How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? 
A solution to Australia’s soft plastics woes
Posted on February 21, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
Licella is a company that uses hydrothermal liquefaction, or HTL, an innovative form of advanced recycling. Licella’s HTL technology is called the Cat-HTR (which stands for Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor). This method of processing uses hot, pressurised water to recycle carbon from plastic, while using less energy than other methods such as pyrolysis and gasification. It also moves hydrogen from the water into the newly created oil, making the oil easier to upgrade in a conventional refinery with much lower impurity levels. Licella has been developing the process over the past 14 years, and it’s now being built at-scale commercially.
“With the Cat-HTR we can create a high-grade oil, which is suitable to go back into the local plastic supply chain without any further purification steps, which is a big point of difference against pyrolysis,” said Licella marketing director Andrea Polson. “We operate at lower temperatures as well because we use water, so it’s a very efficient process. And we can get a higher yield of oil from a broader mix of plastics. We don’t need to do a huge amount of separation or decontamination at the front end.”
What will the quality of the product be like once it is processed? High, according to Polson and they already have a market for most of it.
“Our plasti-crude oil has several interested offtake parties. In general they would likely utilise the ISCC Plus mass balance approach, where for every tonne of our recycled oil we put in, it offsets one tonne of fossil oil,” said Polson. “What we do is use that recycled oil to offset as a 100 per cent replacement for fossil fuels and that basically goes back round through the supply chain as something like polypropylene.”
The conversion rate of soft plastics to oil will be between 80 and 85 per cent, meaning that when the plant is running at full capacity, 120,000 tonnes of soft plastics will produce approximately 100,000 tonnes of oil. Polson said that the company undertook a feasibility study that also showed a 64 per cent reduction in CO2 during the lifetime of the plastic-produced oil compared to imported oil.
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "A solution to Australia’s soft plastics woes". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.