Those much maligned plastic grocery bags can run your diesel truck or car

Sorry first response was a bit rude. Pyrolysis as a technology has been around for a long time. The problem with plastic bags is not that they can’t be converted to something else, but that sometimes they “escape” into the environment where they can cause havoc.
Waste to energy (or liquids) is a very promising technology that promises to be a “sustainable” energy source by taking what is otherwise trash and converting it to synthetic gas (syngas) or liquids generated form the syngas. In some cases pyrolysis can generate liquids directly from the source material.
The key hurdles to this sort of technology outside of the lab is that the input stream can be highly variable and pyrolysis itself is quite sensitive to such things. There are other forms of waste to energy technology though.
Another hurdle is that in some places the green movement insists that such technology is just another form of incineration and therefore polluting. They conveniently forget that incineration is happening without incident on most continents.
Another furphy is that they insist that all waste streams should be reduced, reused, recycled so that nothing is left for waste to energy technology to deal with. This is a somewhat utopian dream to say the least.

“The key hurdles to this sort of technology outside of the lab is that the input stream can be highly variable and pyrolysis itself is quite sensitive to such things.”
When I first moved to a large city in upstate New York back in the early 1980’s they had just completed a “garbage to energy” converter. Quite an impressive building, lots of fancy pipes and whatnot sticking out on all sides. Theory was that we would be running out of “fossil” fuels about now, so they would just collect all that garbage and convert it to “energy” by sorting it and burning the “good bits”.
Funny thing about garbage, it usually stinks, and when you try to burn it as a fuel it stinks even worse….. After a few years they stopped trying to burn it because all the neighbors noticed that burning garbage smells like, well burning garbage. And another funny thing about garbage, it’s got lots of “hard bits” in it, seems they could never quite get the conveyors and other mechanisms sturdy enough to handle the odd chuck of pipe, or old bolt that some folks just seem to consider as “garbage”. Darned if the fancy “sorting” mechanism didn’t jam up every other week or so and bust a fancy gear that took a few weeks to replace.
The fancy “garbage to energy” convertor building was torn down after 5 years or so, they kept the parking lot and the “tipple” where the trucks dumped all the “energy rich” garbage. Now they sort out the paper and plastics (with good old fashioned front end loaders) and bundle it up to be recycled. On a windy day you can easily run over quite a few plastic soda bottles in the street out front as a fun driving challenge (see how many you can nail or how many you can miss).
Cheers, Kevin

@Pamela Gray
The reason why is because market research tells the suppliers that that is what people like. I do not like it either, but they think that people in general do like it.
But I do not want to have to take bags with me to go shopping. Often I will shop because I am out and feel like it. Would you have me never leave home without a bag just in case I decide to buy something! No. Of course not.
I like that I do not have to carry bags around with me. So thanks, but no thanks.
If the bags really were worth recycling then companies would be offering to buy them from us so that they could make a profit. The reality is that it is cheaper to make a new bag than it is to recycle one. Hence why they end up in landfill and new one are being made all of the time. Landfill is not running out, there is plenty of space for landfill and there is no problem with landfill. The whole plastic bag issue is no issue at all!

I can’t believe this …came out of a university.
Even worse, a university in my home state.
Plastic bags ?, as an energy source, ya gotta be kidding me.
—
“The researchers were able to blend up to 30 percent of their plastic-derived diesel into regular diesel, “and found no compatibility problems with biodiesel,” Sharma said.
—
Ya but, biodiesel is expensive and in too short of supply to feed the needs of a healthy economy.
Do things like this even register at the university level anymore ?
I guess not.

It is easy to become too skeptical these days.
Fred is correct the numbers sound enormous but when you really think about it it is nothing in the big picture and the real return even less.
CodeTech is right also, there is hardly any difference but it makes one feel good.
There is a European country that has a saying that translates to something like this:
“if you don’t look after the pennies you are not worth the dollars”
Every bit helps and that is why it is good that people keep looking at these things.
In my opinion we are better off to burn all non metallic/toxic/glass rubbish and turn it into energy rather then landfill, at least we get a return straight away and it is just about all gone and the ashes can be fertilizer.
But there will be people who feel that that generates too much of that plant growing gas.

“The conversion produces significantly more energy than it requires ”
That alone will spoil the fun as far as the gesture-politics eco-nuts are concerned. Where is the self harm? Where is the sacrifice? Where is the hair shirt??!!

I have a solution. Just go back to paper bags. They are from a renewable resource. They break down quickly in the environment. They leave behind organic matter that is good for fertilizer. They could be burned for fuel, with by products of CO2 (good for plants), and ash which again can be used for fertilizer. Tell me again why paper bags are just so bad for the environment. Exactly how many turtles, fish, and wildlife were killed by paper bags? The paper bags that were being made before the bans were pretty good. I actually never threw any away that I got, since I found so many useful ways they were beneficial for my life. Plastic bags are cheaper, but they are definitely not better, or less harmful than paper bags, which are actually good for the environment. Why were plastic bags ever considered “Good”, by the environmentalist in the first place. When they used to ask, “Paper or plastic?”, I always said “Paper please.”

Recycling of plastic bags would seem to be preferable to the petty tyranny of municipalities banning the bags. If you recycle plastic bottles, why not bags? Just encourage people to do it – and DON’T FORCE THEM TO USE PAPER BAGS THAT ARE DIFFICULT FOR HANDICAPPED PEOPLE TO HANDLE OR SO-CALLED REUSABLE BAGS THAT ARE NOTHING BUT CONDUITS FOR FOOD-BORNE DISEASE. As a handicapped, immune-compromised person myself (survivor of leukemia and a bone marrow transplant), I resent the hell out of some narcissistic city councilperson making needless difficulties for me, and even endangering me (and others in similar circumstances) just to prove they can. Ever try to handle a paper grocery bag when you’re using a walker? Have you got a 300-degree steam press in your house to sterilize “reusable” bags? (Washing machine won’t do it even with chemicals.) Banning the bags is just another display of environmentalist tyranny, tied in like everything else with AGW.

@RogerKnights –
Who pays for the extra cost incurred by lower-income people for the bags? A quarter as bag may not seem like much to well-to-do people, but for little grandma in the bad neighborhood already having to choose between feeding the grandkids she’s raising and paying her electric bill, it’s just another unreasonable hardship and burden to bear. Seems to me the people who advocate these reusable bags should reimburse their cost to the people victimized by them. Wealthy leftists never think about what their “environmental” and “energy” policies do to poor people – they don’t feel a 25c bag, but little grandma s does, and her grandkids do.

When might this guilt trip stop ?
I already put twice (maybe 3 times) the mass into the recycle bin as the landfill bin.
I drive around in my dread SUV (it snows in Chicago),I see the garbage the pigs have thrown out their windows.
When it lands in front of my house I put it in the recycle bin.
I’m not doing any damage, and don’t feel guilty about the plastic garbage bags I send to the landfill, lest they escape my recycle bin, and start blowing around the neighborhood.
If you really want to turn them into fuel, I’ll save them for you, knowing it makes YOU feel better.

I feel that the biggest practical effect of recycling is that the concept of “waste not want not” is reinforced in the younger generation.

Not true that plastic bags “sizeable portion of the plastic debris in giant ocean garbage patches that are killing wildlife”.
According to the Plastics At Sea Project: “In most cases it is impossible to know what kind of object the plastic pieces came from. The most recognizable pieces are fragments of fishing line and industrial resin pellets (the “raw material” of consumer plastic products).”
http://progcontra.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/carrier-bag-scepticism.html

i re-use my plastic bags in a myriad of ways.
what i can say is, for a year or so, every person at my local supermarkets were using the fabric ones sold by the stores, & now i never see those bags. no doubt they got grubby & people got sick of washing them & so on.

Where I come from, trash is burned in power stations. Back when plastic bags were free, the bags would help fuel the fire automatically. Then they put green taxes on the bags, so now they have to pour oil on the fire to keep it going.

Out the back says…….”Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” is the old English proverb. Interpreted by the young now as… Never mind settling the credit card, just sign up for another one and transfer the balance. The shock comes in a year or three when this has been done a dozen times and quite a bit of interest has built up…. Me, here in England and very old shall try to stick to the old ways! Such pleasant memories of when I was made so welcome by eveyone I met in Chicago some years ago and in the then prosperous Detroit.

How long before there is a federally subsidized program to produce plastic bags just to convert them to diesel fuel?

By the way … talking about diesel fuel. It seems that the ‘winter’ grade diesel fuel being sold in the United States is only good down to -20 Celsius (-4F). In colder temps the diesel ‘gels’ and clogs the fuel filters. Maybe the bio-fuel mixed in to it has something to do with it. .. In places like Montana there aren’t any signs at the truck stops to warn the truckers, even if the temps *are lower than -20C. … If you are interested a trucker is complaining about it here :- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PswiYmEIgg

I always proposed that burning rubbish, including plastic bags, to produce electricity was better than landfill. This is an even better idea. Not sure if it is ”NEW” though.

For those promoting paper bags over those cheap T-Shirt style plastic bags… To make an equivalent paper bag takes about ten (10) times the energy. As for paper bags deteriorating in the anaerobic atmosphere of a landfill — I don’t thinks so. I would give references — but the information is widely available via google search. Yes I have consulted to both the plastic and paper industries.
Yes plastic bags do deteriorate — a little corn starch does it.

Now people can see the effects of movies such as WALL-E. Kids see them at an early age and “get the message” that people are bad, and killing the planet. First it was killing trees, so no paper bags, now plastic bags and bottles are ruining things, so let’s go to reusable bags, oh, oh, reusable bags get contaminated from food – what to do, what to do? At least going from paper to plastic we reduced the energy requirements, then from plastic to reusable we send the cost well past the equivalent paper costs and they’re made in sweatshops in the third world…
Intelligent commentary explaining the real cost of high energy prices zooms right over the heads of those who think we’re the problem. I sometimes wonder if some members of the NGOs in the third world countries are actually trying to prevent recovery in subtle ways. Just like the “helpful” people in the US who’ve fought the War on Poverty for 40+ years and we have the same percentage of folks living in poverty.

I remember well the propaganda of how plastic bags were going to SAVE THE PLANET by reducing the number of trees we cut.

As a long-time re-user, which today’s eco-freaks work against (illegal to take items out of curb-side recycling, for example), I am very annoyed with grocery stores who make their bags bio-degradable but don’t label them as such.
They fall aprt in the closet, resulting in a mess of little pieces.
(Amusing that people are now pitching re-use of clothing by re-making. My mother did that 60 years ago. And made clothing from flour sacks, which often came with a print pattern on them for that purpose. There was a company on the Canadian prairies that made blankets/socks out of old blankets/socks and such – send remains to them, get good items back. (Perhaps got their start using old army blankets after WW II.) Today of course products like pet food and laundry detergent come in plastic pails that are re-usable. (Petroleum is good.))

negrum says:
February 12, 2014 at 11:30 pm
I feel that the biggest practical effect of recycling is that the concept of “waste not want not” is reinforced in the younger generation.
And I feel that teaching that concept without also teaching a concept of market pricing in conjunction with it has created a generation (or maybe two generations by now) of people who have no sense whatsoever when it comes to resource use.
These are the people that would, on reading the main subject of this post, move immediately to mandate recycling all such bags and even, as someone already mentioned, require the use of their end product in our energy stream. And they would do so without regard to the multitude of costs incurred, costs which reflect to a large degree, energy usage. (If this sounds silly, consider ethanol where we have done it already.)
Put another way, they would mandate saving a bag not worth even a penny even if it generated a nickel’s worth of cost for society.
We don’t need to teach “waste not, want not.” We need to teach a respect for market pricing, and for not messing with market pricing with extraneous regulations like recycling mandates. If we do that, recycling will occur on its own. I once told a school administrator that I only recycled aluminum because that’s the only waste that anyone paid consumers for. He said, with incredulity in his voice, “So you’ll only recycle what someone pays you to recycle?” to which I said “Yes.”
The fact that he had no clue why I was saying that, and meant it, speaks volumes about the state of education in a supposedly capitalist country. Price everything, get out of the way, and let matters sort themselves out.
By the way, I am not against regulation per se. Obviously there are external costs that can only be addressed by law (regulations). But landfill usage can be priced after the external costs have been levied for the odor abatement, traffic accommodation, and eventual restoration of the property. They don’t need to be legislated out of existence because “we’re running out of room.” The price will tell you if we are, indeed, running out of room. And it will tell you we most certainly are not.
One more thing: “Waste not, want not” is an investment concept. Consumer recycling as it is treated today in schools and society is the antithesis of investment, in that it teaches a mindset that typically wastes more resources than it saves (with the possible exception of aluminum cans.)

“Those much maligned plastic grocery bags can run your diesel truck or car”.
But you may require a long stick to push them into your fuel tank. : )
But to be serious, nothing wrong with recycling when you can, plastic bags aren’t the nicest things to be floating around everywhere. Our local council (North London) used to recycle soft plastic wrappings and bags with other recycling but has now stopped recycling the soft plastic because it was uneconomical. The only reason the other (heavier) waste is ‘economic’ to recycle is the penalty (tax) they have to pay per tonne under EEC regulations for any waste that goes to landfill. Because plastic bags aren’t heavy it is cheaper to send to landfill. Funny thing is they promote themselves as ‘being green’ by increasing the amount of waste they recycle but then go back to dumping soft plastic in landfill due to cost.

Paper bags? No thank you. They were weak, and you just had to have one split to want the plastic variety forever after.
One store of a grocery chain tried to charge 5 cents for each plastic bag. So many customers went to a competitor that they went back to plastic bags.
My wife carries a number of the $1 reusable woven plastic bags with her to get groceries, etc., but we still need some of the disposable plastic bags for the “lumps” from the cat’s litter box. (The pooh gets flushed down the toilet like ours.)

Further to the mention of shoplifting…
Imagine you have left the SUV at home and venture out to do some shopping, on foot and re-using some carrier bags you’ve saved from previous retail excursions.
In the NE of England now, you will discover that when you venture into the 2nd or subsequent shops on your trip out, bearing a bag of stuff you bought somewhere else, you will be shouted at by the shopkeeper, immediately made to leave the premises under threat of law, get your picture taken by several CCTV cameras and find yourself summarily banned from ever going into that shop ever again.
Thank you eco-warriors, you are making this a truly horrible world to live in.

@RogerKnights –
You’re a perfect example of the person who is well enough off that 25c or $1 for bags makes no difference to them. It can make a huge difference to some poor woman in the ghetto raising grandkids on a near-minimum wage income – can she feed the kids the cheese with the mac, or only the mac, if she is to pay an electric bill doubled by renewable mandates? Why should she AND THE KIDS suffer to placate some politician’s urges?
Not to mention the risk you are running of contracting food-borne disease by reusing bags for groceries. (At least 5 deaths in San Francisco since that city banned disposable plastic bags,)

“You can get only 50 to 55 percent fuel from the distillation of petroleum crude oil,” Sharma said. “But since this plastic is made from petroleum in the first place, we can recover almost 80 percent fuel from it through distillation.”

Man, it’s all English words, & the syntax is pretty much standard English, but it doesn’t actually make any sense.
You can get (depending on the feedstock & the molecular weight of the finished product) around 90-110% of a barrel of fuel from a barrel of crude. Even straight run distillation can get you more than 60% of various fuels. Maybe Sharma is just talking about straight run diesel, which seems about right, but that then makes the contrast specious.
Also, the fact that something “is made from petroleum in the first place” is pointless diversion when discussing yields from pyrolysis, which depends mostly on the constituents & the precise process rather than the origins of the stuff.
In all, it’s a bunch of meaningless bafflegab to cover the fact that it’s a rehash of old technology (NTTAWWT) & more feel-good nonsense that won’t be economically viable until people start using (& discarding) orders of magnitude more plastic bags than they already do. The most efficient recycling plan is to reuse the bags as trash receptacles, & burn the remainder in giant, trash-powered steam death wagons (lubricated with the finest baby oil & crushed enemy-brains available).

They can also be used for mulch, and in a pinch, as fuel (but don’t inhale).