By Anupum Pant
Plastic is a huge problem. It’s filling up the landfills, causing problems to the animals and what not. But did you know, there’s a very simple method you could use to convert plastic to a general purpose oil – something you could burn for heat. The same oil can even further be distilled to separate gasoline, kerosene and diesel. All you need to do is to construct an apparatus like the person uses in the video below.
An apparatus that would heat the plastics in an oxygen free atmosphere to at least 400 degrees centigrade. This would cause the long polymer chains of plastics to breakdown due to a process called pyrolysis. The end product would be vapors of oil which can be cooled down and collected for general burning. A kilogram of plastic used would produce almost a liter of oil. If you’d rather burn the plastic, it would produce about 3 times as much carbon dioxide in weight. Considering it’d get burnt anyway if you make the oil, at least you’d now have a far more richer and cleaner source of heat.