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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • There have been ways to recycle organic waste into oil for decades. They even built a full sized plant to use turkey offal from a nearby turkey processor (initially could get it for free). Even ran demos on tire rubber or plastics. Initially cost effective when oil prices were high as they could sell the oil.

    Few of problems. Up front cost is high. Oil price volotility and the drop in oil prices made it uneconomic. Coupled with needing to pay for the turkey offal (someone else started paying the processor for it), killed the plant being fully self funded.

    Since then refinements in the process, or closely related ones, keep being developed without being able to overcome the economics. These processes can recycle from just about anything organic, including plastics, to whatever oil feedstock you want. Plastic as good as virgin plastics, pharmaceuticals, or whatever oil you want. Still the economics don’t work when oil is cheap and new oils societal costs are externalized.