TimothyPilgrim wrote:
Old news. :) I've heard about veggie-plastics for a number of years. A prof at my university was researching converting garbage into a fuel. Damn, I should look him up and see what he's doing now. My question is has anybody found a way to de-polymerize a plastic back into a pre-plastic state such that the hydrocarbons can be recovered and converted into a useable fuel. We can recycle plastics by powdering them and forming the powder into pellets for re-use, but can that powder be further broken down into basic components?
Hmm...I'm struggling to recall my high school chemistry here, but if I remember right, polymerization is usually an exothermic reaction. Presumably even if you could depolymerize the plastic somehow, you'd have to add all that energy back in to do it. Burning the resulting fuel might not give you a net energy gain.
