You are trying to stay away from chlorinated dioxins and furans which are nasty. So don’t introduce the chlorinated plastics which I guess #3 is pvc so avoid that. There is enough other plastics to use and enough other nasty cyclic compound, no need to add more especially with the intent on using them in an incomplete burning process like a IC engine.
“The term “dioxin” is commonly used to refer to a family of chemicals that share chemical structures and characteristics. These compounds include polychlorinated dibenzo dioxins(PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzo furans (PCDFs) which are unwanted by-products of industrial and natural processes, usually involving combustion.”
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Every time I read about which grades of plastic are bad all I can think is then why do they use it for a bottle cap? There has to be a better solution for a one time use soda bottle.
We already had that, glass containers and a reuse system based on deposit. Big business eliminated that system for their increased profits.
I wish we had more universal and reusable containers, but our food processing industry is so concentrated the supply chains are probably too long for that to be viable.
One of the things I noticed when I got my garden going is how little trash I have. Those glass canning jars just go back down cellar for next year. Just bugs me that they make that bottle out of a plastic you can recycle but the cap you can not.
Hi Dan ,
your wrong about the bottle caps , I know I recycled over 20 tonnes of the cap material a week for many years , pop/soda bottle caps are polypropylene milk or non pressurised bottle’s the caps are LD polythene , all very sought after material’s in the recycling world .
Dave
And neither contain chlorine. I thought #5 did, but learn something new or relearn something if I forgot it. They do have different properties and melting points.
OK plastic to liquid. l have some limited experiances with the proces so here it goes.
lt is a supereasy proces anyone can perform.
The basic idea is to heat the long chains molecules of plastic to make them chemicaly unstable, therefore break to shorter chains aka liquid hidrocarbons. The proces starts at about 300c. Temperature plays a role in the lengh of chains produced. Lower temps will produce maynly heavyer products, diesel and wax, but will take longer. Higher temps produce mainly lighter fractions, gasoline and gas, and are fast to achive.
The gas is not favorable as it is hard to collect for later use on a small scale, therefor it is usualy vented or flared off, althugh it is very similar in composition as LPG.
Plastics that can be reformed are PP, PE, PS if i remember right. Unfortunaly PET (bottle plastic) can not be turned to liquid! It forms a cottige chese like product, l suspect this happens becouse of the aromatics in the PET chains.
Catalysts can be used to help the reaction happen, althugh most plastics contain them already (fillers and pigments) and can be seen as ash at the end of the reaction.
The proces is allso quite energy demanding.
As for the fuel produced, l only tested gasoline in a engine, althugh many fractions can be made rangeing from wax to gas. the tests showed great potential but the problem is of its low octane number (under 80) so in a higher compression engine ethanol shuld be added.
As for diesel, it is a high quality fuel with a high cetane number, but it is unapropriet for colder climates as it forms a gel at colder temps.
The gasoline made out of plastic is great for 2t engines (on wich i allso tested it) as it is wery lubricative. I actualy didnt add any 2t oil to it and the engine run nice on it for a long static test, no sigh of wear showed up. This mighs cause problems with injector engines (pligging).
There is enough other plastics to use and enough other nasty cyclic compound, no need to add more especially with the intent on using them in an incomplete burning process like a IC engine.