Staying with ideas on converting cars from oil/gas to better fuels, this is a wonderful concept and technology to consider.

Returning plastic to its original petro-chemical foundation, which we've profiled on the radio side, is a great alternative to sourcing and pumping oil from the ground.  Particularly since we are, as nations, typically buying it from other countries.  Of course we hope, fairly soon, to see gas replaced by natural gas and electric for most cars.

Again, this represents a monumental shift in the economy as fuel production becomes local, even recycled.  

Chemists Figure Out How to Turn Plastic Into Fuel

​Soon, your car engine may be running on your plastic trash.

By Avery Thompson

Globally, we produce over 300 million tons of plastic every year, and every year over 8 million tons of it end up in our oceans. While we can recycle some plastics, so much gets thrown away that researchers are constantly looking for new ways to actually dispose of plastic, rather than just dumping it. 

One of the more promising methods, recently published in the journal Science Advances, involves using chemistry to turn plastic into liquid fuel.  

Zheng Huang, a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has discovered a way to melt plastic by combining it with an organometallic compound—a mixture of an organic molecule like petroleum ether and metallic lithium. The result is a compound which, when mixed with polyethylene and heated to about 300℉, turns into a liquid fuel that can be used in diesel engines.

The process still has its drawbacks. For one, lithium is very expensive, so to make this a cost-effective measure would require developing a way to achieve the same effect with significantly less lithium, or using a different metal entirely. Another problem is scalability: while the melting process currently works on the scale of a few grams, it would need to operate on the order of tons to be effective. These are large hurdles, but Huang is hopeful that his process will could someday be used to turn our waste plastic into fuel for our cars.