An Inventor Created A Machine That Can Turn Plastic Into Fuel

The Threat From The Most Familiar Material

Where it comes to the environment, aside from CO2 and global warming, most of us would think about plastic. The media has done its part in portraying the negativity surrounding this useful, but potentially catastrophic material to our planet.

Though plastic has been around for a long time, it’s in recent days that we actually understand the negativity behind it. And one of the negativities is the fact that it’s not biodegradable. In other words, it cannot naturally decay in the environment and be stuck around indefinitely.

Now, the race is on for researchers to deal with it.

The first aim is to reduce plastic usage worldwide. Then, we need to clean up after ourselves and properly dispose of whatever plastic we had dumped into the rivers and oceans. But even if, hypothetically, we are able to achieve the latter goal, our society still consumes tonnes of the material each day.

An inventor from the Southern region of France has suggested a way we can deal with this situation.

Chrysalis

Christofer Costes said he has developed a machine that can break down plastic materials into liquid fuel. The machine he dubbed as ‘Chrysalis’ works by running the material through a 450°C furnace to ‘pyrolise’ it. The high heat will decompose the plastic and create a type of liquid that’s 65% composed of Diesel, 18% petrol, 10% gas, and 7% carbon. All of which are useful to us, for example, Diesel, petrol, and gas can be used as vehicular fuels or for heating. Carbon can be used to make crayons or colourants.