Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 80 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals, as well as 56 kg of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil”.

Just as we are hitting the hubbert peak, we get a technology that may make oil rigs obsolete:

Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4B barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2B barrels of oil. “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”

With their main (only?) source of income in danger, what will the middle east kleptocracies do?
because

The only thing this process can’t handle is nuclear waste. If it contains carbon, we can do it.” and Thermal depolymerization has proved to be 85% energy efficient for complex feedstocks, and even higher for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics

it will be possible to jump start the distributed power infrastructure worldwide.
2007-07-11: Ocean of Garbage

Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water 2x the size of Texas.

2008-01-11: Why not in the US?

Declaring war on the “white pollution” choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to the cloth bags of old

2013-12-05: Depolymerization was hailed as the solution ~10 years ago: turning plastic back into more versatile compounds. I weirdly haven’t heard much about it since. Probably because no one cares about trash?

2015-06-22: Recycling doesn’t work

almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. More than 2K municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.

Anything that requires constant vigilance (sorting) combined with subsidies isn’t going to work even medium-term. looks like recycling needs a big reboot.
2017-04-26: Plastic-eating worms. This sounds like one of those “obvious solutions”, like releasing rabbits in Australia to deal with a forgotten problem. Fear our future where the wax worm is up there with rust as a mortal enemy of civilization.

While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten 4% of the bag. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after 6 months.

2019-02-07: Hydrothermal liquefaction

Hydrothermal liquefaction could change the world’s polyolefin waste, a form of plastic, into useful products, such as clean fuels and other items. Once the plastic is converted into naphtha, it can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals or further separated into specialty solvents or other products. There is 1B tons of polyolefin waste in landfills.

2019-03-13: Plastic recycling never worked, and was a greenwashing effort by the industry, and dum-dums fell for it.

Even before China’s ban, only 9% of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12% was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8B tons have been produced worldwide over the past 60 years—continues to grow.

2020-01-10: Thai Hacks

As Plastic bag ban hits Thailand, consumers adapt with variety of household carrying items

2020-01-20: Plastic Surge

Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels. Petrochemicals now account for 14% of oil use, and are expected to drive 50% of oil demand growth between now and 2050. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.

2020-03-03: Microplastics

Every human on Earth is ingesting 2000 particles of plastic a week

2020-04-11: 90% breakdown of PET in under 10 hours. Process is still expensive and needs to scale further.
2020-07-08: Apples are the most contaminated fruit while carrots are the vegetables most affected. This is a much bigger problem than the performative efforts to clean up the great pacific garbage patch.

THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21B of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.

2021-10-14: There’s now a startup using PET breakdown technology.

The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor 20x larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025. Manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET.

2022-03-04: Meanwhile, stop it with the performative cleaning:

Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video. I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 4000 kg of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100m on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”

2023-09-29: Big if true

78% of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber