Posts Tagged ‘resource’

Plastic=new black gold?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

According to the report from the Ministry of environment, Mauritius produces some 120 tons of plastic wastes daily amounting to a total of 43,800 tons of waste every year of which only 4%, representing some 164 tons, are recycled. In 2006, the population’s consumption of non-biodegradable plastic products amounted to some 70 million Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottles, 7 million PVC bottles, and 113 million plastic bags.
As a part of invironment protection, it needs a new way to recycle the plastic wastes instead of burning and burying. The conversion of plastic wastes into petrol is the very techniques that able to clear our environment of plastic wastes, creating jobs in waste management and collection and at the same time bringing useful resources such as petrol and gas, which can be beneficial to our economy.
The concepts of plastic conversion into hydrocarbons was elaborated by Professor Alka Zadgaonkar of the Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur in Indian, in the year 1995. She worked with a team on the formula and in 2004; they succeeded in turning 300mg of plastic into hydrocarbon liquids. The process was later extended to treat 25,000 tons daily in 2006 and the objective of the project is to treat some 450,000 tons.
This project is a green alternative to the palliative solutions that have been found so far to deal with plastic wastes. The ratio of the conversion is one kilogram of plastic into the volume of 1000 cc of petrol. The pilot project will hence be converting some 2.5 tons of plastic wastes daily into some 25,000 liters of petrol and other by-products. Land filling, incineration, recycling, gasification and blast furnace have shown their limits in the treatment of plastic wastes.
As other techniques of wastes process, recycling is unfortunately not a practical solution in that the cost of collection is quite high; there is a limited market for it, with an absence of marketing. Moreover, plastic can only be recycled three to four times, after that it loses its strength and can’t be recycled. But for the Indian project, after about one year of operation, it was realized with the help of loans. Representatives of the State Bank of India acknowledged that the project is already running on profit, thus proving the efficiency of the method. The world produces no less than 60% more plastic wastes than it did some ten years back with a production of 100 million tons every year. India produces 10,000 tons of plastic wastes everyday which 40% are recycled.
What is the connection between Asian Electronics, Green Hydrocabons and the inventor of the technology,Professor Alka Zadgaonkar of the Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur. Infact she has floated her own company Unique Waste Plastic Management & Research Co. Pvt. Ltd. Really the technology is with her and Asian Electronics is merely proposing to manufacture the equipments. The really work in the conversion is done by the catalytic additive which is known only to the inventor.