This Company Can Power Vehicles With Plastic Waste, Helping Us Protect The Environment

Electric vehicles running on Lithium-ion batteries are not the only ones that are more environment-friendly than those using fossil fuels, that’s for sure. Another less popular solution is vehicles powered by hydrogen.

Vehicles running on hydrogen power also bring a lot of benefits that surpass Li-ion ones such as shorter charging times, simpler refueling.

Now, UK-based Waste2tricity has plans to implement technologies based on hydrogen in vehicles.

To do this, the firm has obtained a patent for its plastic waste heating method, involving gasifying bottles, bags, and more in a furnace into hydrogen. Then they can use this hydrogen to power vehicles without emitting carbon into the atmosphere, this kind of fuel is 100 percent clean whose waste is water only.

In collaboration with Toyota, the company has propelled the idea by setting up a hundred new stations for recycling plastic waste into hydrogen fuel.

Waste2tricity’s experts claim that for every 25 tons of plastic waste, we can generate enough power for a vehicle to run about 96.5 kilometers.

It’s not hard to tell two simultaneous Earth-related advantages of this solution.

The first one is the reduction of pollution from plastic waste on land and under oceans. This method of converting plastic into something actually useful may pave the way to make plastic production both commercial and environmental-friendly.

Secondly, hydrogen-powered vehicles will end transportation’s contribution to pollution for good since they release water rather than harmful gases as wastes. Joe Howe, a professor at the University of Chester, declares that NASA astronauts on spaceships drink water produced from hydrogen fuel batteries.

John Hall, the chairman of Waste2tricity, full of hope, said that the amount of plastic waste their technology would convert into hydrogen power will nearly double that currently being sent to China from the UK, which weighs 5 lakh tons.

However, hydrogen hasn’t been widely used for one reason. Since hydrogen is an unstable element, it has to be contained with extreme precaution. As a result, the common use of this kind of power will require costly infrastructure regardless of the production location. Despite the outstanding benefits we can get from hydrogen power generated from plastic waste, we still have a long way to go before actually making it a common source of energy.