Plastic2Oil Inc (PTOI)

[dreaminbig]

Data tapes have everything do with JBI. The company originally was a data migration tape reading company reading 700 tapes a day at $22.00 per tape 24/7 ($5,621,000 annually). They even had a mobile data tape reading trailer. After migrating the data from the plastic data tapes, JBI was going to melt the old tapes and mix the melted plastic with an inexpensive catalyst formula John Bordynuik found while reading the old tapes. Thus turning old data tapes into oil. JBI bought Pak-it, a cleaning chemical company, to package the catalyst in little sachets that they could drop into a processor they had shipped in from China to melt the tapes.

What do data tapes have to do with P2O?


Here is an article about the process.

John Bordynuik has spent years downloading data. Old data. His company, 310 Holdings Inc. (Niagara Falls, Ont.), has technology that can reclaim information from spools of tape from 40 and 50 years ago.
One of its most loyal customers is the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), with which his firm has an exclusive agreement, but its technology is used by both scientists trying to reclaim old information and large corporations concerned about archival data.
Now, he is adding hydrocarbon technology to his field of operations, and is about to launch a commercial plant in his home town that will produce oil from scrap plastics. The company he runs, Plastic2Oil, employs a proprietary catalyst used on molten polymers to extract about a litre of oil from each kilogram of plastic scrap.
According to Bordynuik, the catalyst technology was developed many years ago, but no way to commercialise it was found until now. How it works exactly is being kept under wraps, but the catalyst is put into a liquid form, then melted plastic is introduced to it.
“We check over the data we retrieve,” he says, “and that was essentially how we found out about the catalyst, which is used in a different field than plastics. It’s quite a complex molecule, but it’s not too expensive.”
And price is a key factor here. Other methods to break down scrap, such as plasma-based approaches or microwaves, need considerable energy to power them, and have not proven economical. With this system, enough gas is produced as a by-product that the process becomes essentially self-powering once it’s under way. Oil can then be extracted for about $10 a barrel.
The initial plant is expected to get through up to 20 tons of scrap per day. The process, Bordynuik adds, can be highly automated, and if all goes well, other plants will be set up in other communities.
Primarily, 310 Holdings is working with polyolefins – PP, PS and several version of PE. It is not working right now on PET, and while it can handle PVC, reprocessing that would require a system to capture the hydrogen chloride gas that would be given off.
These polyolefins tend not to have much in the way of additives or fillers, so that there is little residue to be removed. Bordynuik estimates such residue to be around one percent of the total output from the system.
“We are taking plastics from both post-industrial and post-consumer sources,” he says. “The municipalities right now are paying up to $80 a ton to landfill scrap plastics, so they like the idea of shipping them to us for recycling.”
For initial feedstock, the company didn’t have to look for. It has now worked through about 50 tons of magnetic tape and casings that it stockpiled, and with the data extracted and safely stored again, the tape can be reduced back to basic hydrocarbon molecules.
“NASA use to specify destruction of the tapes, then it mandated recycling,” Bordynuik says. “That was what got us into this in the first place.”
At present, 310 Holdings is looking at 10 to 12 joint-venture situations. Most of these are in the north-eastern US, but Bordynuik plans to add Canadian facilities.
“It’s just that the approvals process in this country takes a little longer,” he says.

http://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/plasticsincanada/news/industry/article.jsp?content=20090924_110713_6584