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Come summer, one of the best targets for some good old-fashioned British whinging is always air travel — the discomfort, the long queues, the freakishly cheery staff. But I promise you, no matter how much you might want to gripe, your journey won’t suck nearly as bad as this guy, who’s trying to fly from Australia to Britain, in a Cessna, using the contents of a landfill as fuel. Right.
The plan is for Jeremy Rowsell to fly from Sydney to London, via Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. His 10,500 mile epic will be completed in a teensy little Cessna, and the power will come from plastic. Specifically, it’ll come from diesel fuel, which can be refined from so-called End-of-Life plastics — the plastic that would otherwise just end up in landfills.
If you’re interested, the dark magic of turning old binbags into tasty diesel is acheived by carefully heating plastic in the absence of oxygen (called pyrolysis.) This yields a product that’s basically the same as refined petroleum. From there, it’s just a matter of using fractional distillation (just the same as in the oil industry) to get whatever hydrocarbon products you want, including diesel. As an added bonus, fuels produced by the process are slightly cleaner and better than you get from old-fashioned out-of-the-ground oil.
The idea of the six-day trip is to raise awareness of the plastic-into-useful-stuff technology (whilst presumably reminding Mr Rowsell of the benefits of jumbo jets). Mind you, it’s not exactly going to be an eco-friendly trip: plastic from all of his stopover points along the trip is being shipped to Dublin, where it’s being converted and then shipped back.
Real question is, who’s volunteering to fly the plane back? [Telegraph]
Image credit: Cessna 172 from Shutterstock
Bloody Australians, they’re all crazy. Mind you, they can pull a good pint.
And edit blogs
Well………
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Yeah.:-)
You know full well I put that in for you.
Thought as much!
Flying over Middle East is gonna be fun these days…
Flying over the Middle East is always Fun, especially if you are landing at Eilat Airport.
We should adopt a “one in, one out” rule, they send an Aussie here, we send a benefit claimant there (for good)
isnt that just going to kill the ozone? dont get me wrong i couldnt care less. but plastic melted is poisonous and it doesnt take a genuis to work it out.
From what I can tell it operates in a closed system, the only real ‘waste’ product from this process is the extra stuff that is added to the plastic (But that is a solid and isn’t released into the atmosphere). No gases are released, unlike in the natural breakdown of plastics and household waste in landfill where you get huge amounts of methane being released.
This is actually pretty amazing! I didn’t know they could do this with waste plastic. Curious as to why more people don’t know about it, just mentioned it around the office and noone had heard of it!!