The End of Landfills

[mbarrick]

I first read about this on Gizmodo in the summer and I have been meaning to write about it since.

This device made by Global Resource Corp. is capable of breaking down hydrocarbons into gas an oil. The implications of this technology far, far more wide reaching than most of the articles I've read even touch upon, excluding the previously linked Popular Science article.

Hydrocarbons are the basis of all organic chemistry. Coal, oil, rubber, plastic, plant matter, animal matter... pretty much anything that isn't a metal or mineral has hydrocarbons in it, and this machine can turn them to refined oil, diesel fuel and natural gas in a matter of minutes. The metal and mineral components are left unaffected.

Think for a moment about what this really means.

All the problems of extracting oil from the tar sands disappear with this machine. Every dry oil well on the planet becomes productive again since a machine like this can extract the oil from the sludge in minutes. Oil shale becomes oil.  Even more amazing, the toxic, oil contaminated sludge at the bottom of every industrial harbour becomes a fuel source and the left-over is clean, uncontaminated fill.

This isn't the sort of ultimately useless recycling done now where plastics are broken down into less and less useful types of plastic but never really go away. This takes them apart into what they were made out in the first place, suitable to be used as fuel or remanufactured into new high-grade plastics. Tires aren't simply ground up and turned into door mats, Astroturf and other products of limited usefulness with markets that don't come anywhere even remotely close to keeping up with the volume with which old tires are discarded.

Imagine going back to not separating your garbage, not worrying about the "correct" disposal of old paint, car batteries, used motor oil, fluorescent bulbs, etc. - because the industrial version of this machine will break down the hydrocarbons into useful fuel and the mineral and metal components are subsequently separable using the same techniques used in their mining in the first place. Toxic old paint will turn into oil and gas (as will the label) while the metal of the can and the metals and minerals in the pigment will be left behind to be separated and extracted by conventional means. An old motherboard would leave you with oil and a gob of copper, tin, lead, and gold. Every overflowing landfill on the planet is now potentially an oil field and a treasure trove of useful metals far easier to get at than conventional mining.

The machine itself does the processing in a vacuum and all the products, gas, liquid and solid are captured so in itself it is entirely non-polluting. Fed a diet of old tires it produces oil in a volume in excess of three times the amount of oil required to generate the electricity to run it.

At this point the process itself is not even a year old. There are only a tiny number of machines in operation and production will be ramping up next year. Watch this technology over the next few years. It has the potential to change everything.

Comments

[opium.livejournal.com]

This is the miracle the world needs.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

It really is. If you can make oil out of banana peels and used diapers, what use is fighting over the Middle East? A small tanker with one of these and a dragnet could mine the Sargasso Sea and the Pacific "garbage spot" and haul up enough detritus to fuel itself, run the machine, and fill the hold with oil for a profit. If people can make more money mining garbage and polluted muck than tearing into mountains the world gets cleaned up PDQ.

Imagine a world where oil companies pay *you* for the privilege of picking up your garbage and nothing goes to waste.

*Everyone* needs to know about this.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

if it pans out then this will be huge...it would be good if you could profit off the excessive consumer lifestyle prevalent in the first world...because to be realistic most people aren't going to change their habits even if the consequences of not doing so are dire...so this way they get the tv miracle they always dream about...you get to remain being a slob and it works out for everyone's advantage...now if they could build something similar that did the same with co2 emissions...though i imagine we'll see something one of these days...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

That, of course, is the downside. Burning the oil produced by this machine does nothing to diminish CO₂ emissions, and actually exacerbates the problem. Nothing is perfect.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

as the t-shirts, ball caps and mugs used to say "pobody's nerfect"...

That should be a word.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

nerfect: n. the effect of nerf darts on co-workers. "He was having a great day until I ambushed him with the nerf gun. The nerfect was awesome, it really pissed him off."

Re: That should be a word.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i can see it now...it could also describe any various injuries incurred while playing with nerf products inappropriately...

Re: That should be a word.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Totally!

"How come you are limping?"

"It's the nerfect of trying to jump over the couch while playing football in the living room."

[skinjob007.livejournal.com]

Woah. I can feel your excitement. You'll put someone's eye out if you're not careful.

I want to get just as enthused, but my "too good to be true" alarm is going off. Loudly.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

There are two catches.
You've already mentioned one of them: CO₂ that reaches the atmosphere still a problem

The second, is that the energy efficiency of the device sucks still. It microwaves the input material as a means of separating it, and that must then still cool off.

What's the real value of it? Cheaper hydrocarbons for non-fuel usages. There was an article in New Scientist some months ago, about the usage of crude oil, I think the raw volume numbers were in the realm of 98% being used for fuel (heating, motive, electricity generation), while the remaining 2% went to plastics and other uses. However, by dollar value, the division was much closer to even.

[sciencequeen.livejournal.com]

My only question is what does the machine emit while it's doing its business? It stated that the energy it produces is far more than what it uses just to run, but there has to be some byproducts of the machine?

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

The extraction takes place in a vacuum. By it's nature there are no emissions from the process because all the gases are captured. What's left over depends on what goes in. For example an old tire will leave you with oil, diesel, natural gas, carbon black (i.e. pure carbon) and steel if the belts are not removed. There is an outfit setting up in Arizona that will be converting 300 tons / day of used tires with one of these. Toxic gases with non-organic compounds aren't produced because it is not a heat-extraction process. There are other microwave extraction processes for things like crude oil sludge or tar-sands that are not targeted that are effectively heat-extraction processes - this uses specifically tuned microwaves targeted at breaking down *just* the hydrocarbon compounds that the inventor has spent the last decade isolating.

In short, it is freaking brilliant.