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? 
What is hydrothermal liquefaction?
Posted on June 8, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
The sad reality is that 87 per cent of plastic is still not recycled in Australia, according to the Plastic Waste Advanced Recycling Feasibility Study: Geelong-Altona Industrial Corridor 2021.
To achieve the Australian government’s ambitious National Waste Management Target of 80 per cent average resource recovery rate, plastics will require an additional 2.5 million tonnes of recycling capacity – that is a 13-fold increase on what is in place.
Advanced recycling is one piece of the puzzle to help achieve this. Also referred to as ‘chemical recycling,’ advanced recycling takes plastic back to its chemical building blocks; oil that can be used back into the local plastic supply chain.
Critically, advanced recycling helps close the loop on the 87 per cent of plastic that still is not recycled in Australia each year. Unlike mechanical recycling, where plastic needs to be sorted by type, advanced recycling can process mixed plastics, including multilayer packaging.
A new approach
While older advanced recycling approaches, such as pyrolysis, are purely thermally based, a lower-carbon approach has emerged – one that uses water.
Hydrothermal liquefaction (or HTL) is the next generation of advanced recycling. Moreover, the most commercially advanced HTL technology in the world is Australian – Licella’s Cat-HTR (Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor) platform.
HTL was developed in a carbon constrained world. It uses hot, pressurised water to recycle more carbon from plastic than pyrolysis, while using less energy to achieve this.
In addition, HTL moves hydrogen from the water into the product oil, making it easier to upgrade in a conventional refinery.
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