Thanks Tic for pointing out the 'generous math' point and including the pics. I had one of our shipping staff come up and take a look at the pics and provide a professional opinion, here is what he said-
60 foot trailers are rarely used unless absolutely necessary (long loads of pipe or assembled construction materials) There is an up charge for using long trailers. The typical trailer is only 48 feet long.
The containers pictured appear to be 3'x5'x4' and they are an oddball PITA container because they need to be pin wheeled which means you have to alternate wide then narrow when loading them. They are difficult to stack more than 2 high on the trailer. These issues are not a problem though because they are typically used to transport metal parts and that is the reason that it is not a big deal to waste so much space because when you load metal parts in them it only takes 20 of these containers to reach max weight limits.
I asked him about using them for transporting plastic and he said "We would never ship our scrap plastic that way, it would cost us 30-40% more in freight cost and it is very time consuming to load and unload, we use heavyweight reinforced boxes and bags which are both cheap and easy to handle and there is no need to pay freight charges to get them there and back"
He went on to say that the most that would fit on a trailed is 24 containers and he agreed that the weight of 800lbs is believable if it’s not ground plastic.
SO... you are correct there Tic my math was wrong... the REALITY is that it would take more like 10 deliveries of allegedly 'free' plastic to fill just one tanker!
24x800=19200
Subtract 70% for unusable plastic, gasses, char and you have around 5760lbs
divide this by 9 since that is the average amount of plastic to fuel and you get
640 gallons per trailer delivery of allegedly 'free' plastic
6000/640=9.375
Look, I’m just trying to help you out here.
No one would like to see this work more than I, but I have seen plenty of good ideas go down the tubes because of mismanaged, over reaching, starry eyed ego guys that get caught-up in the fame and money they make when they sell stock and raise tons of money. They find themselves in a situation where they throw money at every problem and piss the rest away with the feeling that is it easy to raise more.
The fundamental problems here are obvious.
As I said, I will explain more as I have time, but the picture of the scrap plastic that was purported to being used was a blatant red flag that needs to be explored. That picture represents the perfect piece of propaganda that perpetuates a terribly false assumption... and that is that the feedstock is free and therefore commercialization is possible at $10 a barrel.
Bullshit!
When doing this as a backyard project or on a small scale, sure,
look, I can pick apples, it’s easy and they are free
ok, let’s start an apple business and sell our free apples for $.10 each... fine from a roadside stand, you can make a few bucks picking the low hanging fruit, but when you get an order for 500,000 apples there become significant overhead costs associated with those 'free' apples. At $.10 each you go out of business.
When you need substantial amounts of feedstock to produce the amount of fuel touted by this company it is not going to be free.
That was just one glaring issue that I had to point out, like it or not the logistics are a killer.
The next point I will discuss is one very near and dear to me, (so I have a professional opinion on it that I can share if you care to hear it) and that is the state of recycled plastic and its market value vs. the misconception of free 'useable' plastic going to landfills.
BTW,
P2O works...
The successful commercialization of P2O has been a sad failure worldwide for 40+ years.
AI
