Walk down any city street and you’ll undoubtedly see an underlying commonality: plastic bags. Either littered about the gutter or being used by a passer–by, plastic bags are everywhere. Plastic bags are inexpensive to produce, easy to transport, and take about half a millennia to biodegrade. Recently, researchers at the University of Illinois’ Sustainable Technology Center have come up with a process that doesn’t make plastic bags biodegrade faster, but uses the petroleum composition of plastic bags (what keeps them from breaking down) to make fuels like diesel and gasoline. Dr. Sriraam R Chandrasekaran, a research and development engineer from the Sustainable Technology Center who helped develop the process, took some time to speak with me about his findings.
Could you walk me through the process of creating fuel from plastic bags?
Dr. Sriraam R Chandrasekaran: “Standard plastic bags are basically made from petroleum by–products. What we do is collect plastic bags and put them through a process called pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is basically combusting all these materials in an oxygen deficient atmosphere. When you do that it produces syn–gas [synthetic gas], when you condense the syn–gas it forms crude oil. If you want to further distillate it you can get diesel, or gasoline.”