Giant Microwave Oven Turns Plastic Back to Oil

Plastics are durable and degrade very slowly. One of the main advantages of this material is the low price and incredible versatility, which led to a rapid expansion of plastic compounds in almost all industry areas.

The problem is that it's made of oil and should petroleum prices continue to rise, so will the cost of plastic. Not to mention the fact that oil is not renewable. The same property that made plastic so popular, its durability, is making it hard to get rid of, thus turning it into one of the most important pollutant chemicals in the world.

Now, a US company has pushed the idea of recycling plastic further than any other producer, with a novel technology that turns plastic materials back into the oil they were made from and gas.

Global Resource Corporation (GRC) said that the only requirements are a finely tuned giant microwave oven and lots of plastic. The result is the initial raw material, combustible gas and a few leftovers.

The conversion process relies on microwaves, actually 1200 different frequencies of the microwave range, each acting on a specific component inside the plastic material. When a microwave of specific frequency meets the corresponding hydrocarbon material, it breaks it down into diesel oil and combustible gas.

The Hawk-10, the official name of the device, is not different from commercial microwave applications and comes in various sizes, from an industrial microwave oven to a giant concrete mixer.

"Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process," says Jerry Meddick, director of business development at GRC, based in New Jersey. "We release those hydrocarbon molecules from the material and it then becomes gas and oil."

No process is 100 percent efficient, so there are some leftovers, the compounds that don't have a hydrocarbon base. But these form only a small fraction of the final product and the overall efficiency of the conversion makes the new recycling technique appealing to most industrial areas.