Plastic Converted Back to Fuel at Syrian Refugee Camp

In this report, posted on the Internet on November 22, refugees at the Yarmouk camp in Syria show how they produce gasoline and mazut fuel out of plastic debris. "There is no water or electricity," they explain, "so we've been forced to do this work, which is very dangerous."

Following are excerpts:

Syrian refugee: I'm cutting it into little pieces so that it will fit into the barrels. We exact mazut fuel from it, because we don't have electricity or mazut. We need it to pump water out of the wells and to run generators. The little money we make is enough to get some food to live.

Over here we fill the barrels after we have cut up the plastic. We fill the barrels with this material and then we melt it down. We fill the barrels with this material and then we melt it down.

This is our gasoline. It is better than the gasoline of the regime. Cars run on our gasoline, and so can motorcycles and generators. We also extract mazut for generators.

God willing, we will find a way to fill small cylinders with this gas. We still need to figure out how to do this. We are producing gas, but not this way. We use cow manure. We put it in a barrel, and leave it in the sun for 15 days, and it fills up the cylinder.

This is the final product that we extract from the plastic.

[…]

We've been forced to do this work, which is very dangerous. We need to though, because there is no water or electricity. We extract gasoline and mazut to work the generators and pump water.

[…]

The gasoline is poured into a generator that activates a TV set

[…]