This may look like a landfill but, for some, it’s an energy gold mine. New technology about to debut in the United States now has the power to take the waste plastic piled up here - and transform it into oil.
"Since plastic, at least the backbone for plastic, comes from crude oil, we can unzip it and kind of cut it up into small pieces and turn it back into the crude oil from whence it came."
To accomplish this the company, Agilyx, uses a process called pyrolysis.
Dirty mixed plastics separated from the trash are ground to a pulp, packed into a giant steel cartridge and dropped into this machine. There it’s cooked to a gas at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled and condensed into synthetic crude oil.
For every one unit of energy put into the process they get five units out. The small amount of toxic gas made from the process is treated by an Environmental Control Device and burned off.
The potential for the process is enormous. Less than 15% of the plastic generated in the United States is re-used, leaving some 29 million tons to be buried in landfills each year.
"Because the recycling facilities currently don’t have the ability to separate those materials out into their different types of plastic. So, that’s why it comes to the landfill because it’s really not economical to separate it out or the markets are marginal."
One machine like this can turn ten tonnes of plastic into 60 barrels of oil every day.
Enough of them could put a dent in America’s dependency on foreign oil.
"We’ve got a solution that not only solves a particularly difficult and thorny waste problem that is mixed waste plastics but a solution that gives us a new source, an alternative source and a drop-in replacement for fossil crude."
This new oil doesn’t come cheap - but Ulum says, so long as the price of oil stays above $80 a barrel, it can compete.
Since its invention some two to two and a half trillion pounds of plastic are estimated to have been buried in the United States, meaning today’s trash dumps could be tomorrow’s coal mines.
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