufacture as this was more valuable for other purposes

Regards

David

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 18:11:18 -0700
From: David<david at h4c.org>
To: "J. Paul Villella"<woodboyz2 at yahoo.com>,	Discussion of biomass
	pyrolysis and gasification	<gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Gasification] Oil from plastic waste
Message-ID:<51E5EF36.6020204 at h4c.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"



Paul,

On 7/16/2013 5:27 PM, J. Paul Villella wrote:

> >  other possible suitable binders are Long Strand Glycerines from the
> >  production of Biodiesel (they burn like plastic too but need a
> >  stabilizer/wick/co-burn agent )
>    
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Burning glycerine produces acrolein. For some indications of its
toxicity, see Feng, Z; Hu W, Hu Y, Tang M (October 2006). "Acrolein is
a major cigarette-related lung cancer agent: Preferential binding at
p53 mutational hotspots and inhibition of DNA repair"
<http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0607031103v1>. /Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences>/
*103* (42): 15404--15409.

Better to compost the glycerine, make soap, or produce biogas.


d.
-- David William House "The Complete Biogas Handbook" 
|www.completebiogas.com| /Vahid Biogas/, an alternative energy 
consultancy |www.vahidbiogas.com | | "Make no search for water. But find 
thirst, And water from the very ground will burst." (Rumi, a Persian 
mystic poet, quoted in /Delight of Hearts/, p. 77) http://bahai.us/

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