Production of biogas for cars from contraband products seized at customs and agricultural waste. While the company plans to create the first filling stations with biofuel, Lenta.ru recalls that it has also learned how to produce humanity from its own waste.

Oil underfoot

Oil can be extracted not only from the ground, but also from what is lying underfoot. The businessman Vyacheslav Zelinsky from Yekaterinburg, who makes synthetic oil from plastic waste, is sure of this. Bottles for mineral water and sunflower oil, packaging for cakes and eggs, substrates for semi-finished products, bags - everything that usually remains rotting in landfills or is burned are used for production. The inventor also has his own "oil wells" - he placed containers for collecting plastic on several streets.

From one ton of waste, which takes 12 hours to process, up to 700 liters of synthesis oil is obtained. It is also obtained in an environmentally friendly way: using an installation that works on the principle of a moonshine still. The plastic is heated to a certain temperature and then compressed. As a result, gas is evolved without oxygen access and without emissions into the atmosphere, and liquid synthetic oil is obtained. It can be used as fuel. “After deep cleaning, we get solvents and use them for paintwork. It turns out to be of this quality. This is called the fraction of aromatic hydrocarbons, which is currently in demand on the market. Its cost is from 40 to 50 thousand rubles per ton, ”said Vyacheslav Zelinsky. The businessman does not yet produce oil from garbage on an industrial scale, now he is busy improving technology.

Inhabited island

A very effective way to get rid of garbage was invented in Singapore - an island was built from it. According to the local environmental agency, in 2015, the city produced 21,000 tons of garbage every day, 60 percent of which was recycled, another 38 percent was incinerated and about 2 percent sent to landfills.

The construction of the artificial island of Semaku began in 1999. Today, its area is 350 hectares (63 million cubic meters of land), but the construction of the island will continue until 2040. According to the plan, the area of ​​the island should be 654 football fields. At the same time, Semaku does not look like a garbage dump - it is an ordinary island with trees, flowers and a wide pier from which waste is poured into the sea area.

In fact, the island is created from bags, bottles and other waste - recycled. Every day hundreds of special vehicles bring up to 3 thousand tons of new waste to the factories. It is dried in huge bunkers and then burned in ovens. The heat from the furnace heats the water, which in turn turns the turbine and generates electricity. 80 megawatts per hour is enough to power the plant and the surrounding areas. The garbage dust is transported to the naval base and poured into tanks, which are then picked up by a tug and taken 30 kilometers out to sea. After that, garbage dust is poured into cells, from where water is first pumped out. In order for the island to retain its shape, a 7-kilometer long road-dam was laid along its perimeter, which supports the coastline, like special plastic plates - this is the skeleton of the island.

An environmental monitoring service operates on Semak - it constantly checks the quality of water in the water area around the island. The ecological situation is favorable here, you can swim and fish.

Washed ashore

In 2011, conservationists built the Beach Garbage Hotel in one of Madrid's central squares. This original structure was part of the Save the Beach project, through which activists tried to raise public awareness of the pollution of coastal areas.

The construction of the hotel took 12 tons of garbage thrown by the tide on the shores of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, collected in garbage dumps and bought at flea markets in Europe.

Photo: Zumapress / Globallookpress.com

The "useful" hotel for travelers was designed by the German architect HaSchult, who had previously opened a similar hotel out of rubbish in the center of Rome.

Greenpeace approves

Plastic is a real scourge of modern civilization. It makes up the bulk of waste on land and in water. It was estimated in 2014 that there were 268,940 tons of plastic on the ocean surface, and the total number of individual pieces of plastic waste was 5.25 trillion. Plastic waste contaminates about 10 percent of all beaches on the planet. A real garbage island is already drifting in the Pacific Ocean, which is a dense deposit of plastic and other waste and is twice the size of the United States.

It is curious that a partial solution to this problem was found back in 1979 in Massachusetts. It was there that fleece was invented - an ultra-warm fabric that can be made from recycled plastic bottles. The inventor himself refused to patent the material so that it could be made everywhere and cheaply.

The production of one fleece item requires an average of 25 plastic two-liter bottles. A winter jacket made of this material, which will take 40 bottles, can be an excellent replacement for leather and fur products. Several years ago, Greenpeace launched a campaign to promote this material as a sustainable alternative to fur coats and down jackets.

Bottles are pressed, crumbled, heated to a temperature of 270 degrees and a special fiber (polyester) is obtained. It is used to make fabric (fleece) for the production of warm clothes. The Italian company Zegna went even further with the launch of the Ecotech project. The manufacturer has released a jacket made from recycled plastic with integrated solar panels at the top of the sleeves. With this jacket, you can recharge your phone or laptop anywhere.

It doesn't smell

A substitute for traditional oil was also found at one of the universities in North Carolina. They developed a process to use pig manure as a cheap substitute for oil in the production of road asphalt.

Photo: Daniel Maurer / DPA / Globallookpress.com

The researchers found that pig scraps are especially rich in oils very similar to petroleum. Their class is too low to make gasoline, but it is quite suitable for asphalt. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the group has developed technology to convert waste into black bitumen, a sticky binder that can be used to create asphalt. The cost of making bitumen from manure is $ 0.56 per gallon (3.785 liters). It turned out that this feedstock is much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than oil-based binders available on the US market.

The inventors assure that such asphalt will not have an unpleasant odor, since volatile fatty acids (pig manure can be recognized by them) are filtered out during processing.

Bioasphalt is currently being tested. And because the results so far have been successful, the research team formed Bio-Adhesives to expand the development. Such production could solve a serious environmental problem - large volumes of wastewater from farms in the country's agricultural states, they said. The development could be useful not only in the United States: 43 billion gallons of pig manure are produced annually in the world.