Wednesday, October 19, 2011

New York State Senator Timothy M. Kennedy recently toured JBI facility

On October 7, 2011, New York State Senator Timothy M. Kennedy (D-58th District) visited JBI, Inc.’s Plastic2Oil facility in Niagara Falls, NY. Senator Kennedy was joined by Nick Dhimitri, his Legislative Director, Rachel Homewood, his District Office Director as well as Bonnie Lockwood, Senior Field Representative for Congressman Brian Higgins (D-NY27) and New York State Assembly candidate (D-145th District), Chris Fahey.


John Bordynuik personally led a tour of the facility, providing an explanation about JBI, Inc.’s P20 technology that also detailed the evolution of the processor’s design.


The visit provided Bordynuik an opportunity to raise awareness about the P20 technology. He received vast support from Senator Kennedy who was able to witness first-hand the local impact JBI, Inc. was contributing to the economy.


“I was blown away by my tour of JBI. The technology is unlike anything I had ever seen,” stated Senator Kennedy. “This energy innovation is opening the door to tremendous opportunities for Western New York. The jobs that will be created will help spur economic growth while at the same time expanding and further anchoring a well-established business and technology in the Empire State.”


As a green technology advocate, Senator Kennedy has sponsored legislation that has been instrumental in helping JBI, Inc. develop its local, green workforce. The occasion marked Senator Kennedy’s first visit to the P20 facility. The staff at JBI, Inc. would like to extend their appreciation to Senator Kennedy and his colleagues for visiting the facility and for their support.


(Shown in photo from left to right: John Bordynuik, Senator Kennedy, Chris Fahey, Nick Dhimitri)


http://www.plastic2oil.com/site/events/1198
/

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

dispoman predicts price of JBII in Oct. 2012

I will be sorely disappointed if JBII is only $10 by October 2012.


Growth stocks sell based on prospective earnings. By that time they should have three processors working in Niagara Falls, and at least 2 or 3 RKT installations of two to three processors each. That should be a minimum. If they can't get at least that amount up and running then they have a serious issue of manufacturing processors. If they do have 10 to 15 processors installed and operating and an ability to at least maintain or increase that rate of adding new operating installations, then the stock should easily be $25 to $50 in a year.


If they can't get them installed and running at least that quickly, then they have a serious issue to contend with. Assuming a conservative 12 operating processors, at a conservative 100 barrels per day, at a conservative 300 operating days per year, at a conservative $60 profit (after costs and income splitting) yields $21,600,000 annual profit with the likelihood of that doubling annually for many years.

neptune69 discusses JBI vs Agilyx "competition" topic

JBI AND AGILYX...

In consideration of the vast worldwide supply of plastic feedstock available to process into fuel, the JBI vs. Agilyx discourse is irrelevant.

In excess of 100 million tons of new plastic feedstock is generated annually on a worldwide basis. The US, by itself, generates in excess of 35 million tons of new plastic feedstock per year. Significantly, and in addition to the aforementioned new feedstock, are the vast quantities of plastic feedstock resident in landfills throughout the world. Given that tens of millions of tons of plastic have been dumped into such landfills for a multitude of years, it is reasonable to extrapolate that there is in excess of one billion tons of plastic residing in landfills, of which a significant percentage may be processed into fuel.

Let's do some simple math...a 20 ton per day JBI processor converts approximately 20 tons of plastic into 109 barrels of fuel. Lets round down to 5 barrels per ton per day. 100 million tons of annually generated plastic equates to approximately $50 billion of fuel sales at $100 per barrel. Furthermore, the landfills composition of in excess of one billion tons of plastic, equates to in excess of $500 billion of fuel revenue.

The JBI vs Agilyx discussion is rendered moot resultant from the vastness of the prospective market. There is ample room for a multitude of competitors to generate extraordinary businesses and market capitalizations as one could reasonably infer from the aforementioned facts and associated analysis.

Even if JBI's technology is currently the most effective, there will be additional competitors in future time periods, but despite such new entrants, JBI will still be more than amply equipped to build a company with significant market capitalization given the huge size of the prospective market, JBI's early entre' into such market, the noteworthy exclusive access to RKT massive plastic feedstock, and future contracts likely to incorporate such exclusivity

Monday, October 17, 2011

Can Plastic Find A Sustainable Destination?


Plastic is probably the most non-green material anyone can mention straight off the top of their heads. But perhaps the damned material can be put to some good, sustainable use after all.

In the United States plastics are made primarily from natural gas. More recently, a growing number of new technologies started to turn non-recycled plastics into crude oil, electricity and other fuels. Many of these technologies are already being implemented on a commercial scale in Europe, Canada and Asia.

One company that promises to turn plastic into energy, and do this cleanly, is JBI's Plastic2Oil. The company emphasizes that its process results in ultra-low sulfur diesel that contains 15 parts per million (ppm), which qualifies it for the label 'clean diesel' since its sulfur content has been reduced by more than 95%.

Patent is still pending on Plastic2Oil's P2O process but in July JBI announced it had entered an agreement with Rock-Tenn to convert mill by-product waste into fuel using Plastic2Oil's trademark technology. The agreement gave JBI exclusive rights to mine plastic from RocTenn's plastic-only monofill sites for several years.

JBI was founded by John Bordynuik, who noticed that plastic waste was growing while working at the Ontario Legislature back in the 1990s. He saw the problem piling up, literally. In the US alone, over 30 million tons of plastic are produced per year and only about seven percent of it is recycled, according to 2009 figures.

"Because of the new "disposable mentality" that came with plastic containers, we now are navigating the fallout of an enormous waste plastic problem, on a global scale. It's complex, it's far-reaching and it's intimately tied to politics and economics", JBI says on its website. Mr Bordynuik recently had the opportunity to present his vision at the TEDxBuffalo conference.

The company is confident that its process has the ability to transform the 93% of unsorted, unwashed waste plastic that is currently diverted or destined for local landfills into clean, low-sulfur fuel. It says it's commercially viable, could bring economic benefits and help government and organizations deal with waste plastic recycling challenges.

Meanwhile, a new study conducted by the Earth Engineering Center (EEC) of Columbia University and sponsored by the American Chemistry Council said there's huge energy potential in non-recycled plastics. In the U.S. it could provide enough fuel for six million cars annually, or 52 million MWh of electricity, which would be enough to power 5.2 million households per year.

"Plastics have a significantly higher energy value than coal," said Prof. Marco J. Castaldi of the Earth and Environmental Engineering Department of Columbia University and Associate Director of EEC. "Capturing the energy value of non-recycled plastics - and municipal solid waste in general - makes good sense because it provides a good domestic form of energy while minimizing impacts on the environment."

One of the questions that these plastic-to-fuel technologies raise is whether using plastic as a raw material for fuel could increase demand for the stuff, and thus perpetuate the cycle. But it's also a fact that despite plastic bag bans being implemented in many places, the material is not going to disappear any time soon. In which case, turning it into energy could prove better than taking it to landfills. The jury is out on this one.

Image credit: Plastic2Oil


z

Friday, October 14, 2011

C&I Magazine Reports on the plastic waste industry


Novel ways with waste

Lou Reade, 10/10/2011

Despite the best efforts of governments, consumers and industry, little more than half of the plastics that we use in everyday life is recovered – and much of it still ends up in landfill.

According to European Plastic Recyclers, which represents plastic mechanical recycling companies, Europe generated around 25m t of post-consumer plastics waste in 2008. In the same year, it converted around 50m t of virgin plastic into products. Of the waste, 51% was recovered. From this 12.8m t, 5.3m t was mechanically recycled and 7.5m t processed by energy recovery. For nations at the top of the recovery list – such as Germany and Switzerland – energy recovery accounts for most of the re-use of plastics.

Of course, we have been forced to improve our recycling efforts because the volume of plastics has mushroomed: in 1950, says EuPR, global plastics production was 1.5m t; by 2008, that figure had ballooned to 245m t.

EuPR separates recycling into three broad types: mechanical, chemical and energy recovery. Energy recovery is simply burning the shredded plastic to use it as a fuel; mechanical recovery grinds up products such as PET bottles or PVC pipes, and uses the material to make new products. PET bottles have been turned into PET fibres for clothing and even carpets, for example.

At its simplest, mechanical recycling happens within a plastics factory: off-cuts from the production process are simply fed back into the machine to make the next batch of products.

But the real issue is what to do with consumer goods – food packaging, toys, medical instruments, car components – once they are discarded. Europe processes around 50m t of plastics into products each year. At the same time, around 25m t of plastics find their way into the waste stream.

There is a thriving market for recycled plastics: many applications, from park benches to bin liners, rely on the lower cost of recycled resins. But applications of recycled plastics are usually all examples of ‘down cycling’ – in which the final use is inferior to the original.

But as plastics processing techniques improve, more sophisticated products can be made – at least partially – from recycled plastics. A growing trend is to make exactly the same product, for a second time. An example is PVC window frames. They can now be made using a ‘core’ of recycled PVC encased in a shell of virgin polymer, which ensures colour stability. The machinery to make these products is quite specialised – and so far, sales of these windows are still small – but one manufacturer, Veka UK, is confident that they will take off. It recently developed its Infinity model, which uses 80% recycled material. The recyclate comes from Veka’s own reprocessing centre, where it recycles PVC window frames.

Plastic pipes giant Wavin has done something similar. Its Recycore technology makes PVC pipes using 50% recycled material – which is contained within a middle layer. The company says that the pipes have identical mechanical properties to those made from virgin material, and are the same price.

But waste plastic has also been used to create completely new products. A large-scale example of this was recently seen in Dubai: donated plastic rubbish was collected and converted into ‘plastic reefs’ – which were sunk into the Arabian Gulf in order to replace lost coral reefs. The reef is also expected to protect the shoreline from erosion and tidal damage.

But a growing – and far more powerful – method of recycling is chemical recovery. This is sometimes called monomer recovery, and is increasingly used as a way of recovering useful materials from plastic waste. It breaks the polymers back into their constituent parts – hydrocarbons – so that they can be used as fuel, or even re-polymerised.

One technique, called T-Technology, was developed by Polish-Hungarian company Pinter & Tokarz. The technique is called Polymer Energy outside Europe, due to a tie-up with US company Northern Technologies.

‘In Poland, around 1.4m t of waste goes to landfill, of which about 100,000 t is artificial materials,’ says Zbigniew Tokarz, ceo of Pinter & Tokarz. ‘After depolymerisation, it can become a component for the production of liquid fuels.’

The technique uses polyolefins – the most abundant and commonly used type of plastic – as raw materials, and converts them into light fractions of fuel oil: typically C5 to C34. Typical products that can be handled include plastic shopping bags, food packaging, toys, some types of plastic pipes, and vehicle parts such as bumpers.

The plastic waste stream needs to be restricted to cleaned polyolefins (polypropylene and polyethylene).

However, up to 15% contamination such as paper, sand or water is acceptable. The mixture is then catalytically pyrolysed in an airtight atmosphere, in order to break down the polymer chains.

A typical plant converts each kg of plastic waste into 0.78kg of final product (or 720 litres/t). Each unit produces around 300 litres of oil/hour. The technology has been adopted around the world. One of the most recent installers was the Hua Hin landfill site in Thailand. The local municipality estimates that 10% of the 400,000 t of rubbish in the site is plastics waste. If it could all be collected and converted, this would equate to 29m litres of oil. The installation is due to be completed by the end of 2011.

Closer to home, Sita UK has received approval to build a plastics-to-diesel facility in Bristol – which it says would be the first in the country. The company plans to build a ‘resource recovery park’ that will extract energy from mixed waste, to reduce the amount of rubbish sent to landfill. A key part of the park will be the conversion of waste products like yoghurt pots and meat trays into diesel fuel. At full capacity, it would produce around 4.2m litres of diesel/year, from 6000 t of plastic.

The plant is slated to open in 2013, and could be the first of many. Sita will use technology from Irish company Cynar – after signing a deal with the company in 2010. Each Cynar plant can process up to 20 t of mixed waste plastics/day, producing up to 19,000 litres of fuel products at a conversion rate of 95%.

‘We aim to build around 10 facilities in the first tranche of development that will convert waste plastic into diesel fuel,’ says David Palmer-Jones, ceo of Sita UK.

But this 10-plant deal seems to pale into insignificance beside a more recent US announcement: a 10-year deal between JBI of Canada, and packaging giant Rock Tenn.

JBI will now be able to build its Plastic2Oil processing plants at Rock Tenn facilities, which are hoarding a growing stockpile of plastics. As well as generating plastics waste from its paper mills, Rock Tenn already operates a number of material recovery facilities.

JBI will also be able to ‘mine and process plastic from Rock Tenn’s mono-filled plastic sites’. This basically means that it has access to an enormous hole that Rock Tenn has been filling with plastics – and nothing else – for the last few years. The company claims a 90% conversion rate of plastics to fuel. A further 8% is released as gases – such as methane and ethane – which are compressed and stored. The remaining 2% of solids can be landfilled.

The technique has an advantage over others, claims JBI, in that the raw material does not need to be washed or processed in any way. It takes mixed plastic waste and converts it into diesel, heating oil and light naphtha fuels.


But there is something else that can be done with waste plastic: turn it into another plastic. It may sound like the polymer equivalent of alchemy, but researchers at University College Dublin, led by Kevin O’Connor, are looking to identify micro-organisms that can convert waste plastic into a biodegradable polymer called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA).

PHA is actually a group of bio-derived polyesters (including PHB, polyhydroxybutyrate) that are already produced commercially: US company Telles, for example, has a polymer called Mirel. When Telles makes Mirel, it starts from corn starch, using genetically engineered microbes to convert the sugar directly into plastic, which is then separated out and formulated into resins. O’Connor’s idea is that plastic waste – primarily PE or PET – will be ‘digested’ by the team’s own microbes and converted into PHA. First – as with other forms of chemical recycling – the waste must be pyrolysed in order to break it down.

In the case of PET, it is pyrolysed at 450oC, which produces solid, liquid and gaseous fractions. The liquid and gas are burnt for energy, but the solid fraction – which contains terephthalic acid (TA) – is used as the feedstock for bacterial production of PHA.

TA is not normally degraded by bacteria, but the team isolated 32 bacteria strains from soil, and found that three of them would convert TA into PHA. The bacteria came from soil that had been exposed to PET granules, at a PET bottle processing plant.) O’Connor’s lab has also looked at the possibility of converting the most common plastic, PE, into PHA, by first pyrolysing it into a wax. It has also successfully converted styrene oil – from pyrolysed polystyrene – into PHA in a similar way.

If successful, the method could provide a new way of making PHA that does not rely on growing crops, such as corn, specifically for the purpose. The project, which is supported by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency’s Strive programme, will attempt to optimise the bioprocess, scale it up, and characterise and produce the polymers.

Plastics are an inescapable fact of modern life. They solve many problems – giving us lighter cars and planes, stylish consumer products and effective food packaging. Disposing of plastics is a problem that is not going away, but some of the newer chemical techniques are playing their part to solve it.

Europe's first large scale tyre pyrolysis plant for the UK

If there is one polymer that demands attention, it is rubber. In the EU-27 countries, an incredible 2.5m t of car tyres reached the end of their lives in 2009.

That is a lot of rubber to shred and re-use.

Landfilling of shredded tyres was banned in the EU in 2006. But there are plenty of low-grade uses for shredded rubber: as a filler for construction applications such as artificial turf sports fields; and as a supplementary fuel in power stations or cement kilns. But these methods will soon be supplemented – and perhaps one day supplanted – by another.

UK company Pyreco is planning to process 60,000 t/year of tyres, at a new plant on Teesside, in order to extract gases, oils and carbon black. Pyreco says that the plant, which is due to open in 2012, will be Europe’s first large-scale tyre pyrolysis plant. It is being built at Wilton International chemical park, which hosts a number of chemical businesses.

In the first instance, the pyrolysis products will be used to create energy, but in the longer term they could be used as feedstocks.

Lou Reade is a freelance writer based in Kent, UK.

http://www.soci.org/Chemistry-and-Industry/CnI-Data/2011/19

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Oct. 20 Dinner Meeting & Tour of JBI, Inc.’s Plastic-to-Oil Facility

DINNER MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Tour of:

JBI, Inc.’s Plastic-to-Oil Facility

Iroquois Street, Niagara Falls, NY (see direction on back)

Tour Starts Promptly @ 5 pm

Dinner to Follow at:

Como Restaurant

2220 Pine Ave. Niagara Falls, NY 14301

Social Hour @ 6 pm / Dinner @ 7 pm

Dinner Buffet includes antipasta, stuffed claims ala como, salad, rolls, pizza bread, mostaccioli w/

meat sauce, breaded pork chops, broccoli ala marinara, chicken parm, bowtie pasta, coffee, tea etc.

$30: International Members $30: Young Professional Members (35 & younger)

$35: Local Members $40: Non-Members $10: Full-Time Students

Reservations due by Monday, October 17

For reservations, contact Paul Van Kerkhove, Ecology and Environment, Inc.

By Phone: (716) 684-8060 ext. 2617 -or- By E-Mail: pvankerkhove@ene.com

http://www.awmanfs.org/

TEDx Buffalo Reporter Comments on JBI CEO John Bordynuik

http://wnymedia.net/repat/2011/10/the-report-from-tedx-buffalo/

Our Next Billionaire

I seek to take nothing away from the other speakers, but let me note that only one of them is likely a future billionaire. That distinction belongs to the yet unmentioned John Bordynuik, CEO of JBI Inc in Niagara Falls, who heads up the most important initiative you’ve never heard of.

Mr. Bordynuik, former member of the Ontario Legislature and chemical dreamer, has discovered a way to covert average plastic waste into fuel. Currently 7% of our global plastic waste stream is recycled. The leaves 93%, or 29 millions tons, ready to be turned into a potential 7 billion gallons of low-sulfur fuel that can run engines and factory processes of all varieties. Sound too good to be true? Bordynuik himself listed “Disbelief” as his first stumbling block to success. Currently, the JBI factory in the Falls siphons up the majority of the waste plastic stream of Western New York. I would bet it’s a matter of time before we’re mining our landfills for more.

It would be fitting of such a revolutionary TED lecture that it would incorporate the themes of the other speakers as well. The Plastic2Oil process started as a story, a dream of cleaning up plastic strewn beaches and toxic air across the world. The process is scalable and local – not ever bit of plastic need be driven to the JBI plant. Smaller versions can be installed at each local plastic producing factory, converting the waste stream on site to fuel usable on site. And none of this process would be possible except through a hard science education – chemistry and math and engineering – that is becoming increasingly rare.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

JBI CEO Bordynuik speaks at Buffalo's Oct 11 TEDx conference

TED comes to Buffalo to inspire innovation

By Stephen T. Watson
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Published:October 8, 2011, 12:00 AM
Updated: October 8, 2011, 10:04 AM

There’s an organic dairy farmer, an executive with a company that converts plastic waste into alternative fuel, and the designer of an educational program for school drop-outs.

And a guy who wants to bring back Buffalo’s beer culture.

They’re part of the hodgepodge of presenters set to take the stage at Tuesday’s cutting-edge TEDxBuffalo conference.

The daylong session brings together a carefully selected crop of speakers and audience members, from a variety of backgrounds, in an effort to encourage brainstorming and idea-sharing.

“All the speakers have kind of started something outside the official channels,” said Kevin Purdy, a freelance technology writer and the main TEDxBuffalo organizer. “It’s basically folks who have done it — or have a mission to something — on their own.”

TEDxBuffalo is the local version of the national TED, whose speakers have included former Vice President Al Gore, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and anthropologist Jane Goodall.

Local organizers have worked for months to put together their program, with an eye on spurring innovation and follow-up movement after the session.

“The whole TED philosophy is big thinking, big ideas, and getting a conversation started with action behind it,” said Tricia Marcolini, another organizer and Canisius College MBA student who works in the information technology department of CertaPro Painters.

TED — short for Technology, Entertainment, Design — is a nonprofit committed to “Ideas Worth Sharing.”

The group is best known for conferences that attract a range of speakers from the business, cultural and scientific worlds. TED shares recordings of those TEDTalks through its website, YouTube and iTunes.

In addition to the conferences TED hosts around the world, the group licenses events under the TEDx brand.

Purdy obtained a license for TEDxBuffalo in May.

He and a team of organizers started with a list of up to 60 potential speakers and whittled that down to the 12 participating on Tuesday. “We’re trying to connect the innovators, sales people [and] motivators together,” Marcolini said.

Patrick Lango has received notice in the New York Times and other outlets for his handcrafted approach to dairy farming in Cattaraugus County.

Another speaker, John Bordynuik, the founder of Plastic2Oil, has developed a technology to convert plastic waste to ultra-low-sulphur fuel at a plant in Niagara Falls.

And Stacey Watson is a founder of Buffalo’s Drop-In Nation Education Center, where 73 percent of its graduates start college, job-training or a job one year after finishing the program.

These presenters — as well as Ethan Cox, who wants to “embeer” Buffalo, and the other scheduled speakers — are linked by a theme of, “You saw a need and got it done,” as Marcolini put it.

The conference is taking place at Canisius’ Carol & Carl Montante Cultural Center.

TED requires its partner conferences to limit attendance to 100 guests, so organizers worked hard to find audience members from different backgrounds.

“The idea is to see what happens when you mix up the crowd and mix up the speakers,” Purdy said.

People who weren’t invited to the conference but still want to see the action have options.

TEDxBuffalo is holding live viewing parties at four sites: the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the University at Buffalo Honors College, the Sugar City arts collaborative and the Main Washington Exchange.

Also, the sessions will be streamed online and they will be archived for later viewing.

Purdy and the other organizers say they hope the spirit of TEDxBuffalo doesn’t end with the close of the conference Tuesday afternoon.

“TEDxBuffalo hopefully throws a whole lot of different thoughts at people, and hopefully you come away with a better idea of what’s going on in Buffalo and the wider community,” Purdy said.

Visit tedxbuffalo.com to watch the streamed or archived videos and for more information on the conference, the viewing parties and how to win admission to the event through a photo contest.

swatson@buffnews.com

http://www.buffalonews.com/business/local-business/article585896.ece