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I saw this news while on a public place watching NHK Newsline. Interestingly I couldn’t find it on Google search under News or All. The very interesting part is

by hbarka 5y ago

I saw this news while on a public place watching NHK Newsline. Interestingly I couldn’t find it on Google search under News or All. The very interesting part is that the feed stock used to make the liquid fuel comes from common garbage waste. Have we finally found a place for the tons of household garbage we generate? The company cited as the supplier was Fulcrum Bioenergy in Reno Nevada. https://fulcrum-bioenergy.com/ https://fulcrum-bioenergy.com/

Reason077 5y ago
> ”Have we finally found a place for the tons of household garbage we generate?” Fossil-derived plastics make up a significant portion of household waste. From a climate perspective, it might actually be better to bury plastics in landfills rather than burn them as fuel.
- usrusr 5y ago
  The mirror argument is that from a climate perspective, as long as we are still burning low energy-per-co2 fossils like lignite for energy (spot the embarrassed German) it might be a net reduction if we burn those high energy future landfills instead. Plastics are very useful, perhaps we should consider it wasteful to leave any well-to-atmosphere paths where the carbon did not go through a stage of making itself useful as plastics? Hard to find any numbers, because the CO2/MWh stats of incineration plants always contain a considerable fraction of renewable on the input and that would have to be removed from the equation an all sides (input, CO2 output, energy output) for a useful answer. I'm not enough of a chemist, but I suspect that the process the article is about could also habe potential for the creation of raw materials from bio stocks for plucking into the conventional plastics pipeline? This, combined with landfills (instead of incineration/highly processed incineration) could end up being the most viable carbon capture approach: instead of jumping through hoops trying to capture for the sake of it, it would harness our insatiable demand for plastics consumption. Are there any plant-based plastics already that don't don't with the friendly "degradable" label?
  - regularfry 5y ago
    Probably the most common plant-based plastic is PLA. Or at least, that's the one I come across most often. While technically it's compostable, you need an industrial composting process to do it. It's not something you can just throw in the ground and dig up as usable soil a year later. And it's entirely possible that there would be ecosystem-unfriendly additives in it unless you were careful. This runs the same risk as we currently see with recycling: because it all happens behind closed doors, the door's wide open for the worst sorts of environmental fraud where the claimed process actually only happens on a small fraction of the input, and the rest is just dumped. We really need plastics that can be broken down at the home level so people can take ownership of the process directly.
- regularfry 5y ago
  There's a reasonable argument that turning them to biochar would enable us to enrinch soil enough to make it globally more efficient at capturing carbon. That would do both: the carbon in the plastics gets captured, and a carbon capture mechanism gets boosted. The thing you've got to remember about plastics though is that only a relatively small fraction of the carbon involved in producing a lump of plastic is actually in the plastic itself. The production process emits a lot more. If what you end up doing is creating a demand for more raw plastic to be produced, that's a massive net loss.

by hbarka 5y ago

Reason077 5y ago

> ”Have we finally found a place for the tons of household garbage we generate?” Fossil-derived plastics make up a significant portion of household waste. From a climate perspective, it might actually be better to bury plastics in landfills rather than burn them as fuel.

usrusr 5y ago
The mirror argument is that from a climate perspective, as long as we are still burning low energy-per-co2 fossils like lignite for energy (spot the embarrassed German) it might be a net reduction if we burn those high energy future landfills instead. Plastics are very useful, perhaps we should consider it wasteful to leave any well-to-atmosphere paths where the carbon did not go through a stage of making itself useful as plastics? Hard to find any numbers, because the CO2/MWh stats of incineration plants always contain a considerable fraction of renewable on the input and that would have to be removed from the equation an all sides (input, CO2 output, energy output) for a useful answer. I'm not enough of a chemist, but I suspect that the process the article is about could also habe potential for the creation of raw materials from bio stocks for plucking into the conventional plastics pipeline? This, combined with landfills (instead of incineration/highly processed incineration) could end up being the most viable carbon capture approach: instead of jumping through hoops trying to capture for the sake of it, it would harness our insatiable demand for plastics consumption. Are there any plant-based plastics already that don't don't with the friendly "degradable" label?
- regularfry 5y ago
  Probably the most common plant-based plastic is PLA. Or at least, that's the one I come across most often. While technically it's compostable, you need an industrial composting process to do it. It's not something you can just throw in the ground and dig up as usable soil a year later. And it's entirely possible that there would be ecosystem-unfriendly additives in it unless you were careful. This runs the same risk as we currently see with recycling: because it all happens behind closed doors, the door's wide open for the worst sorts of environmental fraud where the claimed process actually only happens on a small fraction of the input, and the rest is just dumped. We really need plastics that can be broken down at the home level so people can take ownership of the process directly.
regularfry 5y ago
There's a reasonable argument that turning them to biochar would enable us to enrinch soil enough to make it globally more efficient at capturing carbon. That would do both: the carbon in the plastics gets captured, and a carbon capture mechanism gets boosted. The thing you've got to remember about plastics though is that only a relatively small fraction of the carbon involved in producing a lump of plastic is actually in the plastic itself. The production process emits a lot more. If what you end up doing is creating a demand for more raw plastic to be produced, that's a massive net loss.