Aviation gets a great deal of value from the sea: nautical miles; offshore-extracted crude oil-based jet fuel and; now, specifically as Jeremy Rowsell suggests, dumped plastic waste.
Mr. Rowsell – a British-born, Australia-based insurer – used recycled plastic-made fuel to fly from Wollongong and Melbourne, Australia in a Vans RV-9A airplane. The above 435 nautical miles (500 miles) were flown using a 90:10 jet fuel/recycled plastic-based diesel mix.
The plastic-made fuel – made from recycled plastic melted without oxygen to form petroleum-esque carbon compounds, by Spanish company, Plastic Energy – was used to show plastic’s reusable value, as a fuel.
Such recyclable plastic can be found – as Mr. Rowsell saw during a charity transpacific flight in 2011 – in suspended plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean. This waste is accumulated by circular, swirling ocean currents called gyres from plastic dumped at the seashore. “The eight million tons of plastic dumped into the oceans,” as said by Mr. Rowsell, “each year can be put to good use.”
‘On Wings of Waste‘ – the program established by Mr. Rowsell and Tony Loughran, a risk management consultant – intends to start recycling plastic for jet fuel use in Australia; get airlines to use the same 90:10 jet fuel/recycled plastic-made diesel in their airplanes and; stop, eventually, the dumping of plastic waste in oceans everywhere.
The 90:10 fuel mix, part of Mr Rowsell’s ‘ten percent solution’, came from earlier plans to fly from Sydney to London – stopping in Asia and the Middle East – in 2012 and 2013, using only recycled plastic-derived fuel in a single-engine Cessna 172.
The jet fuel/recycled plastic mix further came to be from a 2016-set San Francisco to Anchorage, USA, flight in a Vans RV-9A airplane, which also did not happen.
Nevertheless, Mr Rowsell has suggested that future flights may be flown to demonstrate that recycled plastic is a valuable item. One that, by implication, may help airlines fly greater (nautical) mileage with less crude oil-derived jet fuel burnt.
sources used: aerospace-technology.com, australianaviation.com.
Featured Image Credit: (NewAtlas.com Photo)
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