Recycling Plastic to its Original State

            As we know, plastic is a very invasive and pervasion element and has begun to eat away at our environment, or I should say, has begun to be eaten. According to an article on the Fox News, plastic bags can kill up to 100,000 animals of marine life and bids in one year.  Simple math can prove that just plastic bags can kill around 273 animals per day. Obviously, we should put a stop or restriction on these plastics but is there anyway we can use this waste to our advantage? Because the chemistry behind plastic, it takes thousands of years to even fully break it down and it never fully decomposes.

            Polymer Energy might have a new solution to this horrible waste product. Polymer Energy is a company that has designed a machine to break down the plastic and convert it to useable energy. The way Polymer Energy works is by using a catalytic pyrolysis to efficiently convert plastics (primarily polyolefins) into crude oil. In a sense this is a way to recycle plastic to its original form. As we know, plastic is a petroleum product. The Polymer Energy Company has designed a module that can produce 775 liters of crude oil for every ton of plastic waste. Currently, the system can range from 200-400 tons of plastic a month. This can obviously be raised if more modules were produced.

            The design of the actual system can handle other types of waste like metals, glasses and water that might be an inhabitant with the plastic. The advantage of this design is that the plastic does not need to go through any pre-order or cleaning before entering the system. Obviously Polymer Energy’s website sates the importance of recycling and keeping our environment clean but the fumes of converting the plastic back to crude oil

 can’t be that clean, can it? This is a very new idea and would be interesting to see it grown. After all, renewable energy can’t be that bad along with cleaning up the environment of plastic waste.   

U.S.—A Wasteful Country?

In comparison to other countries around the world the United States uses an absurd amount of Energy. There are many different ways a country can use energy. The four top sectors of energy use in industrialized and developing countries are electric utilities, transportation, industrial, and residential and commercial use. In 2002 the world as a whole was stated to use 11.4 barrels of oil per person. This seams like a lot but when broken down into energy per capita it’s a relatively small GDP.

In 2002 it was said that the world consumption of energy was 410 QBtu. In that same year the United States used 98 QBtu. Now, this is getting absurd. This means that the United States is using about ¼ of the worlds energy. Most of the U.S. energy is coming from those four sectors I stated above and guess which two are on top? Electric and transportation. This means that we the people in the U.S. spend more energy on things like air conditioning and driving SUVs than our actual industrial world! Hopefully our strive towards more renewable energy will cut back on the electric utilities but transportation seems to be a bigger issue.

27.3% of our energy use is from transportation. That’s a sh** load. There are a few reasons why our transportation energy is so high. First, it’s because our population density is far less than other countries. This being said, our public transportation is less efficient. But no one can argue me that driving big SUVs that guzzle gas is a good practice. So maybe we should try to improve our public transportation. We could maybe lay down more railroads, and up the amount of busses traveling from city to city. If this were to happen do you think people would actually take the initiative to use the public transportation? Also, by laying more tracks and increasing the busses from city to city, would that be more energy efficient? None the less, improvements need to be made.

Touching on Manure

After a very interesting lecture on biomass on Tuesday 17, 2009 by Curtis Engine and the creation of energy from landfills I wanted to understand more about methane gas and in particular methane gas from manure. It was stated that here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland would be a great area to build a landfill gas energy plant because of the high concentration of poultry farms. Now exactly how does the manure translate into methane and do different types of manure create better methane gas?

 The University of Missouri’s Department of Agricultural Engineering, Charles D. Fulhage, Dennis Sievers and James R. Fisher answer my question. They break it down nicely starting with the simple question: What’s in manure? Yeah, that stinky stuff you step in when walking across an unclean yard that sticks with you the whole night and lingers as if the dog itself is squatting right next to you. Or that white paste that you rest your hand in while hopping down into your boat that becomes your beer’s best friend and doesn’t dry all day. If you haven’t guessed already, I’m talking about poop. Now, walking around and scooping up random dog scat or collecting the floaters in your toilet and donating them to a biomass plant is not the way to go about it all. But on farms, and other places like the Eastern Shore where manure piles are the size of small skyscrapers would be a more efficient way of collecting the potential energy.

 Manure contains organic solids, which are basically fat, carbohydrates and protein. All of these solids are food for the growth of anaerobic bacteria. When this bacteria starts to eat way on the chunks of dung it’s being broken down into two different processes. Fist the solids are broken down by different types of acids. Second, the acids are converted into methane gas and carbon dioxide. This is a very basic way of looking at the process but easier to understand.

 So how much gas will we actually get out of the process? The amount of methane depends on a ratio between the gases produced per solids that are broken down. This is the “gas yield." See Table 1. 

 It’s hard to say whether cow manure is better than swine or poultry because it all depends on the over all amount of the manure. Living on a small farm myself, I would love to one day be able to donate some of our manure to a biomass plant and see it converted into renewable energy.

 For more information see University of Missouri Extension

Maryland's Answer

After a very interesting lecture last night with Dave Blazer of BluewaterWind, Maryland's project, it has become apparent that renewable wind engery is the way to go. Interestingly enough it was stated last night that Governor O'Malley has challenged the state to reduce energy consumption by 15% by 2015 and an increase in renewable energy by 2022. This seams like a perfect time for the BluewaterWind to step in. It was also stated last night that there will be at most 200 wind turbines off the cost of Ocean City producing 600 megawatts that could produce enough energy for something around 136,000 homes. This number sounds large but in reality it's not. This must be an average of a typical home because some homes will obviously use more energy or less energy than the 136,000. I'm all for the wind energy. It's clean, renewable, and so far, environmentally safe.

What about the Seabed?

Wind Energy

Wind energy is obviously a very clean form of energy. The problem I see with wind energy and what was mentioned in the article is conserving the energy the wind generates. Due to the nature of our environment, wind is more aggressive at night and less so during the daytime. The problem is, more energy is used during the day. Is there a way to conserve and capture the energy generated by wind? Would it be less expensive to construct more wind turbines then some sort of pant to capture the energy? The last thing we would want to do is waste the energy that the wind is generating.