Better-Uses-For-Oil-Than-Burning-It

November 23, 2003 – Vol.8 No.35

BETTER-USES-FOR-OIL-THAN-BURNING-IT.

Here’s a dream. The oil producing countries - such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela - wake up some day and realize that they shouldn’t be selling the precious resource in the ground beneath them for fuel.

Instead, they decide to build industries that utilize oil in such a way as to stretch the remaining reserves for centuries, rather than a few more decades. In other words, they begin building sustainable economies - with the resulting jobs and business opportunities - around the crude that will insure social and political stability far into the future.

Is this just a dream? Will they do this on their own? To some extent they already are. There’s fleeting news of chemical industries growing in these nations, and hearsay of patents for a variety of oil-based compounds being grabbed up by oil exporting countries.

Plastics is one of the industries that come under the category of better-uses-for-oil-than-burning-it. Yet plastics, unlike metals, aren’t easily recycled. Recycling makes an industry sustainable. Both steel and aluminum industries make good use of recycling.

The plastic recycling process requires a visual identification by type - meaning people have to look for the stamp on the product being recycled. And separation by type is by hand. Then, when like-type plastics are melted and reformed they are often degraded - lose strength for instance.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a way to recycle plastics that won’t disturb important properties like strength, hardness, or resistance to decay in sunlight.

The scientists mixed ground-up plastics of one type with ground-up plastics of another and pressed them together. In experiments with hard and soft plastics, the properties of the hard plastic were retained. Even when the original sample was recycled repeatedly - up to ten times - the properties of the harder plastic stood. Recycled plastics could be recycled, in other words. The process, too, uses less energy than remelting plastics.

The process doesn’t solve the sorting problem, however. That still needs work.

The ability to recycle plastic would give the versatile material even more appeal and could be used in even more applications than today. And more market opportunities for plastics and plastic recycling could build sustainable industries around a diminishing resource.

The research was published in the journal Nature at http://www.nature.com/ (click NPG Subject Areas, Chemistry, Low Temperature Processing of Baroplastics by Pressure Induced Flow)