US recycling company Global Resource Corporation has adapted a military device called a klystron microwave electron tube to ‘crack’ the hydrocarbons in waste materials like plastics, wood, rubber and glass with specific radiofrequencies, and harvesting any usable oils and gases released. The process does not consume water and is carried out in an oxygen-starved vacuum. No global-warming carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide is emitted.

GRC call the process ‘High-Frequency Attenuating Wave Kinetics’ or HAWK for short. HAWK’s potential is huge

• Plastic-coated copper wiring is turned into bare copper wire, oil and gas
• Old car tyres are ground up then turned into steel, carbon black (a pigment), diesel oil and gas. Nine kilos of tyres yields 1kg of steel, 3.4kg of carbon black, 4.54 litres of diesel oil and 1.42 cubic metres of gas. (The average European car tyre weighs 7kg.)
• Most of the ‘autofluff’ (the vast amount of plastics, woods, rubbers, fabrics, glass, sand, dirt and paper left after all the steel has been extracted from a scrap car) is converted to gas and oil, reducing pressure on landfill sites
• Waste in landfill sites is massively reduced in the same way
• Slurry oil, oil shale, oil tar and oil well drillings can be converted into usable gases and oils