A Gaza resident has built a high-tech plant from basic equipment to turn used plastic remains to its origin; fuel.
It took Ibrahim Soboh, 55, from the Nusairat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza Strip, seven months to build and perfect the plant.
Israel's siege on the Gaza Strip lead to many essential goods running out, pushing the residents to Gaza to invent new machines with basic equipment to try to find alternatives.
Soboh refused to disclose the secret of his invention but said the idea came to his mind as he knows that plastic is made of fuel and plastic remains, which used to be exported to Egypt through tunnels, are accumulating in huge amounts.
In his plant, Soboh melts plastic by heating it until it becomes vapour. The vapour is condensed in the same machine and becomes fuel.
According to Soboh, every 1.5 kilogrammes of ground plastic gives one litre of fuel. The new fuel is used to run electricity generators, cars and other machines which operate on oil.
The next stage for Soboh is to search for donors to set up a big plant to be able to reuse tonnes of plastic remains accumulated in large stores in the Strip. He believes this will solve two problems; it encourages plastic recycling and finds a way to help with the fuel crisis.
Yeah is legit imo, by burning the plastic the polymers involved will be broken down into smaller hydrocarbons which can be used as fuel. Don't really see how this is anything groundbreaking though, pretty simple science, but fair play to this geeza obviously gaza ain't the most accommodating environment for science lol.
If the process works without requiring a net input of energy once you consider a complete lifecycle then it would be a pretty awesome breakthrough. It's one thing to burn plastic into carbon dioxide, it's a whole different ballgame to then react it to form methanol or any other fuel in an energetically favourable way. Although the way the article is written it almost sounds as though they're converting the plastic back into a liquid monomer/polymer/tar and then burning that as fuel, which sounds a bit icky plus having comparatively poor energy content.
