Walter Rosner is a metallurgist and researcher who designed and manufactured a reactor to turn plastic waste into fuel. He did this from the small missionary town Dos de Mayo in Argentina where no such machine had ever existed; therefore, he had to invent it himself. Now, he uses the oven to melt standard plastic from packaging and other sources and distills it down to diesel or gasoline for vehicles and machines.

Rosner proposed building a facility in each municipality that would collect plastic and turn it into fuel. The size of each plant should be scaled according to how much garbage the region produces.

One reactor can process 30 kilos of plastic in about 90 minutes. For every 10 kilos put in, nine liters of fuel comes out. Even agrochemical packaging such as glyphosate can be transformed into a usable product. Different plastics produce different types of fuel (naphtha, diesel, or oil), and some plastics take longer than others to convert.

Rosner’s household accumulates around 8 kilos of plastic waste weekly, which, when converted in the reactor provides 5 liters of gasoline. To put it into perspective, here in Thailand, I use a motorbike to get around. I have to fill it once a week with three liters of gasoline. The amount of plastic Rosner’s household throws away could provide me with almost double my fuel needs for the week! However, I rarely have plastic to throw away (or recycle) because my diet barely involves things packaged in single-use plastic. No soda, no junk food, almost no plastic!

Of course, I also live on a small island with lots of small local farms selling fruits in vegetables from market stalls, and many places around the world are not like this. It may not be possible for some people to avoid plastic. For this, Rosner’s reactor is terrific because it accelerates the plastic decomposition process from hundreds of years to merely three hours.

In three hours, you have fuel suitable for cars, machines, generator sets, chainsaws.

Meanwhile, in Africa, there’s another man from Ghana called Francis Kantavooro, who also assembled his own reactor. It turns plastic waste into either diesel, gasoline, kerosene, or domestic gas for home use.

Ghana spends [a lot of] money on plastic waste. When I was at university as an engineer, I wanted to make a change. I started to research what the plastic waste could be used for and [how to] permanently get it out of the environmental system.

Ghana has a severe plastic pollution problem as it produces 1.7 million tons of it annually but only recycles 2%! Now, at least in his town, people collect plastic waste and bring it to the reactor site. They receive money per kilo. It takes no longer than a day for Kantavooro’s reactor to convert one ton of plastic into 800 liters of diesel. Likewise, people from the town come to him to buy fuel for their motorbikes and machines as it is cheaper than buying it from the gas station.