The power of waste | Priyanka Bakaya | TEDxAmherst

Priyanka Bakaya and her company PK Clean believe that “waste is a terrible thing to waste.” Their mission is to eliminate landfill-bound plastics by converting them into fuel. She shares her experiences with the technology and her insights into recycling on stage at TEDxAmherst.

Priyanka Bakaya is currently CEO at PK Clean, which has a vision to end plastic waste forever by converting landfill-bound plastics into high value fuels. The company’s first demonstration of its process at commercial scale is in Salt Lake City, Utah. They have signed a contract for their next unit and will also be expanding to developing markets such as India and Africa. Bakaya has previously been selected as a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, a Lightspeed Venture Fellow and named to the Fortune 40 under 40 Ones to Watch List, and Forbes 30 under 30 List in Energy. She is a graduate of MIT and Stanford University with Honors.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Five years ago, I embarked on a mission.

I'd heard a statistic

that the average American generates
4.5 pounds of waste each day,

which meant that I was generating
my weight in waste every four weeks.

It was mind-boggling to me
that we generate this much waste each day

without even thinking twice
about where any of it goes.

Today I'd like to share with you

three short stories
about what I've learned

about how waste is perceived
from different lenses across the globe,

and finally, I'll tell you a little bit
about the solution that we've developed

at our company, PK Clean.

My first story is about one of the most
marginalized communities in the world.

Waste pickers represent one percent

of the urban population
across the developing world.

These are some waste pickers
that I met in India a few months ago.

They told me that they earn
less than a dollar per day

and that their incomes have been
virtually unchanged over the past decade.

What I learned from them

was that sorting through low-value
plastics was not worth their time,

and they also told me
that plastic wrappers,

such as the candy wrappers
that we send from overseas,

end up becoming an environmental burden
on developing countries.

The next story I'd like to share with you

is about how plastic waste
is impacting our marine life.

My first exposure to this
was during my childhood in Australia,

during beach cleanups.

Apparently, that was only
the tip of the iceberg

because an estimated
5.25 trillion pieces of plastic waste

is said to be across
the ocean's surfaces globally.

Nothing tells the story
more powerfully than these images,

and perhaps even more powerful
is the impact that this has on humans,

who eventually end up eating
many types of marine life.

My third and final story

is about how waste is perceived
by the average American.

This story is about myself.

An honest look at my own waste consumption
is, frankly, embarrassing.

This is a picture that I took
of my daily consumption of food.

While this may look
all very healthy and organic,

unfortunately, I know that none of
these plastic items will ever be recycled.

That's because even though
I'll put them in my recycling bin,

my recycler won't pull these out,
due to their low recycling value.

Either these items are going to be
headed to landfill

or perhaps sent to Asia
in order to avoid the landfill fee

and to be further picked through
by waste pickers,

or even worse,

perhaps they'll fall into the ocean
somewhere along the way.

The common thread
across all three of these stories

is how challenging plastic waste is.

While metal and paper recycling rates
have grown over the decades,

plastic recycling has stayed
relatively unchanged, at under 10%.

Plastic is the worst type of waste to bury
because it never decomposes.

My biggest question was,
"Why is plastic's recycling rate so low?"

It turns out that
in order to recycle plastic,

you need to have a pure stream
of a specific number -

numbers one through seven,

which you can find under
your plastic packaging container.

Once you mix all these different
plastic numbers into your recycling bin,

it becomes very difficult
to separate them out.

Typically, recyclers pull out PET,
such as water bottles and soda bottles,

as well as HDPE, such as milk bottles
and detergent bottles,

and much of the rest of the plastic waste

ends up being a residual,
mixed waste stream

that looks something like this.

What you're looking at here

is the challenge facing waste pickers,
marine life, and domestic recyclers.

It's that certain plastic waste streams

are simply too mixed
and too dirty to separate out.

I knew that since plastic
came from oil to begin with,

that there had to be a way
to recover oil back from plastic.

This is why I started PK Clean.

What we do is we take mixed, dirty,
landfill-bound plastic waste,

and we feed it into
an oxygen-free reactor

which is heated up,

and the resulting vapors
are condensed back into oil.

At a high level, the chemistry
is very straightforward.

Plastic is comprised
of long carbon chains.

What we do is we cut down these chains
into smaller chains between C12 and C20,

which is similar to diesel fuel.

The end product is a fuel
that looks like this.

We're able to achieve an energy recovery
of roughly 95% overall.

(Applause)

In New York City,

diesel trucks carry garbage
over 25 million miles each year

and consume over
11 million gallons of diesel.

New York City sends its
plastic waste residual waste streams

to landfills in states
such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.

If instead we converted these into fuel,

we'd be able to get more than enough

to fuel the diesel trucks
in New York City.

So far, we've demonstrated
this process in Salt Lake City

at our facility which you can see up here,

and next, we are targeting
other large cities.

Beyond this, we see a huge opportunity
across the developing world,

and we plan to work
directly with waste pickers

in order to give them
higher value for their plastics.

And finally, we are working
with the Plastic Ocean Project

in order to deploy our technologies
across beach and island communities

so that we're able to convert

all the tons of plastic waste
which are washed ashore each year

back into fuel.

Global waste is expected
to nearly double in the next decade,

from 3.5 million tons
to 6 million tons per day.

Innovation is required
to slow down this pace of growth,

yet so few young minds
consider waste a career path.

Perhaps it's not glamorous enough
or that we're not patient enough,

or perhaps we just simply haven't
thought of waste beyond a trash can.

Waste is our greatest untapped resource,

and as a society,

we need to change our mindset
from seeing waste as waste.

This requires us following the four Rs:

to reduce, reuse, recycle,

and then recover back into energy
whatever remains.

But most importantly,

we need to convert
a previous generation's challenge

into our generation's
greatest opportunity.

So next time you toss something out,
remember that there is power in waste,

and it's time we harness it.

(Applause)