Plastic Bags: A New Power Source?

news.discovery.com:

Rather than languishing in landfills or littering roadsides, plastic bags could make their way into useful products like toner, lubricants, or rechargeable cell phone or laptop batteries, if new research becomes commercialized.

Read the whole story: news.discovery.com

Comments

[jobrien1950]

12:26 AM on 06/30/2010

This is off subject, but cleancoal is running an ad that says either "fix it or nix it" regarding the clean energy bill, which is so funny, because there is no such thing as cleancoal, and the ads are actually run by Koch industries, one of the biggest coal companies ever. Disgusting.

[logicanada]

12:08 PM on 06/29/2010

This is silly unless it more than off sets the power needed to make plastic bags.

[jsarets]

01:06 PM on 06/29/2010

No... This is only silly if the product fuel/energy is worth less than the alternative uses of waste plastic. Since in most cases waste LDPE can only be downcycled into stuff like patio furniture or asphalt filler, there is only so much demand for applications that out-price fuels.

Your logical fallacy is to assume that we'd be producing plastic bags just to convert them into fuel, when the plastic exists to serve an independent demand, and this process creates a new demand for the resulting waste stream.

In the future, our productive capacity for foods and virgin materials will be limited to our photosynthetic output. The key to maximizing standards of living will be to get two or more uses out of each unit of biomass as we downcycle from foods and virgin materials through secondary materials, fuels, and ultimately energy/fertility.

Waste management is the most difficult challenge of creating a sustainable economy, surpassing agriculture and certainly transportation. We have to extract as much value as possible out of our waste streams: reusing and recycling where practical, and downcycling to lesser materials or fuels where necessary.

[research]

01:47 PM on 06/29/2010

It's basically a bio char process. Heat without oxygen, and the plastic decomposes and generates hydrogen and other gases, that can be burned cleanly, to power the whole process.

[research]

12:32 AM on 06/29/2010

Yes! Bio Char can turn that organic waste into energy, "bio" fuels and soil enhancing charcoal!

[jsarets]

11:15 AM on 06/29/2010

You and I have been on top of this for a long time.

I hope people are throwing money at you as they seem to be doing for this guy at Argonne.

They certainly aren't throwing any money my way... :(

[bbrecht]

02:54 PM on 06/28/2010

We can do much better than this! Stop using plastic bags. Carry your own cloth bags-- and energy will be saved in both producing the bags, and trying to turn them into energy after. The production of plastic bags creates toxic waste.

Cloth bags are better anyway! They're more sturdy, easier to carry, etc.

[piggybackmom]

03:15 PM on 06/28/2010

I agree with you on using cloth bags. That should be enforced, but until it is this is a good idea then seeing the plastic bags in landfills.

[bbrecht]

04:12 PM on 06/28/2010

It won't ever be enforced until we organize to pass laws to ban them.

[AJH]

07:58 PM on 06/29/2010

If the petroleum components don't go into plastic bags they will go into something else if only straight to a waste containment impoundment if no other marketable use is found for them.

Getting rid of the bags somewhat ignores the reason they really exist as well as the laws of physics.

[rougebaisers]

10:47 PM on 06/28/2010

Yep. I now have more than a dozen reusable bags. They are pretty cheap and carry a lot more than plastic bags that break.

[piggybackmom]

02:42 PM on 06/28/2010

I love this idea. Plastic bags into batteries. Yes!

Recently in the Argonne National Laboratory southwest of Chicago, US, a scientist came up with the brilliant discovery of recycling plastic bags and making them into batteries. Scientists found that the much problematic plastic bags could be recycled into carbon nanotubes a main component of lithium ion batteries

http://www.solarpowerwindenergy.org/2010/06/23/plastic-bags-recycled-into-batteries/

[sc300nc]

01:10 PM on 06/28/2010

If it burns, it can produce power.

[bbrecht]

02:56 PM on 06/28/2010

If you burn plastic, you release hormone disrupting dioxin into the air. Not such a good idea.