Reply #9: High Pressure and Heat sounds a bit like [View All]

Thermal Depolymerization. TDP is being played with here, mostly at poultry farms, but it looks to be a way of extracting the petrol out of just about anything that doesn't contain metal.

I did a napkin calculation about using TDP in Pittsburgh. If they processed all the garbage each year instead of trucking it to the landfills on the outskirts of the county, the city would generate enough fuel to fill the entire city vehicle fleet for a year, plus they would have pre-processed pure water. This would result in longer life on the garbage trucks, savings of $1.5 mm a year on gas at present prices, and lower water processing costs by adding the water from the system to the public water supply.

Oh, and that doesn't count the additional savings if they added processing the sewage stream, or if they mined the landfills to empty them and return the property to the tax rolls.

DBDB