PLASTIC PYROLYSIS (under 400C) CAN'T BE DONE - Unless You Try

[00:00:00]What's up everyone? Welcome to Lower Expectations. Thanks for lowering your expectations and hanging out with me here. I do appreciate it. In today's video, I am doing something basically for my No, not basically for myself. I'm doing this 100% for me, and whatever the outcome is, I'm probably going to share it in a video because I know there are some people out there that are just as curious as me, and it doesn't really matter what the outcome is, you guys are going to want to see it. There's going to be a bunch of naysayers that assume that I think that I'm going to 100% pyrolyze this, and yeah, that's not the case. I'm hoping that we actually are able to vaporize this and then recondense those vapors and collect something, but I have very little, if any, expectations. You could say that my expectations have been lowered.

[00:00:55]And yeah, the plastic that is in here, I believe is HDPE. It is plastic bags, and these plastic bags actually have some significant meaning to me. I'm not going to talk about what that significance is in this video, but I might talk about it at some point in the future. Uh anyway, I am just going to get to it now. I just finished doing a gasoline distillation, and I've been doing a bunch of those. Um I've actually distilled or collected uh probably about somewhere between 5 and 7 L of fuel, and I've poured most of that into my truck.

[00:01:36]I do have some of it here that I'm hoping to test in something, but because I've done the engine oil test and the bacon fat test, I have other stuff to burn in my lawnmower, so I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. I could, I guess, burn that in a generator. I don't know.

[00:01:52]Anyway, let's just get into this. We We going to Yeah, we're going to heat this up and see what happens. I think I've already said it. I've got 100 g.

[00:02:01]I might heat this up and let it compact. You can see it is filled right up to the brim.

[00:02:07]So, I might let this compact down some and then I We'll see what happens. Let's just start, see what happens, and we'll decide what we're going to do based on what happens.

[00:02:20]It is 9:15 p.m. I just powered this on and if anything interesting happens, I'll be sure to share it with you guys.

[00:02:47]I don't know if you guys can see that.

[00:02:50]Oh, yeah, for sure.

[00:02:54]There is some sort of haze forming. I can actually see some smoke moving around inside the flask.

[00:03:03]And the plastic is receding? Is that the right word?

[00:03:08]Plastic is Yeah, compacting down into the bottom.

[00:03:20]>> [music] >> Ooh, I see some condensate running down the inside of that container.

[00:03:31]That is a pretty good sign that we're going to get something. We're going to collect something.

[00:03:52]All right, folks. As you can see a lot of smoke.

[00:03:59]I'm kind of wondering if I should turn the temperature down some.

[00:04:04]I don't know that this is actually going to collect into anything. I think we're probably just going to get a lot of smoke going out through the vent.

[00:04:18]Currently, we are 290° C on the flask.

[00:04:24]So, almost 300° C.

[00:04:26]C.

[00:04:28]The original 100 g of plastic compacted down as it melted into the bottom of the flask, and so I decided to add another 100 g.

[00:05:11]>> [music] [music] >> Here on the side of the flask, I have a temperature probe.

[00:05:38]And in this collection flask, you guys can see we are collecting some distillate. It is dripping.

[00:05:50]Quite clearly then, we are heating this plastic to under 300 Celsius.

[00:06:01]Just under 300 Celsius, and we are actually collecting distillate.

[00:06:12]Very cool.

[00:06:14]I'm guessing we're probably not going to collect a whole lot, but I am able to crank this up a little hotter. I'm currently keeping it around 300 Celsius because that is as high as this can actually read. So, once I go over 300, I don't know what the temperature actually is.

[00:06:35]You can see the temperature at the top of the column is 53° C currently.

[00:06:41]And this looks very angry.

[00:06:45]It is Yeah, it looks angry.

[00:06:48]>> [laughter] >> Well, folks, it is 11:00 p.m. and as you can see behind me here, I have wrapped the column and the flask in aluminum foil. I'm about to go in for the evening, but I think I've kind of proven already that I can in fact collect some sort of distillate from plastic. I was kind of thinking of just ending the video here, but I think at the very least we're going to have to come back tomorrow, take this distillate, and see how flammable it is. So far, what we've collected has all come over below 70° C, most of it around 50 something, and we just hit 71 C. And so, and so, I'm thinking that it's probably going to be quite volatile. So, yeah, I guess I'll see you guys tomorrow and we'll give this a burn test and see [music] what it acts like.

[00:08:05]So weird to see plastic bubbling away like this.

[00:08:11]I got here just in time before it got real smoky.

[00:08:22]Man, I sure hope we do get some half decent weather here this summer.

[00:08:28]This is doing some interesting things.

[00:08:34]The smoke has mostly cleared.

[00:08:37]And it looks as though we've got mostly liquid. I don't The plastic or the bits that are floating around could be paper. There were some labels, but it also could be some other kind of plastic that ended up in there.

[00:08:54]I'm thinking it's actually paper though.

[00:09:06]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> I might regret this decision in the future, but I'm going to leave the distillation going. You can see the drip rate is quite high. The reason why I might regret this is because our temperature is now 188°C, which means we're collecting something that's going to be a little bit less volatile, something more along the lines of diesel.

[00:10:15]Whatever it is that we've collected now, we're starting to mix in something that's a little less volatile, but what I kind of want to do is just let this run until stuff stops coming over, and then basically maybe do another distillation on it at some point. I can see that we are generating, or it looks like we're generating a fair amount of water. You guys can see those droplets in there.

[00:10:43]I'm fairly certain that those are drops of water, and there's no water in the flask. So, I think that's being generated as part of the process. That could be because there was some paper in there.

[00:10:58]Uh you guys know probably someone in the comments knows exactly why this is happening, so be sure to let me know.

[00:11:06]It is a little while later, and I'm kind of shocked. I expected the production to stop or slow down pretty quickly, but we've actually got the temperature still raising. Is it? I don't know. Anyway, we're at 267, and it is still coming over quite quickly. As you guys can see, we've collected a fair amount of distillate.

[00:11:29]Not sure how long it's going to keep going. I've put about 300 g of total plastic into the flask.

[00:11:39]And so, I can't imagine we're going to get much more than this.

[00:11:45]Uh 300 g of plastic I wouldn't think would make more than say 300 ml or a little over a cup.

[00:11:55]But, uh yeah, I guess we'll see.

[00:11:57]I've got some bacon fat over here that I've washed and dried.

[00:12:02]And uh I'm considering trying to run this with uh carbon dioxide to see if we can produce a better yield and a better quality fuel. If you haven't seen my videos where I tried to turn bacon fat into uh something along the lines of gasoline, it kind of worked, but it kind of didn't. We ended up with something a lot more like diesel.

[00:12:29]And I think that we can be a little bit more successful if we do a couple of things. One is collect lower temperature fractions, but two is starting off with a dry product without a lot of junk in it.

[00:12:43]And two is using carbon dioxide so that we don't have a bunch of oxygen in there reacting with stuff.

[00:12:52]We have some nesting birds of prey in the area, or it seems that way cuz they're hanging out an awful lot. So, poor Florence hasn't been able to go outside recently. She's starting to get a little frustrated about the whole thing.

[00:13:09]So, I've taken her out to the bus so she can hang out here.

[00:13:14]Hoping she doesn't make a jump for it out that window.

[00:13:18]She'd probably be okay, but uh don't want to take a chance on it.

[00:13:24]The The rate is slowing down here, and based on how much we've collected, I think I'm going to stop the distillation here because well, the temperature is dropping there.

[00:13:36]Drip rate is slowing. I'm assuming we're just going to start burning up this flask real bad if we haven't done that already.

[00:13:43]So, yeah. I'm going to turn it off right now.

[00:13:49]It's quite interesting. It looks like we actually have a few pieces of paper that survived.

[00:14:03]This is the distillate from the HDPE plastic and I've got my scale turned on with a beaker of the same weight and a cork of the same weight on there. So, we're going to pull this off and see how much material we've actually collected.

[00:14:21]We started off with approximately 300 g of plastic and we ended up with 235 g of distillate. So, that is pretty cool.

[00:14:34]Now, I am going to take this stuff and do a bit of a burn test on it.

[00:14:40]I'm a little bit nervous to get a smell of this because I am pretty sure I'm pretty sure this is going to be nasty stuff to smell.

[00:14:56]Mhm.

[00:14:57]It's not as bad as I thought it would be.

[00:15:01]Let's collect a little bit.

[00:15:07]All right. Let's try to get 2 ml.

[00:15:14]There we go.

[00:15:20]Hopefully the can doesn't blow over.

[00:15:23]Now, let's see if it will light.

[00:15:28]Oh, yeah.

[00:15:34]Burns fairly clean.

[00:15:43]Burns with a little bit of soot, but yeah, I'd say cleaner than diesel.

[00:15:59]That sound is probably a little bit of moisture inside of the can.

[00:16:17]Kind of just smells like burning HDPE.

[00:16:21]Kind of like a candle.

[00:16:25]It's burning for a long time.

[00:16:28]It's like we're starting to have a higher boiling point stuff here that doesn't really want to burn very well.

[00:16:58]And it all burnt out. Cool.

[00:17:01]Quite honestly, I don't understand why this is working as well as it is. I've had an awful lot of people tell me that this wasn't going to work at all. I've also had people tell me that the bacon fat distillation wasn't going to work, and the oil distillation wasn't going to work, and so on and so forth. I think some of the confusion comes about because if you go looking on the internet for, say, plastic pyrolysis or HDPE pyrolysis temperature, what they give you is an optimal temperature for doing it efficiently.

[00:17:34]So, the way that they would do it in the industry.

[00:17:38]However, the number or the temperature at which plastic or oil or bacon fat, whatever, actually starts to degrade is much lower than that.

[00:17:51]So, this might not be the most efficient or effective way of doing what they would do in the industry, but I'm still able to do it at much lower temperatures.

[00:18:20]427 g.

[00:18:24]15 oz.

[00:18:28]I was able to get almost everything into the flask, but there were a few pieces that were too big and also some pieces of paper here. So, I'm going to weigh that now, subtract it from the total, and we'll know exactly how much is in there.

[00:18:43]Weigh me on a scale. No, I'm smelling burnt skin. So, 1 oz, 29 g. So, we have [snorts] essentially 400 g of plastic.

[00:19:01]As you can see, the flask is fairly full. I'm going to crank the heat on all the way, and we'll see what happens.

[00:19:09]HDPE round two. I've got about g of plastic in the flask. I'm going to take you guys out and show you something. Look at that production. That is a lot. And we are up to almost 300 degrees Celsius at the top of the column.

[00:19:26]Let's go take a look at something outside.

[00:19:49]All right, folks. I basically burnt up my flask here and distilled over everything that was in here. It's going to be a real nightmare to clean that out, I assume.

[00:20:01]The good news is that we ended up with 383 g.

[00:20:07]And we started out with just under 400 g. Let's just call it 400 for ease of math.

[00:20:15]Which means, if my math is right, we got 95.75% yield by weight.

[00:20:21]Which seems too good to be true.

[00:20:25]And to make it even better, this is only less than half of the bucket.

[00:20:33]I've now chopped up the other half of the bucket.

[00:20:39]And we now have 1 lb 2.7 oz, 531 g.

[00:20:49]More.

[00:20:50]So, we have about a liter.

[00:20:53]We will end up with about a liter of distillate from one single 5-gallon pail.

[00:21:01]All right, folks. It is the next day. I just got done doing some service calls and answering emails. This is going to be really hard for me to show on camera.

[00:21:12]Uh but there's almost nothing left in this flask and I had said something the other day about worrying this was going to be a nightmare to clean out.

[00:21:26]It's actually cleaning out really easily. And I'm actually not going to clean it.

[00:21:33]What I'm going to do instead is Oh, you can see the stuff moving around.

[00:21:40]What I'm actually going to do instead of cleaning it is I am actually going to put more plastic in here and do another batch tonight. It is past 9:30 p.m.

[00:21:51]So, I'm going to do this off camera and just crank it and see what I can do.

[00:21:56]I'll probably end up having to come back over the next couple of days and finish it up, but uh after doing the first batch, I had kind of decided, "Ah, this is a one-time thing. I'll never pursue this any further."

[00:22:10]But this has got to be one of the easiest and best yield uh distillations that I've ever done.

[00:22:20]It's shockingly good.

[00:22:22]Well, folks, it has been one heck of a day and it feels like it kind of went on forever. I left this morning, did three tractor services, two snow blowers, about six lawn mowers, a weed trimmer, and some other stuff that I'm probably forgetting.

[00:22:40]And then I came home. I got home at about 7:00 p.m. and immediately turned the heat on to the mantle all the way up and then realized that the plastic had probably settled and I could add the rest of the plastic. So, I in fact did that. So, now we have all 530-ish grams of plastic in there and I've got the heat cranked up. And uh yeah, I'm excited to see what the yield is the total yield is going to be.

[00:23:09]And I'm also not sure what we're going to do once we've got it all distilled over. Oh, I also wanted to mention that this is one entire bucket, everything except for the lid. So, I used a whole bucket, the sides, the bottom, everything. The only thing that didn't go in was the plastic on the handle, and I'm kind of upset that I didn't do that now.

[00:23:33]Cuz uh I probably should have put that in there, too. Anyway, >> [laughter] >> I'm not sure if I'm going to do a second distillation on this. I think I probably will. I was showing it to my friend yesterday, and there's a little bit of floaty stuff in it when it gets kind of cool. So, it almost kind of like uh when I did the candle wax, it's uh some of the stuff in it isn't liquid at like colder temperatures. It is 9:00 the following evening, and I've collected a bunch more distillate. I just turned the apparatus off because it looks like I have boiled the flask basically dry.

[00:24:14]Got quite the mess going on here. I'm hoping that I can cook some gasoline inside of here or something, and maybe maybe clean that up a little bit.

[00:24:27]Uh yeah, who knows.

[00:24:30]Who knows? Not terribly worried about it. It's not like I'm trying to cook food inside here or anything that needs to be very pure.

[00:24:38]But uh yeah, we got quite the mess going on. So, once everything's fully cooled off, I will weigh all this product, and we will see how close we got to the original weight. I think it was 527 g or something like that. I'm going to say that this is quite the success story. This is from the first distillation that I did. This was plastic bags and bottle caps, these two.

[00:25:09]And all the rest of this is one 5-gallon pail.

[00:25:15]So, yeah, that's pretty decent, I would say.

[00:25:20]So, 1,200 g and all we have left is, well, very difficult to see. So, I'm going to try to get you guys a better shot.

[00:25:32]But, there's about that much stuff in the bottom of this 1-L flask after boiling after collecting 1,200 g of distillate.

[00:25:42]And a lot of this is actually I shouldn't say a lot of it. Some of this is actually What is it called? Yeah, the aluminum oxide.

[00:25:54]I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to weigh the flask.

[00:25:58]Then I'm going to clean it out, and then I'll weigh it after.

[00:26:02]So, 1 lb 1 oz or 482 g.

[00:26:11]It's not perfectly clean, as you can see there is a little bit of stuff stuck in there.

[00:26:16]But, most of it is gone, and so we are going to re-weigh the flask.

[00:26:22]12.5 oz or 354 g. So, now That is actually pretty incredible, even if we don't account for the approximately 40 g of aluminum oxide that we put into the flask during the first distillation and stayed in there through this whole process.

[00:26:47]That means we have 97 g of leftover material, approximately 3.4 oz.

[00:26:55]That's kind of shocking. Not kind of shocking, that is quite shocking that uh we actually squeezed that much out of this plastic without getting to ridiculously high temperatures. The highest temperature I ever measured on this was 380° C doing another test, so I assume we reached about the same temperatures.

[00:27:19]Uh I did that with an infrared uh heat gun thing.

[00:27:23]I am going to break this up into two videos because it has gotten quite long.

[00:27:28]So, the next video that you guys will see will be a refinement or a second distillation of this trying to separate the fractions so that we have something gasoline-like and something diesel-like.

[00:27:43]And also testing this in my lawnmower.

[00:27:46]Uh see if it'll actually work at all. See what happens.

[00:27:50]So, that is going to do it for this one.

[00:27:52]Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time.

[00:28:03]The whole family of geese here. Hey, geeses.

[00:28:06]I'm not going to harm you.

[00:28:09]I probably don't believe me, but you heading for the water?

[00:28:31]Huh?

[00:28:34]Can you get out of my way?

[00:28:45]I would like to just get by if I could.

[00:28:57]Thank you.