Waste Management is turning hard to recycle plastics into oil at a new facility in North Portland.
Courtesy of Waste Management
This weekend, the garbage hauler Waste Management is collecting hard-to-recycle plastics at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland.
By hard to recycle, they mean the kinds of plastics that can't go in your curbside bin: Old plastic toys, plastic film or jugs that are dirty or oily.
The items will be collected at OMSI Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm. They'll go to a new facility in North Portland that uses an oxygen-free heating process to turn plastic into a gas and then condenses it into crude oil.
The process offers an alternative, eco-friendly path for dirty and mixed-material plastics that are rejected by traditional recycling facilities because they contaminate the recycled plastic.
The crude oil produced can be refined into gasoline, low-sulfur diesel, inks and even new plastics. The oil being made at the Portland plant right now is already going to a refinery in Washington State.
“This process has a very high threshold for contamination,” said Jackie Lang, spokeswoman for Waste Management in Portland. “It can handle plastics that would otherwise be impossible or difficult to recycle because they are dirty or greasy, and materials that are not typically recycled in the existing recycling infrastructure.”
This weekend's collection event is a bit of an anomaly. According to Lang, Waste Management doesn't plan on accepting plastics from residential neighborhoods at its North Portland plant. Instead, it's targeting plastics from commercial and industrial businesses. Things like the film plastic used to wrap pallets for transportation or tarps used to cover farm crops. They will also take the planting pots used at nurseries.
“You have some of these things in your home, but this is an incremental process,” Lang said. “We want to make a real difference as quickly as possible with this technology. The cost-effective way to do that is to tap waste streams that are now going to the landfill by the truckload from commercial and manufacturing settings.”.
If you do decide to drop off some plastics at OMSI this weekend, 1945 SE Water Ave., be advised that any toys must be 90 percent plastic and not battery-operated. Bring only what you can carry; the limit is two 30-gallon bags per person, and make sure it can't be recycled curbside. And don't bring any PVC pipe, plumbing pipe and vinyl siding.
One day, Lang says, we all might have our own portable plastic-to-oil machines, as envisioned in this video. Imagine how much less litter you'd see if everyone could make their own fuel from plastic trash.
– Cassandra Profita