Unbottling waste

• By TED GRIGGS
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Mar 30, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Every year, U.S. consumers buy and use 3 billion quart bottles of motor oil. Almost all of the empty bottles, and the roughly 20 million gallons of oil left inside, end up in landfills.

But some day thanks to the efforts of LSU scientist Qinglin Wu and BP, those bottles might disappear into decks, porch railings and outdoor furniture.

“Have we made a pound of product using used oil containers to date? The answer is, ‘No,’” said Dan Cadigan, senior strategic project leader, BP Lubes in Port Allen. “Are we heading in that direction, slowly but surely? The answer is, ‘Yes.’ And that’s the good news.” 

Wu is the Roy O. Martin Sr. professor of composites and engineered wood products at LSU. In late 2006, he won a $792,000 grant from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture to develop commercially viable wood-plastics composites using natural fibers, such as bagasse, or sugar cane waste, and rice straw.

Wu and his fellow researchers also figured out a way to strengthen the bonds between plastics and natural fibers, resulting in a sturdier composite.

A January 2007 story in The Advocate about Wu’s research caught Cadigan’s attention. Cadigan called Wu and asked if the compounding process could work with empty oil bottles.

The short answer, Wu said, was yes.

Cadigan said the problem with recycling oil bottles is the residual oil. If it’s not removed from the plastic, the items made with the bottles end up smelling strongly of oil.

Wu said some recyclers blow out the residual oil using hot air or carbon dioxide, but those methods are too expensive.

Wu suggested draining as much of the oil out as possible and then using natural fibers to absorb the remainder.

During Wu’s process, the plastic and natural fibers are combined to create a product as strong as the composite decking materials now available, he said. The process would allow the recycled oil bottles to be fed into an existing plastic composite manufacturing operation.

“BP is pushing hard to come up with the recycling infrastructure,” Wu said. “Our part is to come up with the technology to take these materials and then convert them into an economically feasible product.”

A lot of work remains before oil bottle recycling becomes a reality, Cadigan said. While Wu’s processes can create commercially viable composites, the infrastructure needed for recycling the bottles does not yet exist.