a) From what I know, re-melting down plastic only works so many times till you hit a quality barrier, this can make use of the plastic that that process can't use.
b) This can make use of trash that otherwise would not have been recycled. It seems pretty agnostic about what plastics it accepts which is good, but on the other hand it also makes me wonder about byproducts in the oil and if or how they are extracted / disposed of.
Of course, at this point the price of waste plastic is cheap but it seems like if this caught on, then the oil suppliers would raise their prices for the raw plastic manufacturers, who would then have to raise prices for bottles and such, which in turn would probably lead to bottled drinks costing more. Which might even incentivize people to buy less of things with plastic packaging!
This price increase doesn't really apply much for the ton of existing plastic waste that we already have though, which can be obtained cheap, converted back to oil, then sold. All in all, this sounds great!
Distillation isn't magic. It works because different materials have different boiling points. When it's salt and water it's really easy since the boiling points are totally different but when it's something like this we're talking about hundreds to thousands of possible compounds all in the same mixture (also, there might be different compounds each time because of the different materials), melted up together. I doubt it's purified.
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The nice things about this are:
a) From what I know, re-melting down plastic only works so many times till you hit a quality barrier, this can make use of the plastic that that process can't use.
b) This can make use of trash that otherwise would not have been recycled. It seems pretty agnostic about what plastics it accepts which is good, but on the other hand it also makes me wonder about byproducts in the oil and if or how they are extracted / disposed of.
Of course, at this point the price of waste plastic is cheap but it seems like if this caught on, then the oil suppliers would raise their prices for the raw plastic manufacturers, who would then have to raise prices for bottles and such, which in turn would probably lead to bottled drinks costing more. Which might even incentivize people to buy less of things with plastic packaging!
This price increase doesn't really apply much for the ton of existing plastic waste that we already have though, which can be obtained cheap, converted back to oil, then sold. All in all, this sounds great!
It looks like it distils the oil which would mean that it is purified. It also would mean that the machine needs to cleaned regularly.
Distillation isn't magic. It works because different materials have different boiling points. When it's salt and water it's really easy since the boiling points are totally different but when it's something like this we're talking about hundreds to thousands of possible compounds all in the same mixture (also, there might be different compounds each time because of the different materials), melted up together. I doubt it's purified.