Ken Ketteringham, of Ludham, who is marketing a process which can recycle plastic waste into fuel. Photo: Paul Hewitt.
Plastic bags should actually be viewed as a positive asset - to help solve the fuel crisis.
That is the message from Norfolk businessman Ken Ketteringham, a former main-board director of blue-chip engineering group Vickers in its 1970s heyday, poised to market technology in Europe that is already successfully working in China - to turn waste plastic into high-quality diesel and petrol.
And such is his confidence that he is on to a winner that will simultaneously help to tackle Britain's growing fuel crisis and plastics disposal headache, he has sunk the proceeds from the sale of his prime-site London apartment into his company, Environmental Technology Systems.
John Best, chief executive of the East of England Energy Group (Eegr), last night welcomed the initiative and said: “I am extremely interested in this development. The future of our secure energy supplies will depend on innovative schemes which will require just this sort of entrepreneurial approach. We will be launching the Eegr Energy Innovation Awards at our summer conference in Newmarket on July 10.”
Mr Ketteringham, 75, of Malthouse Lane, Ludham, had been working as a business consultant after leaving Vickers in the early 1980s, and came across the technology - which has been working in China for several years - through working with executives from a leading energy firm.
He said: “They came across a working plant and the inventor, a Beijing professor, who had been awarded a diploma for his invention.”
After engineers had checked out that the technology actually works, a market study of waste plastics in Europe was undertaken, and Mr Ketteringham was sufficiently impressed by the potential to form his company and acquire the world-wide patents for the process.
He explained that all waste plastic, not just bags, could be used. Through a process operating under heat, called “catalytic cracking”, the shredded plastic was converted back into oil that could then be turned into high-grade diesel and petrol.
A successful demonstration plant was operating in China. The next step was to upgrade the plant to meet European design standards.
“The beauty is that the plastic bags don't have to be clean. They can be covered in grease and, in fact, a lot of plastic cement bags are used in China,” he said.
One plant, costing about £5m to build, would be capable of processing all the waste plastic from an area as wide as Norwich, Yarmouth and Ipswich, and could produce about 1.5m gallons of fuel a year. Conversely the fuel could be used to generate more than three megawatts of electricity
If a local authority took up the technology it would have enough fuel to run all its vehicles as well as solving its waste plastic disposal problem.
He said: “With oil prices soaring over $135 a barrel, we can produce it at $46 a barrel.”
Mr Ketteringham said that subject to planning approval a plant could be up and running within a year.
Still working at a hectic pace 10 years after the normal retirement age, he said he was driven by his desire to “get off my butt and help to tackle the environmental problems that will face future generations”.
Source:
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