Mike Biddle has a TED talk on recycling plastic - We can recycle plastic.

Less than 10% of plastic trash is recycled -- compared to almost 90% of metals -- because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds. Frustrated by this waste, Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can, and does, recycle any kind of plastic.

CBS has a report that the Atlantic ocean may have an equivalent to the pacific ocean gyre - "Plastic Soup" Found in Atlantic Ocean.

Researchers are warning of a new blight on the ocean: a swirl of confetti-like plastic debris stretching over thousands of square miles in a remote expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

The floating garbage - hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents - was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

The studies describe a soup of micro-particles similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a phenomenon discovered a decade ago between Hawaii and California that researchers say is likely to exist in other places around the globe.

"We found the great Atlantic garbage patch," said Anna Cummins, who collected plastic samples on a sailing voyage in February.

The debris is harmful for fish, sea mammals - and at the top of the food chain, potentially humans - even though much of the plastic has broken into such tiny pieces they are nearly invisible.

Since there is no realistic way of cleaning the oceans, advocates say the key is to keep more plastic out by raising awareness and, wherever possible, challenging a throwaway culture that uses non-biodegradable materials for disposable products.

Inhabitat has a post on a rather out-there plan to build an artificial island using the rubbish collecting in the north pacific gyre -
Architects Envision Hawaii-Sized Island Made of Recycled Plastic.

A group of architects from the Netherlands have a crazy idea to take all the plastic floating out there in the Pacific Ocean, and recycle it into a floating island the size of Hawaii. Climate refugees would be able to move there and live in recycled plastic homes, and work on farms or grow seaweed. The entire island would be totally self-sufficient once built, producing its own food and energy, and managing waste. While totally off the wall, this is an intriguing concept that gets our imaginations in motion about what we can do with that ginormous mass of plastic floating around in the ocean!

There are millions of pounds of plastic swirling out in the ocean and the best way to take care of it would be to collect it all and recycle it. Whim Architecture, from the Netherlands, is proposing to do just that with their Recycled Island – collect the plastic, sort it and then recycle it into building blocks to create a whole new floating island as big as Hawaii (approximately 10,000 sq km) depending on how much plastic could be collected. As the climate changes, many people, especially island nations like the Maldives, will be forced from their homes, becoming refugees. The new island, located somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii would be made available to those refugees.

The island would be totally self-sufficient, capable of producing its own food, managing waste and producing renewable energy. One section of the island would be for urban housing, built from recycled plastic, and would also include all the necessary amenities for recreation, commerce, and living.

Inhabitat has an interesting post on a new bioplastic developed by a company called Genomatica - Scientists Develop Plastic-Producing Bacteria. More at Cleantech.com.

Scientists at Genomatica Inc. recently announced that they have developed strains of bacteria that are able to produce plastic without the use of oil or natural gas. The sustainable process utilizes little more than sugar and water to produce butanediol (BDO), which can be manufactured into everything from plastics and fibers to pharmaceuticals. Genomatica estimates that within a year the energy-efficient process will cost less than current hydrocarbon-based processes - a revolutionary development since close to 3 billion pounds of BDO manufactured each year.

Currently BDO is made exclusively with oil and natural gas, and its production is very energy-intensive. Utilizing sugar and E. Coli to create the chemical allows the production process to be conducted under normal pressure and temperatures, which drastically cuts it energy use: “By using advanced computational modeling and evolution‐based methods to rapidly engineer living organisms, Genomatica can produce valuable chemicals from renewable feedstocks at low cost.”

The bacteria-grown plastic can be produced in large fermentation tanks in a manner similar the way that algae is being used to produce biofuels, and the company plans on using sugars that are non-competitive with the food industry to steer clear of some of the conflicts that have been brought up with ethanol-based fuels.

WorldChanging is running a series of older posts lately, with one repeat being this one on plastics - Making Products Greener: Choose the Best Plastic.

Bioplastics were the first choice. We've written about the researchers at the University of Warwick who made cell phone cases out of a biodegradable polymer which comes with an embedded sunflower seed--just drop the case in the ground and it composts and releases its seed. We've also mentioned how NEC made a cell phone whose case was made out of the bio-plastic PLA reinforced with kenaf fiber. Both of these projects were groundbreaking and took extensive R&D to accomplish. They have yet to be duplicated by other manufacturers. PLA is being used by itself in many applications--mostly food packaging--and although it is still new to the market, it is quickly becoming the most successful bio-plastic. We've written about PLA before, but the best article about it on the web is by Smithsonian Magazine. The more prosaic Nylon 11, which has been around for decades, is also a bio-plastic: it is made from castor bean oil. However, since it was not invented with ecological impact in mind, it is not compostable and does not save significant energy in its manufacture like PLA does.

Unfortunately the company I was working for, like most normal companies, does not have years to research cutting-edge materials like the University of Warwick or NEC. They also have tight engineering requirements for the product which made it unfeasible to use off-the-shelf PLA or Nylon of any kind. In fact, as great as PLA is, it has the problem of melting at 114°C, which means it'll melt if you leave the product on your dashboard on a hot sunny day.

In the end, the product's engineering requirements dictated that we use polycarbonate or ABS. At first I was dead-set against that because they are recycling coded "other", so almost no cities in the US recycle them. However, the biggest impact of our little electronic device will be the circuit board, not the case, and we will have a takeback program with a strong incentive for users to send their old devices back to us. The companies who take electronics for recycling all recycle polycarbonate and ABS, so we can consider them recyclable materials after all. Still, using recyclable plastic is not enough. You're not really recycling unless you're making your device from recycled material. I investigated using 100% recycled plastic as our material, so that we do not cause any new plastic to be manufactured, and so that we can prevent existing plastic waste from going to landfills.

My recent post on bioplastics had one commenter at TOD noting that China is looking at producing plastic from coal (and that Pakistan claims to have the world's 4th largest coal reserves).

Given China's interest in coal to liquids I thought this sounded like it could be true, and lo and behold - here's Green Car Congress reporting on "Siemens to Supply First 500MW Coal Gasifiers to China for Coal to Plastics".

Siemens Energy will deliver the first two of five coal gasifiers to Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group Co. Ltd. (SNCG) in China. (Earlier post.) The coal gasifiers, each with a thermal capacity of 500MW, are destined for the Ningxia coal-to-polypropylene (NCPP) plant in Ningxia Province in northwest China.

After completion in early 2010, the plant with its five gasifiers will have an hourly production capacity of approximately 540,000 cubic meters of syngas, which will then be converted in downstream processes to polypropylene plastic.

The Siemens coal gasifiers, which are 18 meters long with an inside diameter of 3 meters and weigh 220 tonnes, are among the world’s largest and most powerful. They are capable of gasifying up to 2,000 tonnes of coal daily.

In the gasification process hard coal, lignite and other substances such as biomass, petcoke and refinery residues will be converted to syngas, and environmental pollutants such as sulfur and carbon dioxide subsequently removed. The syngas can then be used for power generation in integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants or as a raw material in the chemical industry, for example in the production of synthetic fuels.

The WSJ also has a look at coal to plastic in China - Coal-to-Chemicals Projects Boom in China":

For years China has been a magnet for the chemicals industry, attracting European and American companies with its cheap production costs and growing market. Now China has another attraction for the energy-intense chemical industry: vast supplies of coal that can replace oil and natural gas as raw materials for chemical production.

In the last two years, China has built nearly 20 plants that convert coal into a gas that can be used to make such things as plastic and pharmaceuticals, according to the Gasification Technologies Council, an industry trade group. The new plants draw on technology developed by companies such as General Electric Co. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

Now, Western chemical firms are getting in on the action. Celanese Corp. opened a plant this year that uses coal-based feedstock to make a chemical used in paints and food sweeteners. Dow Chemical Co. has partnered with Chinese energy company Shenhua Group Corp. to study a project to convert coal into plastics. Mining company Anglo American PLC is also looking at a coal-to-chemicals project. Suppliers to the chemical industry, such as Praxair Inc., are vying to open accounts with the new coal-to-chemical plants.

"Coal to chemicals is an opportunity that's literally exploding [in China] right now," says Timothy Vail, chief executive and president of Synthesis Energy Systems Inc., a company that builds coal-gasification plants.

Launching their own coal-to-chemicals projects in China represents one way Western companies are fighting to keep their competitive edge. In the past decade, chemicals makers based in Europe and North America have lost market share to their counterparts in Asia, where demand for chemicals is rapidly growing.

China's government, meanwhile, has orchestrated the buildup of the coal-to-chemicals industry in an effort to reduce the nation's growing dependence on imported natural gas. Using China's vast coal deposits to make chemicals and plastics provides a more reliable source of raw materials that can feed the expansion of China's main economic growth engine, its manufacturing sector. The new plants also replace older, soot-belching chemical factories that have earned the government a bad reputation for the pollution they create in Chinese cities.

Gasification technology, which uses high temperatures and pressure to break the molecular bonds in coal to produce gases that can be recombined into a variety of fuels and chemicals, has existed for more than a century. Germany gasified coal to fuel its planes during World War II. China has made fertilizers through gasification for decades. But there had been little incentive for the global chemical industry to gasify coal until prices began soaring for natural gas and oil.

The Pakistani coal story also seems to check out, with the Geological SUrvey Of Pakistan making some optimistic claims (peak coal doomers would do well to note that coal data is pretty poor, and its likely that there is a lot more out there than they imagine).

Pakistan has considerable oil, gas, coal reserves; tidal, solar and hydel potential. It is ironic that Pakistan has fourth largest coal reserves in the world but it is importing 2.5 million tons of coal per annum for cement industry. At the same time, due to high cost of energy resources, the government has also decided to enhance the share of coal in the overall energy mix from 5 % to 18% up to 2018. Among the other alternative sources, coal is the man source for producing cheaper electricity and its availability is much higher. In view of anticipated shortfall of electricity and other energy resources during the next 10 years, demand for indigenous coal would grow in power generation considerably.

Pakistan has emerged as one of the leading country - seventh in the list of top 20 countries of the world after the discovery of huge lignite coal resources in Sindh. The economic coal deposits of Pakistan are restricted to Paleocene and Eocene rock sequences. Economists say that the energy demand over the next 5 years is expected to grow at a rate of 7.4 % per annum. It may be noted that in India the share of coal is as high as 54.5% in the total energy mix. To meet the future requirements of the country with indigenous resources, domestic exploration would have to be intensified to increase the share of coal from 5 to 25% by 2020. The GSP’s workshop provided a platform to highlight the role of the indigenous resources in the national economy especially in energy and industry.

Coal -the black gold, is found in all the four provinces of Pakistan. Country has huge coal resources, about 185 billion tons, out of which 3.3 billion tons are in proven/measured category and about 11 billions are indicated reserves, the bulk of it is found in Sindh province. The current total mine-able reserves of coal are estimated at 2 billion tones (60 % of the measured reserves). The speakers at this moot enlightened the audience with the importance of Thar coalfield and its development and utilization as less expensive fuel for power generation and other process industry. Because of Thar coal’s extraordinary importance for power generation, industrial development and economy, Sindh government and GOP are making all out efforts to develop this huge deposit for power purpose. It is one of the world’s largest lignite deposits discovered by GSP in 1992, spread over more than 9, 000 sq. kms. comprise around 175 billion tones sufficient to meet country’s fuel requirements for centuries.

For those of a conspiratorial bent, here's a Pakistani report accusing the oil companies of stymieing the development of the Thar desert coalfields.

Advisor to Chief Minister on Mines and Mineral Department Dr. Khato Mal Jeewan while talking to The Nation said the Sindh government had invited proposals from companies interested in a project of open cast mining in Thar coalfield in a joint venture with equity participation of provincial government.

The provincial government made mandatory that preference would be given to those companies with sound financial position of at least US $ 200 million dollars in paid-up capital, and those which are dovetailed with power project of at least 1000 MWs. Advisor said the Board of Directors of Sindh Coal Authority will look into the offers submitted in return of invitation of provincial department and than short listed.

He did not confirm the acceptance of the offers of two national and international companies but said both are financially sound and well reputed firms. Dr. Khato Mal pointed out that PML-Q led previous provincial government without getting approval of Board of Directors of Sindh Coal Authority, had signed MoUs with 8 national and international firms for mining and other studies of coal reserves in Thar.

Out of 3-4 companies, the majority of them did not fulfill the requirement which they signed in Terms and References, Advisor said, informing that notices have been issued to those companies which proved default in fulfilling the TOR.

He alleged that Wapda, NEPRA, oil and generators’ importers mafia was the main hurdle in utilization of coals of Sindh because they are making billion of rupees profit in this business.

Referring to the recent studies of USA and other international companies which are working on coal mining in Thar, Dr. Jeewan said the utilization of only 25 billion tons of coal could fulfill the energy requirements of the country for next 200 years. He further said that Sindh had at least 175 billion tons lignite/coal reserves only in Thar but the Wapda and oil importers’ mafia making hurdles for delay in implementation of coal based power project.

From a global warming point of view none of this is very encouraging of course...

Reuters reports that the high oil price has made old dumps a fertile ground for plastic hunters - Could $100 oil turn dumps into plastic mines?.

Sparked by surging oil, a dramatic rise in the value of old plastic is encouraging waste companies across the world to dig for buried riches in rotting rubbish dumps.

Long a symbol of humanity's throw-away culture, existing landfill sites are now being viewed as mines of potential which as the world population grows could also help bolster the planet's dwindling natural resources.

"By 2020 we might have nine billion people on the planet, we could have a very big middle class driving millions more cars, and we could be in a really resource-hungry world with the oil price climbing and a supply situation in Libya, Russia and Saudi where natural gas is limited," said Peter Jones, one of Britain's leading experts on waste management.

"It is those drivers, those conditions, which will encourage the possibility of landfill mining."

In Britain alone, experts say landfill sites could offer up an estimated 200 million tonnes of old plastic -- worth up to 60 billion pounds at current prices -- to be recovered and recycled, or converted to liquid fuel.

As many oil analysts predict oil prices will stay above $100 a barrel, waste experts in America, Europe and across Asia have been conducting pilot projects to recoup old plastic and other waste materials.

Prices for high quality plastics such as high-density polyethelenes (HDP) have more than doubled to between 200 and 300 pounds ($370-560) per tonne, from just above 100 pounds a year ago, according to experts in the waste industry.

Grist points to a US TV series on one of the Pacific Garbage Patches - "Ready, Aim, Gyre".

This is the first episode of 12 from VBS.tv on the vast, Texas-sized stew of plastic and garbage floating in the North Pacific Gyre. They sailed out to see it with their own eyes.