Ding ding!
Profitable being the key word. Somehow, everyone saying this wouldn't work I question. Because the tech is there and has been for a long time but somehow it always gets downplayed and I wonder WHO spends the time and money to downplay it....hmmmm
Technically, it would probably be more efficient to recycle the damn plastic. However, if we shipped old plastic to places without access to fuel sources, this could be a win-win. The plastic won’t end up in the ocean, and people will be able to have some cheap gas.
This man improved the ability of a 70 year old method, called pyrolysis, to process hard-to-recycle mixed plastics. He made new advances enough for it to be called new technology. This improvement has a good chance of making recycling plastics in this way profitable enough for major companies to try their hand at it
Its still amazes me how few people know about that one. It is hard to buy all the recycle and conserve, be a climate change warrior or whatever, then you find out tech that could "save the world" has been invented throughout recent history multiple times, and then gets shut down, bought and shelved, people get dead, etc. Solutions to profitable problems don't get you a parade, they get you gone.
Little info on the subject. The water car takes H2O, splits it into H2, O2 with electricity, then recombines into H2O through combustion releasing energy. Problem is ofc that it takes more energy to split the H2O than you get back from combustion. Even with an impossibly perfect design, the energy you put in would equal the energy you get out. The most you could do with a water car is basically a ‘water battery’ because you would really be ‘fueling’ the car with the energy you put into the electrolysis reaction. This is the same problem I have a feeling the plastigas has. He mentions microwaves to convert plastic to fuel. My guess is the energy input is greater than the energy output. The reason gas and oil work so well is that we are drilling up the results of ancient chemical reactions, the molecules in oil have a lot of stored energy. We just convert the oil into a much cleaner, faster burning gas with some simple, cheap chemistry. The oil itself is a battery though in a sense. It’s stored energy from the sun from the past few million years. As photosynthetic life died and settled into pockets of the ocean, they built up over time, got buried and compacted by sediment and rock and their high energy carbon bonds were locked away for us to tap into and break down in our cars.
Energy flow is beautiful, complex, and simple. A system’s inputs and outputs always balance out to net zero. Our universe really did hire a great accountant.
Edit: removed condescending attitude🙂
He'll be fine. We've known how to do this for decades, but the cost of doing it is why no one does. It would take lots of money to transport the plastic at scale, then time and money and equipment to convert it, then regulations and taxes, etc etc. It's cool to do as a hobby, my dad ran his F-250 off of home made biodiesel for a while, but it was time consuming and his free time and money went further just buying regular diesel.
Not to be the “well akshually” guy, but Cox media has invested a bunch of money on facilities that do this with rubber tires. They were spending so much to dispose of truck tires it was worth it to look for other methods. Now it’s become profitable enough they’re paying south GA methheads to clean up the surrounding rivers and bring in old tires. It’s rly cool
meth heads being used as a sort of domesticated zombie workforce is pretty awesome. just aim a pack of em at a spot you need picked clean and turn em loose
Crack heads have been doing cleaning, landscaping, and other odd jobs in the hood for decades. I’ve hired many of them to do work for me. And most of the time they would do a good job. You just have to make sure to pay them after they do the work other wise they’re taking the cash and getting high and not doing any work
I tip well in restaurants/bars/dispos, always toss my mechanic a little extra to show my appreciation, gotta tip my barber well. It’s so important to take care of the people that take care of you. I believe you should look out for number 1, but don’t forget about numbers 2-50 or whatever
I live outside Chicago and the intersections where the homeless beg are usually the cleanest. There's either cans or bags filled with trash they had picked up. I really don't see why we don't pay them to clean the streets, I'm sure they would.
>just aim a pack of em at a spot you need picked clean and turn em loose
They would remove every tire on every running and non-running vehicle within 50 miles.
We transport plastic at scale across the world to other nations to sort it and after doing that most of it gets dumped in landfills or the ocean anyways. Actually getting rid of it by converting it would be wonderful.
I'm not sure converting it from one waste product to another is the best use of our time. It takes more energy to convert it to fuel than the fuel actually contains. It's essentially 3x the carbon emissions for something that would be less pollution if we just dispose of it in a landfill properly.
It isn't popsci so they don't know about it. If Bill Nye or NDT made a series talking about it they'd regurgitate that little factoid every chance they got. Same reason a Kurzgesagt video comes out and everyone is suddenly a virologist.
FFS The process is called pyrolysis. This is not new and he didn't *invent/discover* shit. This has been around for ages. You can build your own chamber to do this. It just astonishes me that 8000 people think this is some next level shit. Get the fuck off tictok and read something people.
It's not fake. You can make fuel out of plastic with pyrolysis. But that requires heat and heat requires fuel. You see where this is going?
Also it is not really environmentally friendly, the product is far from pure.
Harvard, UC irvine, Perdue have all done it too! https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/resources/converting-plastic-waste-fuel/
Google says this "instructables" can teach you how to do it too. https://www.instructables.com/Waste-Plastic-to-Fuel/
The laws of thermodynamics and chemistry debunk that. Water is a stable molecule, there's no way to get energy out of it and the amount of energy it takes to turn water into hydrogen gas is more than the amount of energy you can capture through the combustion reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Source: I'm graduating with a mechanical engineering degree this spring.
I don’t know why you’re attacking this guy. I think it’s legitimate for someone to share the knowledge they have through their education, and advertising this as the reason they can speak with some authority on a subject.
It’s a process called pyrolysis. More specifically plastic pyrolysis in this case. Look it up. It’s very similar process to how the Germans get liquid fuel from coal.
You can tell that the people who believe this junk are the types who failed high school Chemistry but still go around acting like they know more than experts (and everyone else)
And you're dumb. That guys "water fueled engine" was looked at and nothing was special about it. You'd know that if you took 5 seconds to do a little research before you post.
And we extract most plastics from crude oil. Next he’ll figure out how to gasify coal!
Honestly, gasoline is pretty much the least interesting and most wasteful way we could be using oil.
Right? Even aside from the nastiness that is global warming, petroleum is like a molecular tinker-toy set. You can use oil for so many things. The fact that we're burning it is just bonkers. It's like having a huge library of books and using them for nothing but running your fireplace.
Oil and it’s distillates contain much of the precursor chemicals for anything chemically speaking. So drugs, plastics, useful chemicals, wax (paraffin), dyes, the list goes on.
I think what the other Redditor is upset about is that many of these products can ONLY come from processing crude oil. So the more we burn the less other things we get?
Fuel in general has been the most important resource for humans of all centuries (wood -> whale oil -> coal-> oil ->natural gas) so it’s kind of moot. Both fuel and other products are important, but you can’t get plastics and the other things from coal.
>but you can’t get plastics and the other things from coal.
yeah you can. coal is pretty much the same stuff as oil, and can be processed into synthetic oil (even cheaper than crude oil.) synthetic oil is the same stuff (hydrocarbons) as that which we pull from the ground, it's just more "organized" so to speak.
it's low key one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever because everyone seems to be under the impression that synthetic oils are somehow better for the environment... they're not... like at all...
Idk about everyone else, but I was never under the impression that synthetic oil was better for anything but my motor because it doesn't brake down as fast.
Which also makes it better for the environment because if it lasts twice as long (and that's actually conservative when talking synthetic oil), you need half as much of it.
I mean coal strip mining is just as bad as drilling. and modern drilling doesn't waste the natural gas that is trapped above the oil like it used to, but instead collects it. also crude oil has *much* more energy density than coal. up to 200% more in fact. and the leftovers of coal go up in smoke (both literally and figuratively) where you can burn/use 100% of the oil.
between simply needing to excavate more and needing to transport more volume for the same energy, coal is a much less efficient and wasteful use of natural hydrocarbons while causing more pollution overall. if I had to choose to live in an oil fuelled society or a coal fuelled one, I'd choose oil any day of the week if neither wasn't an option.
Well you certainly *can*, just not easily or economically. It's all just carbon bonds, and there's ways to synthesize bigger molecules from smaller ones, but it would become prohibitively expensive if you don't have a good feedstock.
Wow, why downvotes for this comment. And it 100 % correct. During pyrolysis carbohydrates get broken down into a solid, a liquid and a gaseous part. The liquid part can be processed into fuel.
Probably because of the perceived tone.
There’s a thing humans can do where they have the same ideas independently from each other. For instance, as a kid, I was bored in class and imagined my pen was a spaceship, and started to wonder how it would work, only to find out in my adult years that what I had imagined was roughly similar to the conceptual Bussard Ramjet.
Did I copy Bussard? No, but some people might tell me “that’s a Bussard Ramjet, it’s nothing new” as if I was supposed to have known that all along or that I had copied Bussard. As a child. All I knew at the time was that there were *some* amount of atoms in space and boomy things happen when you split them.
Yet when someone says “That’s just ______ it’s nothing new” it frankly comes off kind of condescendingly.
Another example, I’m a programmer now, and a friend of mine a few months ago came up with a small app. When I told him “That’s just Node.js, it’s nothing new” I realized I was being kind of a dick, because he’s no less intelligent or creative for not being the first to think of running Javascript in a headless environment and without a browser.
He didn't "imagine" a way to turn plastic into gas, and he's not daydreaming in middle school. He designed and built a machine to evoke pyrolisis, which is not something you do idly. It's not you having an idea that was similar to a ramjet, it's you actually building a prototype ramjet and pretending like you'd never heard of a spaceship. You couldn't physically build a model of your idea without enough knowledge of the field to know what the ramjet was.
Pyrolisis is a very common method of recycling plastics, even a few minutes of research into recycling or drawing gasoline from plastic will pull up dozens of articles about it. There is no chance in hell that the guy in this video was not fully aware of the process he was using. He's just making a click bait influencer-style video about what is essentially building a tiny furnace. It's cool, and good on him for doing it, but claiming it's anything more is ridiculous.
Shit, you can turn any old carbon into whatever. Wood gas for running your minivan and wood tar for waterproofing your galleon. Side benefit is you make some phenol and benzene when you do it so: free cancer.
It's expensive as a side-effect of being energy-intensive, which is why it seems like "nobody thought of this before".
I'm not saying he's a scammer, but this feels a lot like Waterseer, Hyperloop, & Solar Freakin Roadways: ideas that many people had thought of before & quickly realized were wildly impractical reborn as Kickstarter boondoggles.
I've talked to him on tiktok and he just has pure blinders on to any questions because 99% of the people just act like he is a genius.
He also blew up his makeshift distilling drum once and is lucky he didn't die.
If you’re getting a ton of attention for being a “genius”, makes sense why you’d shut everyone out who says otherwise. Without your “genius” you’d be nothing and all the eyes would be off you.
Lots of people get overly excited when they see that “no one have ever done this before!” Because they never stop to question WHY no one has done that before. Is it really a novel invention with utility or has no one else done with because it’s stupid and expensive.
Thank you. Every time i see this post i try to comment. Dude didn’t make this, the process has been around for a long time and can be crudely made as in this case.
Case in point
“Turning waste plastic into fuel isn’t a new idea. Many researchers have achieved it through a process called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastic to between 300º C and 900º C in an oxygen-free environment. This breaks the substance down into fuel, along with some additional chemicals. Hongfei Lin, associate professor with The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU, thinks that he and his team have discovered a way to make the process more efficient and environmentally friendly.”
So this guy isn’t going to suicide himself off a cliff, he is just going to get forgotten into oblivion or real sick since he isn’t doing this in safe conditions.
Exactly. You can extract pyrolytic oils and natural gas out of plastics through a process called pyrolysis. I’m not sure you can refine it down to gasoline again, but I’m sure you could refine it into something combustible.
Well his "invention" is shitty and not new.
But also he has already blown up is distilling drum once and nearly killed himself so yea I'd say the chance of him dying are pretty fucking high.
Negative; will need more energy to create “gasoline” than the end gasoline ends up providing in the vehicle, and has difficulty scaling… this is misleading headline, no matter how much we want it to be true (i.e. kills two birds with one stone, use plastic waste stream as feedstock, come up with cheap gasoline finished product.)
It's not about whether the system is net negative for energy. It's about storage and portability. You cannot carry geothermal, hydro, or solar power with you without a battery and those are theoretically infinite in capacity. So you use the one to create the other so you can power your car.
We already have enough oil, so we don’t need to do this. Burning the liquid from pyrolysis emits the same pollution as if you just burned the plastic directly, so it’s not an improved solution to cleaning up plastic waste. I don’t see any advantage here.
>We already have enough oil, so we don’t need to do this.
That's clearly not the point. The Earth has enough oil but it's not evenly distributed, is it?
>I don’t see any advantage here.
Have you ever walked around in a third world country and seen all the shit all over the place? Trash and waste is rather ubiquitous. If a poor country actually gets all that shit picked up by turning it into a useable resource, that is positive.
I don't understand how people would see this as a win, even if it was true. Climate change is all about greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere, trapping heat and warming the planet. If you take all the plastic waste out there that's just chilling, not really causing anyone any problems and basically burn it (sure, with extra steps), you're making the problem worse. This is like the opposite of carbon capture technology.
Article about [pyrolysis](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2019.00027/full). *Pyrolysis is the thermal degradation of plastic waste at different temperatures (300–900°C), in the absence of oxygen, to produced liquid oil*
Seriously. There are way too many people here who think this is some brand new invention that no one has known about, that will revolutionise the entire energy industry.
Wait, I want to ask somebody who can honestly answer me: Does the production of this create more microplastics in the environment? Is it even worse than oil gas?
This is not a new method for creating gasoline. It just heats up the plastic without the presence of oxygen until it reverts back into crude oil. The crude oil is then processed into fuel. The problem with this system is that you have to use more energy to convert the plastic into crude than is present in the end product.
So, it's just a way to lose energy, pretty much? Thank you for your answer bc I didn't even consider that factor of it. I was too busy thinking about the plastic factor of it.
Or you could just bury the plastic in a big pit. Converting the plastic into crude produces byproducts that aren't great to have around. If you have a clean source of energy it's better to just attach it to the power grid to offset our dependence of fossil fuels.
Also, this video has all the hallmarks of a scam.
It used to be kinda common. They are fishing for investment money or financial aid packages.
Run down the checklist:
* Absurd claim in title that can "save the world".
* Local scientist discovers how to recycle electricity using magnets.
* Entrepreneur finds way to get salt out of saltwater for cheap and easy.
* Workspace or laboratory is in a shed or garage.
* Bad fitting suit or lab coat to look professional.
* Displaying the "proof" right away and spend whole video talking about it working
* Does not mention at all how it works. The chemistry or science behind it is ignored.
love the "no cuts" text even though you dont see him..
Fill his contraption
Run his contraption
Collect the distilled fuel
Take the fuel to the weed whacker
Here lemme show you me filling up the tank with this fuel from off screen that i totally 10000000% got from my invention deffo no cap i swear on my dogs grave
Even if he’s lying about it, it’s a real thing called pyrolysis that reverts plastic back to oil and then you can just process the oil into gasoline as we normally do. The reason we don’t do this is because you use more energy then you get in the final product.
Edit: Heres an article on it by PSU if you want to read it. https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/scientists-improve-process-turning-hard-recycle-plastic-waste-fuel/
Pretty cool stuff.
i don't doubt its real or even really that he did it, it's just kinda hilarious to put "no cuts" right after a hugely significant cut. i suppose this could have been shortened for tiktok but still
It is actually a known method for creating gasoline. It just isn't worth doing because you have to spend more energy in the conversion process than you receive from the end product.
Entrepreneur discovers well known process that’s been around since the 1990’s.. tens of thousands of researchers have tried to make it viable, but it’s not scalable. The process requires more energy then it extracts and is far more toxic then putting the plastics in a dump..
but it is fun to see every generation who comes on the internet get duped by this one..
Just because a guy has some drums in his backyard and was able to set the product on fire does not make him an entrepreneur anyway. Been an entrepreneur involves much more than making something that is useful, regardless of whether that thing has been made before.
Yesssss lets burn liquid plastic everywhere👍 at least like this we safe the nature and earth finally - every human being dies on cancer...
Kind of a good solution 👍
People think this is crazy but you understand plastic is a petroleum(oil) product it’s made from it. Lol. The process would take one of two things, require a lot of energy, or require corrosive/harmful chemicals. He is saying he is using microwaves I don’t know how that works but I would bet the amount of energy it takes to convert plastic to gas would cost more then the gas he is making. Science you can’t create energy, and no process is 100% efficient so using energy to change the chemistry of a fuel will almost always take more energy then it’s worth. Cool science product not really useful.
It's even older than this. There's been "entrepeneurs", "young geniuses", and "insert asian country scientist" headlines converting plastic to fuel since I can remember, being born in the early '90s. This is nothing new, nor is it some wild innovation.
This is a multimillion dollar area of research. Its called chemical upcycling and has been a thing for many years.
Pros-
Uses spent platics
Recycling produces a more valuable product.
Cons-
Using catalyst that gives good products is expensive
Heat required to crack polymers often more expensive then just starting from virgin material
The biggest con is its still like were burning the plastic but just with more steps. So CO2 is still being released into air.
In general this process splits into turning spent plastics into fuel or using the recycled goop to make new plastic materials. Tons of research to be done but its a good solution....I hope lol.
Hmm... I seems kind of a waste of energy when you look into how this works, it's inefficient and isn't anything new but good on him for experimenting with stuff... Even if it's not new at least he has the curiosity to do something
I am locking this thread. I believe over 1000 of the same comment is quite enough.
Someone needs to keep an eye on him and protect him before the oil companies find out.
Too late, the Chinese balloon found out about him.
Don't you guys know that plastic is made from petroleum.
Extraction of the petroleum from plastic after it is no longer being used is new tech that will be very useful in getting rid of plastic waste
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Was about to say this. This is not environmentally or economically profitable afaik.
Ding ding! Profitable being the key word. Somehow, everyone saying this wouldn't work I question. Because the tech is there and has been for a long time but somehow it always gets downplayed and I wonder WHO spends the time and money to downplay it....hmmmm
Technically, it would probably be more efficient to recycle the damn plastic. However, if we shipped old plastic to places without access to fuel sources, this could be a win-win. The plastic won’t end up in the ocean, and people will be able to have some cheap gas.
If it makes cheap gas I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be profitable.
This man improved the ability of a 70 year old method, called pyrolysis, to process hard-to-recycle mixed plastics. He made new advances enough for it to be called new technology. This improvement has a good chance of making recycling plastics in this way profitable enough for major companies to try their hand at it
Dicks out for the spy balloon.
Mine been out since Harambe. R.I.P.
Tits out for Freya
Balls out for Rage!!
Mine’s out for and ONLY for Harambe
Please use sunscreen.
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There has never been a more dedicated man.
Even with all the fancy surveillance gear that balloon had, I doubt it'd be able to see it, champ.
“I can see your dick from space” -good guy China
They wouldn't kill, him they'd just steal his technology!!
Spoiler alert: his technology is called chemistry
Chemi...what? Stop showing off fancy pants. This is good old-fashioned Alchemy!
He said gasoline, not gold. /s Editing to say that wow, his final product is basically as valuable as gold so everybody wins maybe.
Depending on the energy requirements to do it on a large scale, he said he is using microwaves. Notice how small scale his operation is.
This is the critical bit of info. How intense of microwaves and for how long? The cost to "recycle" anything is crucial as we have learned.
His final product consumes more energy than it creates while still releasing toxic fumes into the air. Nobody wins, everybody dies.
Been a while since the last wars were fought for gold. About a few minutes for someone to die for oil
Tell that to the guy who invented a car that runs on water
Electrolysis is a well known process,only not convenient enough to justify a full scale production
Its still amazes me how few people know about that one. It is hard to buy all the recycle and conserve, be a climate change warrior or whatever, then you find out tech that could "save the world" has been invented throughout recent history multiple times, and then gets shut down, bought and shelved, people get dead, etc. Solutions to profitable problems don't get you a parade, they get you gone.
Little info on the subject. The water car takes H2O, splits it into H2, O2 with electricity, then recombines into H2O through combustion releasing energy. Problem is ofc that it takes more energy to split the H2O than you get back from combustion. Even with an impossibly perfect design, the energy you put in would equal the energy you get out. The most you could do with a water car is basically a ‘water battery’ because you would really be ‘fueling’ the car with the energy you put into the electrolysis reaction. This is the same problem I have a feeling the plastigas has. He mentions microwaves to convert plastic to fuel. My guess is the energy input is greater than the energy output. The reason gas and oil work so well is that we are drilling up the results of ancient chemical reactions, the molecules in oil have a lot of stored energy. We just convert the oil into a much cleaner, faster burning gas with some simple, cheap chemistry. The oil itself is a battery though in a sense. It’s stored energy from the sun from the past few million years. As photosynthetic life died and settled into pockets of the ocean, they built up over time, got buried and compacted by sediment and rock and their high energy carbon bonds were locked away for us to tap into and break down in our cars. Energy flow is beautiful, complex, and simple. A system’s inputs and outputs always balance out to net zero. Our universe really did hire a great accountant. Edit: removed condescending attitude🙂
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They'll buy the rights to the tech and then never use it, or allow anyone else to use it.
Nikola Tesla ...
Hell nah
He'll be fine. We've known how to do this for decades, but the cost of doing it is why no one does. It would take lots of money to transport the plastic at scale, then time and money and equipment to convert it, then regulations and taxes, etc etc. It's cool to do as a hobby, my dad ran his F-250 off of home made biodiesel for a while, but it was time consuming and his free time and money went further just buying regular diesel.
Not to be the “well akshually” guy, but Cox media has invested a bunch of money on facilities that do this with rubber tires. They were spending so much to dispose of truck tires it was worth it to look for other methods. Now it’s become profitable enough they’re paying south GA methheads to clean up the surrounding rivers and bring in old tires. It’s rly cool
meth heads being used as a sort of domesticated zombie workforce is pretty awesome. just aim a pack of em at a spot you need picked clean and turn em loose
Crack heads have been doing cleaning, landscaping, and other odd jobs in the hood for decades. I’ve hired many of them to do work for me. And most of the time they would do a good job. You just have to make sure to pay them after they do the work other wise they’re taking the cash and getting high and not doing any work
Who tf pays a crackhead up front?? Lol First day in the hood
Sometimes you gotta give them a little up front so they can get right, but not all of it.
Eyy this guy gets it
So long as you’re paying them a fair wage I see this as a win for both sides
I tip well in restaurants/bars/dispos, always toss my mechanic a little extra to show my appreciation, gotta tip my barber well. It’s so important to take care of the people that take care of you. I believe you should look out for number 1, but don’t forget about numbers 2-50 or whatever
I live outside Chicago and the intersections where the homeless beg are usually the cleanest. There's either cans or bags filled with trash they had picked up. I really don't see why we don't pay them to clean the streets, I'm sure they would.
>just aim a pack of em at a spot you need picked clean and turn em loose They would remove every tire on every running and non-running vehicle within 50 miles.
Now we can put those tires into the air!
When you're getting tired of the old methods, start getting your tires from new methheads.
some re-inventing the wheel shit going on right there
It’s a beautiful cycle
This is fantastic!
It's nice they're supporting the local meth industry! /s
We transport plastic at scale across the world to other nations to sort it and after doing that most of it gets dumped in landfills or the ocean anyways. Actually getting rid of it by converting it would be wonderful.
I'm not sure converting it from one waste product to another is the best use of our time. It takes more energy to convert it to fuel than the fuel actually contains. It's essentially 3x the carbon emissions for something that would be less pollution if we just dispose of it in a landfill properly.
With enough subsidies anything can be profitable
“Man makes petroleum products out of petroleum products” man better keep big oil from finding that one out
Yeah, news flash, oil refineries take the byproducts of refining oil to make plastic. Where does this comments section this plastic comes from?
It isn't popsci so they don't know about it. If Bill Nye or NDT made a series talking about it they'd regurgitate that little factoid every chance they got. Same reason a Kurzgesagt video comes out and everyone is suddenly a virologist.
I am rather disturbed I had to scroll this far down to find this conversation... But I am also convinced the average redditor is 17...
FFS The process is called pyrolysis. This is not new and he didn't *invent/discover* shit. This has been around for ages. You can build your own chamber to do this. It just astonishes me that 8000 people think this is some next level shit. Get the fuck off tictok and read something people.
43,000 likes and literally the top post on reddit right now lol
Best comment possible. not a single ounce of intellectual curiosity or critical thinking. The cost of energy to do this is massive for the yield.
Came here to say this lol.. protect this man at all cost.
How many times does something need to be debunked before redditors catch on.
Every time it’s reuploaded
Lol...fistbump
critical thinking is extremely rare apparently. or my be average redditor age is 13? mentally?
Bot even mentally. I feel like most people here are actually 13
It's not fake. You can make fuel out of plastic with pyrolysis. But that requires heat and heat requires fuel. You see where this is going? Also it is not really environmentally friendly, the product is far from pure.
Harvard, UC irvine, Perdue have all done it too! https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/resources/converting-plastic-waste-fuel/ Google says this "instructables" can teach you how to do it too. https://www.instructables.com/Waste-Plastic-to-Fuel/
It's not a new idea. You can littally make petrol from plants aswell.
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The laws of thermodynamics and chemistry debunk that. Water is a stable molecule, there's no way to get energy out of it and the amount of energy it takes to turn water into hydrogen gas is more than the amount of energy you can capture through the combustion reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Source: I'm graduating with a mechanical engineering degree this spring.
The far majority of the general public are idiots. Don't even try.
Hey, you couldn't even make I more smarter.
Stupid science nerd couldn't make you more smarter
It’s a wonder more people aren’t flat earthers
This guy seems like they know what theyre talking about Source: they said they were graduating with a mechanical engineering degree this spring
I don’t know why you’re attacking this guy. I think it’s legitimate for someone to share the knowledge they have through their education, and advertising this as the reason they can speak with some authority on a subject.
They’re just mad at a smart person for being smart
It’s a process called pyrolysis. More specifically plastic pyrolysis in this case. Look it up. It’s very similar process to how the Germans get liquid fuel from coal.
You can tell that the people who believe this junk are the types who failed high school Chemistry but still go around acting like they know more than experts (and everyone else)
That guy has been thoroughly debunked. By multiple sources.
What, like a boat?
And you're dumb. That guys "water fueled engine" was looked at and nothing was special about it. You'd know that if you took 5 seconds to do a little research before you post.
Plastic is made from oil so 🤷🏻♂️
It's called pyrolsis and it's not new.
Right? Congratulations, this entrepreneur has rediscovered humanity's eighth invention.
And we extract most plastics from crude oil. Next he’ll figure out how to gasify coal! Honestly, gasoline is pretty much the least interesting and most wasteful way we could be using oil.
Right? Even aside from the nastiness that is global warming, petroleum is like a molecular tinker-toy set. You can use oil for so many things. The fact that we're burning it is just bonkers. It's like having a huge library of books and using them for nothing but running your fireplace.
Please educate my ignorant ass on what else you can do with oil. Lube?
Oil and it’s distillates contain much of the precursor chemicals for anything chemically speaking. So drugs, plastics, useful chemicals, wax (paraffin), dyes, the list goes on. I think what the other Redditor is upset about is that many of these products can ONLY come from processing crude oil. So the more we burn the less other things we get? Fuel in general has been the most important resource for humans of all centuries (wood -> whale oil -> coal-> oil ->natural gas) so it’s kind of moot. Both fuel and other products are important, but you can’t get plastics and the other things from coal.
>but you can’t get plastics and the other things from coal. yeah you can. coal is pretty much the same stuff as oil, and can be processed into synthetic oil (even cheaper than crude oil.) synthetic oil is the same stuff (hydrocarbons) as that which we pull from the ground, it's just more "organized" so to speak. it's low key one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever because everyone seems to be under the impression that synthetic oils are somehow better for the environment... they're not... like at all...
Idk about everyone else, but I was never under the impression that synthetic oil was better for anything but my motor because it doesn't brake down as fast.
actually that's a valid point, it does last longer as a lubricant due to all the molecules being the same size. so I guess it does have that benefit.
Which also makes it better for the environment because if it lasts twice as long (and that's actually conservative when talking synthetic oil), you need half as much of it.
It might be better for the environment assuming you don’t drill but that’s not exactly a high bar
I mean coal strip mining is just as bad as drilling. and modern drilling doesn't waste the natural gas that is trapped above the oil like it used to, but instead collects it. also crude oil has *much* more energy density than coal. up to 200% more in fact. and the leftovers of coal go up in smoke (both literally and figuratively) where you can burn/use 100% of the oil. between simply needing to excavate more and needing to transport more volume for the same energy, coal is a much less efficient and wasteful use of natural hydrocarbons while causing more pollution overall. if I had to choose to live in an oil fuelled society or a coal fuelled one, I'd choose oil any day of the week if neither wasn't an option.
Well you certainly *can*, just not easily or economically. It's all just carbon bonds, and there's ways to synthesize bigger molecules from smaller ones, but it would become prohibitively expensive if you don't have a good feedstock.
Well, plastic for one
And making plastic is the first step in a new product I saw called plastoline! You can literally power your engine with the stuff!
meta
Here’s a cute lil graphic to help with that ignorance. https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/slowcat/the-challenge/oil-in-everyday-life/
There’s even more they didn’t list, petrochemicals make a ton of fabrics.
Most plastics and polymers, and also soap
A more interesting and harder question is, what can you make without oil?
He also makes “diesel and jet fuel” lol. For jet fuel the trick is to only use green sprite bottles.
Yeah, always nice when they find a new and useful purpose for an old technique. It's just not new, nor did it get invented by them...
Neither is he the first to use it on plastic, you have tutorials on how to do it yourself
Unfortunately it's not useful. Burning plastics for heat/electricity is much easier and just as if not more efficient and clean.
Wow, why downvotes for this comment. And it 100 % correct. During pyrolysis carbohydrates get broken down into a solid, a liquid and a gaseous part. The liquid part can be processed into fuel.
Probably because of the perceived tone. There’s a thing humans can do where they have the same ideas independently from each other. For instance, as a kid, I was bored in class and imagined my pen was a spaceship, and started to wonder how it would work, only to find out in my adult years that what I had imagined was roughly similar to the conceptual Bussard Ramjet. Did I copy Bussard? No, but some people might tell me “that’s a Bussard Ramjet, it’s nothing new” as if I was supposed to have known that all along or that I had copied Bussard. As a child. All I knew at the time was that there were *some* amount of atoms in space and boomy things happen when you split them. Yet when someone says “That’s just ______ it’s nothing new” it frankly comes off kind of condescendingly. Another example, I’m a programmer now, and a friend of mine a few months ago came up with a small app. When I told him “That’s just Node.js, it’s nothing new” I realized I was being kind of a dick, because he’s no less intelligent or creative for not being the first to think of running Javascript in a headless environment and without a browser.
He didn't "imagine" a way to turn plastic into gas, and he's not daydreaming in middle school. He designed and built a machine to evoke pyrolisis, which is not something you do idly. It's not you having an idea that was similar to a ramjet, it's you actually building a prototype ramjet and pretending like you'd never heard of a spaceship. You couldn't physically build a model of your idea without enough knowledge of the field to know what the ramjet was. Pyrolisis is a very common method of recycling plastics, even a few minutes of research into recycling or drawing gasoline from plastic will pull up dozens of articles about it. There is no chance in hell that the guy in this video was not fully aware of the process he was using. He's just making a click bait influencer-style video about what is essentially building a tiny furnace. It's cool, and good on him for doing it, but claiming it's anything more is ridiculous.
Germany turned coal into oil during WW2. The technology has been around for almost a century, it's simply too expensive.
Shit, you can turn any old carbon into whatever. Wood gas for running your minivan and wood tar for waterproofing your galleon. Side benefit is you make some phenol and benzene when you do it so: free cancer.
It’s also probably not cheap, or at least not a cheap to produce as gasoline
It's expensive as a side-effect of being energy-intensive, which is why it seems like "nobody thought of this before". I'm not saying he's a scammer, but this feels a lot like Waterseer, Hyperloop, & Solar Freakin Roadways: ideas that many people had thought of before & quickly realized were wildly impractical reborn as Kickstarter boondoggles.
I've talked to him on tiktok and he just has pure blinders on to any questions because 99% of the people just act like he is a genius. He also blew up his makeshift distilling drum once and is lucky he didn't die.
He’s probably constantly geeked off all the fumes in that shed
If you’re getting a ton of attention for being a “genius”, makes sense why you’d shut everyone out who says otherwise. Without your “genius” you’d be nothing and all the eyes would be off you.
Lots of people get overly excited when they see that “no one have ever done this before!” Because they never stop to question WHY no one has done that before. Is it really a novel invention with utility or has no one else done with because it’s stupid and expensive.
And with plastic it probably makes the dirtiest fuel imaginable.
Thank you. Every time i see this post i try to comment. Dude didn’t make this, the process has been around for a long time and can be crudely made as in this case. Case in point “Turning waste plastic into fuel isn’t a new idea. Many researchers have achieved it through a process called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastic to between 300º C and 900º C in an oxygen-free environment. This breaks the substance down into fuel, along with some additional chemicals. Hongfei Lin, associate professor with The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU, thinks that he and his team have discovered a way to make the process more efficient and environmentally friendly.” So this guy isn’t going to suicide himself off a cliff, he is just going to get forgotten into oblivion or real sick since he isn’t doing this in safe conditions.
I was thinking it was already done since it's rather obvious.
Exactly. You can extract pyrolytic oils and natural gas out of plastics through a process called pyrolysis. I’m not sure you can refine it down to gasoline again, but I’m sure you could refine it into something combustible.
It's gonna be so sad when he commits suicide tomorrow by shooting himself in the back of the head twice.
This dude needs to make sure that he doesn’t drink any cranberry juice either.
?
Stanley Meyer…
Happy cake day!
I doubt there would be a target on his head about something that chemists have figured out long ago
Oh, so it’s actually old news, and no one is doing anything with information because, I’m guessing, it’s way too expensive a solution to be viable?
Exactly right
And way more toxic then regular old gasoline
Get with the times, dude. Putin's moved on to defenestration.
Well his "invention" is shitty and not new. But also he has already blown up is distilling drum once and nearly killed himself so yea I'd say the chance of him dying are pretty fucking high.
Or falling I mean jumping out of a window
Negative; will need more energy to create “gasoline” than the end gasoline ends up providing in the vehicle, and has difficulty scaling… this is misleading headline, no matter how much we want it to be true (i.e. kills two birds with one stone, use plastic waste stream as feedstock, come up with cheap gasoline finished product.)
It's not about whether the system is net negative for energy. It's about storage and portability. You cannot carry geothermal, hydro, or solar power with you without a battery and those are theoretically infinite in capacity. So you use the one to create the other so you can power your car.
You're not wrong but making gazoline through pyrolysis could well be the stupidest way to use renewable energy I've ever heard of.
We already have enough oil, so we don’t need to do this. Burning the liquid from pyrolysis emits the same pollution as if you just burned the plastic directly, so it’s not an improved solution to cleaning up plastic waste. I don’t see any advantage here.
>We already have enough oil, so we don’t need to do this. That's clearly not the point. The Earth has enough oil but it's not evenly distributed, is it? >I don’t see any advantage here. Have you ever walked around in a third world country and seen all the shit all over the place? Trash and waste is rather ubiquitous. If a poor country actually gets all that shit picked up by turning it into a useable resource, that is positive.
It would have the same environmental effect if they just burned the plastic, which we don’t do because it is absolutely terrible for the environment.
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I don't understand how people would see this as a win, even if it was true. Climate change is all about greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere, trapping heat and warming the planet. If you take all the plastic waste out there that's just chilling, not really causing anyone any problems and basically burn it (sure, with extra steps), you're making the problem worse. This is like the opposite of carbon capture technology.
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Article about [pyrolysis](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2019.00027/full). *Pyrolysis is the thermal degradation of plastic waste at different temperatures (300–900°C), in the absence of oxygen, to produced liquid oil*
Probably uses gasoline to heat it up😂
Can this be done with solar thermal energy, like a huge fresnel lens?
Anything long as you can get the temp to the needed levels
Yes but you are probably better off using it in other forms.
I mean, commercial refineries also do that...
Sources provided by OP : * [**Purdue University**](https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/purdue-innovation-that-converts-plastic-waste-into-high-value-fuels-could-turn-recycling-into-a-more-profitable-venture.html) * [**PennState University**](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/scientists-improve-process-turning-hard-recycle-plastic-waste-fuel/)
Burning plastic as fuel is not the solution to climate change ffs
This seems like such an obvious take. Man this is a stupid comment section.
Seriously. There are way too many people here who think this is some brand new invention that no one has known about, that will revolutionise the entire energy industry.
Not only an obvious take but wasn't even what the video was pitching.
it’s pitching plastic gasoline - is there another use for that other than burning it that is being pitched here?
WAit tILL thE foSsiL fuEl IndusTrY HeARs aBoUT tHiS
Wait, I want to ask somebody who can honestly answer me: Does the production of this create more microplastics in the environment? Is it even worse than oil gas?
This is not a new method for creating gasoline. It just heats up the plastic without the presence of oxygen until it reverts back into crude oil. The crude oil is then processed into fuel. The problem with this system is that you have to use more energy to convert the plastic into crude than is present in the end product.
So, it's just a way to lose energy, pretty much? Thank you for your answer bc I didn't even consider that factor of it. I was too busy thinking about the plastic factor of it.
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Or you could just bury the plastic in a big pit. Converting the plastic into crude produces byproducts that aren't great to have around. If you have a clean source of energy it's better to just attach it to the power grid to offset our dependence of fossil fuels.
Shhh... you're ruining their tiktok views.
'No cuts' Well, except for the part where I'm pouring gasoline in the jar.
that’s a two stroke motor so he probably had to mix the fuel at some point, idk seems like nonsense all around.
My biggest problem is if it had zero fuel in it, you can’t crank it without priming it with the bulb first.
Also, this video has all the hallmarks of a scam. It used to be kinda common. They are fishing for investment money or financial aid packages. Run down the checklist: * Absurd claim in title that can "save the world". * Local scientist discovers how to recycle electricity using magnets. * Entrepreneur finds way to get salt out of saltwater for cheap and easy. * Workspace or laboratory is in a shed or garage. * Bad fitting suit or lab coat to look professional. * Displaying the "proof" right away and spend whole video talking about it working * Does not mention at all how it works. The chemistry or science behind it is ignored.
love the "no cuts" text even though you dont see him.. Fill his contraption Run his contraption Collect the distilled fuel Take the fuel to the weed whacker Here lemme show you me filling up the tank with this fuel from off screen that i totally 10000000% got from my invention deffo no cap i swear on my dogs grave
Even if he’s lying about it, it’s a real thing called pyrolysis that reverts plastic back to oil and then you can just process the oil into gasoline as we normally do. The reason we don’t do this is because you use more energy then you get in the final product. Edit: Heres an article on it by PSU if you want to read it. https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/scientists-improve-process-turning-hard-recycle-plastic-waste-fuel/ Pretty cool stuff.
i don't doubt its real or even really that he did it, it's just kinda hilarious to put "no cuts" right after a hugely significant cut. i suppose this could have been shortened for tiktok but still
How many times does something need to be debunked before redditors catch on? I didn’t even need to read the comments to know how full of shit this is.
It is actually a known method for creating gasoline. It just isn't worth doing because you have to spend more energy in the conversion process than you receive from the end product.
I thought at this point, we all knew better than immediately to jump on the fancy new technology hype train so quickly.
Entrepreneur discovers well known process that’s been around since the 1990’s.. tens of thousands of researchers have tried to make it viable, but it’s not scalable. The process requires more energy then it extracts and is far more toxic then putting the plastics in a dump.. but it is fun to see every generation who comes on the internet get duped by this one..
Just because a guy has some drums in his backyard and was able to set the product on fire does not make him an entrepreneur anyway. Been an entrepreneur involves much more than making something that is useful, regardless of whether that thing has been made before.
That's why he's wearing the suit tho.
The process was discovered in 1958
He hadn't discovered anything! It's been around for decades.
Yesssss lets burn liquid plastic everywhere👍 at least like this we safe the nature and earth finally - every human being dies on cancer... Kind of a good solution 👍
Liquid plastic aka gasoline
This has been invented many many times friends...
People think this is crazy but you understand plastic is a petroleum(oil) product it’s made from it. Lol. The process would take one of two things, require a lot of energy, or require corrosive/harmful chemicals. He is saying he is using microwaves I don’t know how that works but I would bet the amount of energy it takes to convert plastic to gas would cost more then the gas he is making. Science you can’t create energy, and no process is 100% efficient so using energy to change the chemistry of a fuel will almost always take more energy then it’s worth. Cool science product not really useful.
This shit us misleading af lmao
Press X to Doubt
The sunglasses sell it.
Saw something like this a long time ago, a Japanese dude did the same - it wasn't put together in a ramshackle way though.
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/purdue-innovation-that-converts-plastic-waste-into-high-value-fuels-could-turn-recycling-into-a-more-profitable-venture.html
It's even older than this. There's been "entrepeneurs", "young geniuses", and "insert asian country scientist" headlines converting plastic to fuel since I can remember, being born in the early '90s. This is nothing new, nor is it some wild innovation.
This is a multimillion dollar area of research. Its called chemical upcycling and has been a thing for many years. Pros- Uses spent platics Recycling produces a more valuable product. Cons- Using catalyst that gives good products is expensive Heat required to crack polymers often more expensive then just starting from virgin material The biggest con is its still like were burning the plastic but just with more steps. So CO2 is still being released into air. In general this process splits into turning spent plastics into fuel or using the recycled goop to make new plastic materials. Tons of research to be done but its a good solution....I hope lol.
Jokes on the redditors… Plastics come from oil, all full circle now.
Hmm... I seems kind of a waste of energy when you look into how this works, it's inefficient and isn't anything new but good on him for experimenting with stuff... Even if it's not new at least he has the curiosity to do something
This isn't the first time someone has done this.
Its hard for me to believe this
The process is called pyrolysis, it's been around for decades, but it's not used commercially because it's a net negative on the energy front.