What do you do with your plastic grocery bags? There are several options: reuse, recycle, or … convert back to diesel and fuel your car. A study by the Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Illinois analyzed oil products obtained from grocery bags by Pyrolysis, or thermal decomposition in the absence of oxygen. Pyrolysis is derived from Greek pyro (fire) and lysis (separation). An article on Fuel Processing Technology explains:
Pyrolysis of HDPE waste grocery bags followed by distillation resulted in a liquid hydrocarbon mixture with average structure consisting of saturated aliphatic paraffinic hydrogen (96.8%), aliphatic olefinic hydrogen (2.6%) and aromatic hydrogen (0.6%) that corresponded to the boiling range of conventional petroleum diesel fuel. Comparison of the fuel properties to the petro-diesel fuel standards ASTM D 975 and EN 590 revealed that the synthetic product was within all specifications....
