A little over four years ago, chemical engineer Germán Jiménez challenged himself to produce biodiesel from economic sources and after a couple of months of research he identified the process to transform plastic waste into alternative fuel, thanks to a university thesis in New Zealand.
The investigations of his colleagues in alternative fuels made him set the personal goal to find a solution applicable in the country. This is how he created his company Balance Energy, which manages to disintegrate most of the plastic at its molecular level, and then turn it into fuels such as gasoline and diesel.
The common factor between plastic waste and fuel is that they both come from oil, only that they take different routes. What we do with this waste is that we heat the 10,000-link plastic molecule (where the oil is at the molecular level) and break it into bits whose chemical composition is identical to gasoline and diesel, so basically we take a shortcut, to turn it into oil again and purify it to make it a fuel that can work in vehicles,”
explained the engineer.
He believes the performance of the process is quite efficient, since approximately one kilogram of plastic waste can create around a liter of fuel and some fractions of gas, propane, butane or methane, and coal, which can be used for cooking or industrial processes.
The cost of the process is also very efficient, Jiménez said, because even that percentage of gas that results from each purification is used to heat the next process, that is, it is self-sufficient from the energy point of view. Translated into costs, each liter of gasoline transformed from plastic waste would cost around ¢250 or $0.42, versus the ¢600 of a liter of gasoline in Costa Rica.
Jiménez said that his company not only developed the method, but the equipment to start producing the hydrocarbons.
The materials that can be processed are: polyethylene, polypropylene (most containers and wraps) and polystyrene. That is, 75% of plastics. Its technology cannot process other polymers such as PET or PVC, since they contain alloys. These, however, can be recycled.
Germán’s idea was awarded the Solá 2018 prize, a competition for regional projects in which more than 300 Central American undertakings participated and which was sponsored by Unilever. After going through all the filters, Balance Energy received 15,000 euros (US $ 17,053) of seed capital.
The Balanced Energy project caught our attention from the beginning, by meeting the requirements we were looking for as an innovative, disruptive idea with great impact on the environment. We are thrilled that we can add this venture to the value chain of Unilever, we know that together we can achieve something transformative,”
explained Marina Rodríguez, Unilever Corporate Affairs manager for Central America.