Your Tax $$$ At Work: Argonne Lab's Better Batteries, Greener Fuels Page 2

By John Voelcker

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Vehicle being crushed, from Argonne National Laboratory video

Approximately 8 million acres could be planted with these biofuel crops; Negri and Gopalakrishnan estimate that harvest could supply 22 percent of annual energy demand in a state like Nebraska—even more if the state irrigated the land.

There are challenges, of course. Steep slopes on roadway buffers would be harder to harvest than flat Midwestern plains. State transportation departments keep highway borders mown flat to increase driver visibility. And it's unclear exactly how much carbon would be sequestered or how many pollutants taken up. Still, the concept seems to warrant further study.

More end-of-life recycling

Finally, Argonne has built a pilot plant to test out ways of recovering and reusing the 25 percent of a vehicle that isn't currently recycled after it's shredded. Of 12 million vehicles scrapped yearly, 5 million tons of material is just "shredder residue" that's now sent to landfills.

Argonne's plant first mechanically separates the materials in the shredder residue:  ferrous metal (steel, nonferrous metals (aluminum, copper, brass, and stainless steel), seat foam, and then a "polymer concentrate" made up of several types of ground-up plastics.

Then the concentrate is separated into different polymer types in a flotation chamber, so that each type can be melted down and reused without the contamination that comes from mixing different polymers together. A mixture of polypropylene and polyethylene, for example, can be made into knee bolsters and other plastic moldings for a car's interior.Altogether, Argonne says the process could remove most of that 5 million tons from landfills, save the equivalent of 24 million barrels of oil, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 12 million tons every year.

[Argonne National Laboratory Transportation Technology R&D]