Plastic Bags Into Fuel Via Carbon-Negative Device

Welcome to the modern consumer landscape, one where our everyday environment is literally littered with plastic bags. We cannot escape them, we cannot stop using them. What's to be done? An inventor in Japan by the name of Akinori Ito has offered up an invention that takes these bags and turns them into fuel. How could this possibly be done? Consider the makeup of the bags: oil and ink. Is it possible to revert these bags back down to their elements, elements that can be reused for all manner of fuel-sucking machines.

All it takes is heat! What Ito's invention does is hold an amount of bags inside itself, head them up to great temperatures, trap the vapors that result, and channels the vapors through a system of pipes and water chambers. Once these vapors are channeled, they're cooled to a level that turns them back into liquid, into crude oil. This crude oil can essentially instantly be used in generators of many types as well as some stoves. If this crude oil is then refined, it can be converted into gasoline for all manner of machines.

The device that accomplishes this feat is the Carbon-negative system, already produced by Ito's Blest Corporation (a group founded around a year ago in 2010.) This tech is currently rather expensive, right around 10,000 USD per unit, but does have some impressive specs to go with it. Each kilogram (approximately 2-lbs) of plastic is converted into 1 liter (about a quart) of oil with only 1 kilowatt of power. Each time this is done, it costs around .20 cents. Sounds like a good deal!

Ito currently hopes that this system will be much more mass-produced than it is today so that it can be done for much cheaper than it is today. Would you rather have one system for 10k USD or 10 for 1? I think we all know the answer to that.

[via Clean Technica]