The Case for Pyro-Degrade Energy

The Popular Stance on Plastics

Plastic: A class of synthetic polymers made from oil that are utilized in many products and their packaging. These materials are long lasting, and have desirable characteristics with regard to form-ability, flexibility and strength.

Plastic is everywhere; in our air, our water even in remote places like Antarctica. We don't have a grip on the implications of this and those that profit from these materials don't seem concerned. This seeming lack of caring provides motivation to plastic opposition to paint producers as evil and greedy at public expense. This sentiment builds over time to produce an unbalanced projection of the dangers of plastics even with a lack of hard evidence. This is reflected in my internet research where I have noted that negative articles regarding plastic account for approximately 70% of the articles available. Positive articles on the other hand, occupy about 20% of the results. The remaining fall into the neutral category. Is the balance of negativity warranted or is this a case of dramatization?

The Benefit of Plastics

These polymers like Polyethylene or Polypropylene can be formed into films, solids and all manner of shapes to facilitate a product's usefulness and shelf life. Sourced from mineral oil (crude), they are relatively inexpensive in comparison with other more natural materials.

Plastics have improved life for humans in several ways. In packaging for example, they have extended the shelf life of food, lowered the packaging weights and facilitated automation for factories. All of these factors provide a means of getting products to people more quickly, cheaply and safely than ever before. Unlike packaging materials like glass, plastic is disposable.

The Problem

These polymers are extremely stable, persisting in the environment for an extended period of time. This means that trash, left about by dirty humans remains. Unlike metal waste, the value of plastic is nearly $0 and therefore, there is no incentive to do anything other than consider it refuse. The result is that over time, the trash compounds until the only trash we seem to have is plastic.

This has pushed manufacturers to create biodegradable plastics. Biodegradable plastics can refer to wholly new polymers that allow for bacterial breakdown or fully synthetic types with additives allowing for early deterioration. Most of these materials still require proper treatment in an industrial composting facility and do not break down readily in a natural environment.

While the polymers themselves are extremely stable and non-reactive, additives are sometimes included to enhance UV stability, flame behavior etc.. The implications of these additives may be far reaching. There is evidence of additives leaching into foods and the environment in low quantities, but the nature of these chemicals raises concern. These substances have been shown to cause hormone disruption and other natural process interference.

Existing Solutions

These facts have created a desire to reduce the disposal rates of plastics in various ways. The most pervasive method of is to recycle by integrating post consumer plastic back into the same products. For the pure plastics, the material can be used up to 5 times. This circular or reuse approach promises to reduce the creation of additional plastics as it diverts waste. There are numerous programs set up through policy and law that promote and encourage this type of recycling. Other methods of 'recycling' include the blending plastics into asphalt to enhance the life of road surfaces. However, at the end of it's life, the asphalt and it's plastic still become waste that ends up in a landfill. At the same time, there are also concerns about road wear releasing high amounts of microplastics into the atmosphere.

While plastic lends itself to being recycled, but acquiring, sorting, cleaning, drying, shredding, heating and reforming that plastic tends to be more expensive than simply producing virgin plastic from crude. That varies but at the time of this writing, recycled PET is 15% higher in price than virgin PET. This price difference reflects the relative effort needed for each process.

Plastic Circularity Market Gap

Recycling can only be performed so many times. This means that recycle plants must reject as unusable, some of the plastics they receive. Disposal rates at a typical new recycling facility runs about 15% while older plants dispose of 35% of incoming material. What happens to the material at the end of it's life? It goes to the dump. Here in Nairobi, it will likely be open burned spewing partially burned polymers (otherwise known as toxins) into the air to be absorbed into the environment elsewhere.

Currently, there is no good solution for end-of-life plastics. Imagine a recycler who rejects bottles from their process, bundles them and takes them to the dump. On the way to the dump, the bailing wire breaks and now the crushed bottles are loose inside the dumper. These bottles get picked up by the 'pickers' at the dump and returned to the recycler through an informal recovery process.

Our solution

We know that plastics need to have a lifecycle termination point if we do not want them sitting in the environment for years. The good news is that this does not require some new technology. The solution was developed quite some time ago and it is called pyrolysis.

Pyrolysis is the heating of a substance in the absence of air. This technique allows, in our case, the long carbon chain polymers to break down into shorter chains without the danger of oxidizing them. These shorter chains are molecules like cetane, kerosene and butane. These are then isolated and cleaned for use as bio-fuels. Bio-fuels can then be sold into the energy market displacing fuels that would otherwise been extracted from crude oil.

Diverting this material from the dump saves approximately 1,740 tons of CO2 from being introduced to the environment every month based on our current sizing estimates of 20 tons processed per day.

Don't confuse the fact that the technology is old and simple with easy. However, using engineers familiar with the process does make it achievable. That is where we are leaning on the engineering prowess of Klean Industries. Klean has installed plants like this throughout the world and their track record gives us the technical expertise and experience we need to make this solution work. The benefits of this type of solution are naturally the environmental aspect, the generation of jobs on the social front, and the fact that it is an economically sustainable solution.

The Pyro Vision

We have completed our proof of concept plant and now we are ready to expand into a full size commercial plant. Our vision is to start within Nairobi where the environmental problems are quite acute. The profits of the company would then be used to take the concept to new plants in Kenya, expanding to stable countries all across Africa.

We are looking for investors. Reach out to us to set up a meeting