SAMARINDA, EAST KALIMANTAN: Authorities in East Kalimantan have unveiled a plan to turn plastic waste into fuel, in a bid to tackle both waste disposal and fuel scarcity problems in the province, Jakarta Globe reported news.
Halda Arsyad, head of the provincial research and development agency, said on Monday that the project would be based on a locally developed variant of the common liquefaction-pyrolysis-distillation process for turning plastic into fuel oil.
“The problem we face now is that most of the waste that we produce can’t be put to good use,” he said.
“With this system, however, we hope to make use of plastic waste to develop a new source of fuel.”
He added that a group of Samarinda residents had already developed a crude version of the liquefaction-pyrolysis-distillation mechanism, which is commercially available in other countries, and that his agency would help refine it.
“Right now, the device developed by the residents can only process a kilogram of plastic waste at a time,” Halda said.
“We hope to develop it further to increase its capacity to 80 or 100 kilograms. We also want to study in greater detail the kind of fuel that they’re currently able to produce with it.”
The residents claim their device can turn a kilogram of plastic waste into a liter of kerosene, and are selling the fuel for Rp 7,500 (78 US cents) a liter.
Commercially available devices have slightly lower fuel yield rates of approximately 97 percent.
In Balikpapan, meanwhile, authorities are making use of another type of waste, organic refuse, to generate their own fuel.
Robi Roswanto, the head of the municipal sanitation agency, said his office had decided to pipe the methane gas generated by the decomposition of trash at the city’s Manggar landfill site to more households, after initially piping it to two homes in a pilot project.
“These two households have benefited from the use of the methane gas for their cooking purposes, so we now intend to expand the program to a total of 40 households,” he said.
He added the Balikpapan administration was working with the Malang, East Java, administration to develop the methane-capture technology in order to maximize the amount of methane generated from the landfill.
A similar methane-capture project at the Bantar Gebang landfill in Bekasi, the country’s biggest dump site, uses the flammable gas to produce electricity through steam turbines.
The project, which began in 2010, now generates 26 megawatts of electricity. The site is the final dumping ground for 70 percent of Jakarta’s daily waste output of around 6,500 tons.