Saving oceans: UK startup turning plastic to oil
london — At a garbage dump about 80 miles west of London, Adrian Griffiths is testing an invention he’s confident will save the world’s oceans from choking in plastic waste. And earn him millions.
His machine, about the size of a tennis court, churns all sorts of petroleum-based products — cling wrap, polyester clothing, carpets, electronics — back into oil. It takes less than a second and the resulting fuel, called Plaxx, can be used to make plastic again or power ship engines.
“We want to change the history of plastic in the world,” said Griffiths, the chief executive officer of Recycling Technologies in Swindon, a town in southwest England where 2.4 tonnes of plastic waste can get transformed in this way daily as part of a pilot project.
For financial backers including the UK government and more than 100 private investors, the technology could mark a breakthrough in how plastic is managed globally. The machine uses a feedstock recycling technique developed at Warwick University to process plastic waste without the need for sorting, a major hurdle that has prevented economically viable recycling on a grand scale.
Griffiths’ project is unique in that it doesn’t target a specific type of plastic, but rather seeks to find a solution for the so-called plastic soup inundating the world’s water bodies. By 2050, plastic will outweigh fish in the oceans, according to a study presented at this year’s World Economic Forum by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. “It could be a real game changer,” said Patricia Vangheluwe, consumer and environmental affairs director at PlasticsEurope, a trade association representing more than 100 polymer producers, including BASF and Dow Chemical Co. “This is a great way of getting plastics that you would not be able to recycle with current technology, or do that in an economic way, back into the circular economy.”
At the moment, only about 10
We want to change the history of plastic in the world Adrian Griffiths, CEO of Recycling Technologies
per cent of plastic gets reprocessed because it’s cheaper to pump new oil for petrochemical feedstock, especially after crude prices collapsed in recent years. The rest is incinerated, disposed in landfills, or dumped into oceans, releasing toxic chemicals that harm coral reefs and get swallowed by the marine life humans eat.
Many projects fail because they don’t offer a big enough margin to make them viable, according to Nick Cliffe, innovation lead in charge of resources efficiency at Innovate UK, one of two government agencies that’s provided £2.6 million ($3.4 million) of grants to Recycling Technologies.
“Recovering raw materials from the waste stream is the future,” said Cliffe, whose team also finances projects that recover platinum from old electronics and calcium from eggshells.