Dive Summary:
- A group of Brigham Young University students have created a spray called PlasTek that will degrade plastics in landfills, resulting in a reduction of volume across the seven classes of plastics within 12 to 36 months.
- The non-toxic spray was developed in conjunction with chemists from Aufbau Labs and is being tested at a working landfill. The product is targeted at landfills that collect methane as the spray accelerates bacterial consumption, which produces large quantities of methane rapidly.
- The company is in talks with state governments in order to gain approval for the spray from the Department of Environmental Quality and has an anticipated launch date for around mid-2014.
From the article:
As the formula for PlasTek neared its final stage in the spring of 2013, Inviroment’s profile began to rise. The five won a $100,000 grant at the Department of Energy’s National Clean Energy Business Plan competition held in April, in Boulder, CO, then they went on to the finals in Washington, DC in June.
“Those landfills will be able to immediately take advantage of the additional space capacity and collect the accelerated methane output,” Bennion said....” The landfills will be able to capitalize on the additional methane and convert it to use for clean energy.
They estimate that if all 594 landfills capable of collecting methane in the United States used PlasTek, they could generate about 4,289 MW of power, and power 2,530,510 homes. “This would reduce CO2 emissions by 20.2 million tons – the equivalent of CO2 emissions from 20.3 billion gallons of gasoline every year.”
