Plastikoleum tower is designed to convert plastic waste back into raw petroleum form so that it can be reused. The main idea for this tower comes from the Japanese inventor Akinori Ito who’s company Blest Corporation sells plastic converters that process waste plastic and convert it to raw petroleum, from where it actually came from.
The device designed by Akinori Ita converts 1kg of plastic waste material into 1 liter of oil which can be further refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel. But the only problem with this device is that it consumes a lot of energy to convert waste plastic into oil. Moreover, if this device runs for an hour it takes about 1KWh of electricity to produce each litre of oil. Since one litre oil is equivalent to 11 KWh of electricity, the process itself consumes up to 9% the energy that is contained in the resulting product thus giving a scope for further development and giving birth to the idea of the Plastikoleum tower.
Plastikoleum tower uses solar energy to convert tons of waste plastic into oil. This tower adopts the same process, except that instead of using the heat to create steam for turbine electricity generation, it is used to create oil from plastic waste. While most solar towers are generally sized at around 20MW capacity, the Plastikoleum Tower is rated at 10MW. At 10 tons per hour capacity these towers could produce around 60 barrels of oil every hour.
At this level of production, the concept could put a nice dent in the millions of tons of plastic waste that is discarded every year and would otherwise end up completely unused in landfills. Moreover, the technology can help educate people about waste management.
Via: Land Art Generator
