You could also cover them with something to stop the UV radiation from degredating the plastic.
2 Likes
a lime wash coating. That would help with fire risk as well.
2 Likes
Hi Bob Mac wouldent that be nice if something good could happen with ocean plastic clean up AMEN. Maybe we all pray that will make the difference, in the mean time the verse i can think of and i am not a reading person is the one that says those that distroy the earth will i distroy allso, not sure exact location or phrase.??
2 Likes
Kevin,
I’ll take a risk here. Not proselytizing, just presenting as an important historical document.
Part of the big final scenes in/of the book of Revelation. King James Version (public domain).
To be fair, I don’t think they were taking about environmentalism… 
3 Likes
Thanks Mike R,That might have been the verse i was thinking of. Ya it might not have been there, though there are some too beleive it ment that i gess. yes he will return with fire this time, as in the days of sodom and gamora. So it seems there will be a new heavan and new earth.
2 Likes
I doubt anyone is going to make millions harvesting plastic from the ocean, but P2O -might- help make it cost a lot less to clean up, and may prevent a lot of plastic from getting there in the first place.
3 Likes
I doubt world economies and corporate “brains” will do anything but follow the cheapest path to profit. But the good news is that as oil runs out / becomes uneconomical, the problem may soon be self regulated… 
2 Likes
That is the crux of it I think. According to the numbers I have seen the vast majority of the plastic is coming from a dozen rivers serving some of the poorest places on earth. No money for recycling and a cultural tradition of waste disposal through rivers. If the economics of turning it into oil work better then tossing it it will happen. Keeping it out of oceans where it’s dispersed mixed and broken up is key. A good article on the subject:
5 Likes
It looks like we just need to convince people plastics to oil actually works in those areas. Most of those areas also have a high percentage of diesel vehicles. The first youtube video I watched on the subject was a guy from supposedly Ethiopia. He was making it for cars.
3 Likes
Amen,… I don’t think you necessarily have to compete with big oil to sell your product. If it makes any resonable profit, and can be done at a grass roots level, then it can and will happen if the technology to do so is disseminated and the powers that be will allow it to happen. Big IF’s maybe, but we don’t need to compete with big oil. Their profit margines are way higher than they need to be in order to make it profittable for a local Indian family to collect plastic and make fuel on a relatively small scale. Look at all of the “illegal” refineries in Africa. Making diesel and gasoline in the jungle just to make a few dollars. The way they are doing it is very bad for the ecology and very dangerous. I am not promoting that, just saying that when people are in need of an income, they can make things happen at a lower level than might be considered profitable by big business…
At least that’s my hope…
5 Likes
Kristijan, I have a question for our chemist…
context: refining waste oil into fuel.
I watched a video of pirates making diesel from stolen crude in the back woods of Nigeria a while back. They were just boiling oil in a drum with an open fire and running the condensation pipe through a tank of cold water. I think they probably blow themselves up pretty often, but if they can do that in the jungle, surely we can do it with better equipment. It just got me to thinking.
As I understand it,
raise temp to 248F to boil off the water to atmosphere
Then gasoline at 104 F- 420F depending on specific molecular structure,
capture and re-condense
kerosene @ 500F
diesel 1 at 626F
diesel 2 a second time at 626F to remove more impurities
Then Lube Oil at 752F
Leaving tar/sludge/road pavement goo.
My questions are these.
- are these numbers correct?
- DO you boil off the water and gasoline together and capture them and then separate them in a second process?
It seems they would both boil out and re-condense together, or at least they would overlap.
I found this after I posted. so maybe it answers my questions.
Which prompts another question: How long would the oil have to stay at each temperature to accomplish each phase of “boil off”? Minutes? Hours?
4 Likes
I’m pretty sure gasoline and water separate if left unagitated. You could always add alcohol to the water to help it burn off.
4 Likes
Sorry for the late responce.
Billy, what kind of waste oil exactly are we talking about here?
If its cooking oil, l filter that and use as is. I have had a grunge aginst diesels for years, and l still kinda do, but being able to fuel my old diesels with this fuel sheds light on the concept 
we made biodiesel in the lab in chemist school but for now l just cant see it being worth it. Moderner diesels have a problem with that anyways, just talked to Tone on the phone about the topic actualy. He is a expert in that area…
If its engine oil thats in question, it too can run old diesels straight if filtred. Not my kinda thing thugh, there is some nasty junk in that oil… Kinda seems too much to blow those in the air we breath…
If distilling the motor oil in to gasoline is the question, you answered it your self. Lube oil is a separate fraction, not a compound like crude oil. So unless you invest in some cracking action, you will only be able to distill a slightly cleaner version of that motor oil.
If crude oil separation is what you are after, first of all congradulations on finding an oil well 
joke aside, to answer the question of how long the temp needs to be held, its the same as any distilation. Think moonshine you never get pure alcohol, even thugh the difference in boiling point and water is big. Some water always escapes with the alcohol vapor. The condensers at refinerys are diliburately desighed so that part of the vapour recirculates back, otherwise you wuld always get a mess out, like diesel/petrol mixes. Its a mess…
Plastics to gas. here, we do not talk about normal distilation anymore. Think of plastic as a clean suuuper heavy fraction of oil. Like gasoline that decided to become diesel and way overdid its self it went to became parafin wax, then it still kept going and became plastic. With plastic to oil we want the other way, we want smaller molecules. This operation is called cracking and we somehow need to do it. High temp and time are easyest althugh the proces is energy demanding… The resault is the stinkyest oily substance you ever came across but it apeaes it is an excelent fuel. The weedeater motor l run it on run like crazy.
9 Likes
Ok, so I am working on the idea of plastics to fuel…
but this question was about the use of waste engine oil/waste automatic trans fluid/other mechanic shop oils etc. as a diesel engine fuel. Shops here tend to dump all oil products in a tank or drum and pay someone to come pump them out and haul them away. With fuel prices rising…I see this as a resource.
I am aware of the concept of “black diesel”…meaning filtered (or not) engine oil being mixed with some percentage of diesel 2 from the gas station.
DIfferent people report different results.
ATF seems to have a detergent effect in older fuel systems and possibly causes break down of injection pumps/injectors etc due to “over cleaning” them.
Brake fluid mixed in tends to eat rubber
gear oil tends to “caramalize” on everything and cause smoke
My interest is in refining, with heat, this mixture of oils so as to create a safe (for the engine) diesel fuel.
5 Likes
Motor oil is not that bad, but ATF might be a nother deal… I have not investigated it much, because l never even seen one here 
99.9% of “not new” vehicles here are either manual or belt variomatic.
I can imagine your potential feedstock might be a complete mess… Perhaps distilation might be the only way. Maybee add some lime to the mix before distilation, or better quicklime! It will chemicly bind to both water and acids and probably detergents too. Then let sit for it to fall out and distill the now somewhat cleaned mess. Burn the lime sludge in the distilation vessle fire to dispose the nasty crap, and maybee even reuse the lime/ash… Just thinking here
8 Likes
I’ll be following this experiment, it’s very interesting to me
4 Likes
As far as ATF goes never ever use the Mobil1 Synthetic LV ATF HP. Coworker threw some in his Isuzu and it ate all the seals in his fuel system.
Also I think it absorbs water.
When I use veg oil I toss in a little turpentine or gasoline into it. There’s a guy on youtube that did solvent experiments. I think he does the same with used motor oil.
Edit: The best thing about the turpentine oil mix is you can hypothetically make your own diesel fuel on the farm. Harvest sunflowers for oil and distill your own turpentine and sell the Rosin. 20% Turpentine to 80% WVO so maybe pure VO would work even better?
It definitely brings the viscosity down so it may not need preheating like straight oil sometimes needs.
2 Likes
I think I am going to make a new collection barrel for “engine oil only”, and one for all the other stuff. It seems that engine oil is safe enough to just use directly mixed with diesel after it’s been filtered enough (2 micron or so).
With the other stuff, K, so you’re saying to mix lime into the mix to drop out some of the nasties.
Would you do that cold and just stir it in and let it settle out. Or would you have to heat it at that stage also? Are we talking about using hydrated lime …agricultural lime, (ground up limestone), the same stuff one would use to whitewash a concrete building?
Or anhydrous lime?
I also think that the mix of oils we would get from any other shop would be so mixed up with everything, we would have to distill it to make a safe product.
I think I want to start moving on that as well. Using woodgas, with an unlimited supply of prepared kiln dried precut woodchunks, as a heat source for refining, I think we can produce the diesel we need for heavy hauling from a waste product that we can get paid to haul away. And I think starting with waste oil is miles ahead of starting with plastics.
4 Likes
Do you also extract used oils from garages or something? Depending on the place you’ll probably have much more oil than ATF mixed in.
The dealership I work at we have maybe two times a day the Transmission techs will empty their catch buckets, but we have way more oil changes than atf changes on a daily basis.
From what I understand about filtering waste motor oil it can either be centrifugally cleaned or ran through filters. I had looked into it but didn’t want to pay for a big centrifuge. It would probably be more worthwhile to you though.
2 Likes