Technical solutions for a sustainable handling of mixed plastic waste – webinar report
Finding sustainable solutions for handling of plastic waste has already been a relevant question for many years due to the vast volumes generated worldwide and their impact on the environment.
If we talk about mixed plastic wastes in particular, its heterogenous composition poses an extra challenge. They contain not only hydrocarbon polymers, but also heteroatoms, additives such as fillers, pigments, plasticizers or flame retardants, and other types of contaminants such as food waste, biomass, inert or metals among others. This is a challenge for high quality recycling and for that reason they might end up being incinerated or landfilled losing with it resources and impacting negatively the environment.
New technological pathways are being explored with the aim of providing solutions to a more sustainable handling of mixed plastics wastes. Mechanical recycling is becoming more and more important in establishing the carbon cycle to recover material and reduce CO2 emissions. Chemical recycling (specifically pyrolysis and gasification) starts to play an important role in handling mixed plastic waste, provided that the main challenges to scale up plants for chemical recycling are overcome and, therefore, it is considered now as complementary to the existing mechanical recycling. Advance sorting (sensor-based) technologies are meant to pave the way to a more efficient sorting of mixed plastic waste in the future: they might help to adjust the operational parameters of mechanical and chemical recycling of mixed plastic waste plants in the future to increase feasibility and efficiency.
This webinar brought light to advanced technical solutions that led to a more sustainable valorization of this waste stream and bring us closer to circularity in the field of plastic waste management.
MAIN CONCLUSIONS
The webinar presentations clearly showed that there are technical solutions that already have and that might potentially have an impact on paving the way towards a circular handling of mixed plastic wastes.
The main conclusions from this webinar are summarized below:
- In the future, it seems feasible to adopt mixed plastic waste sorting strategies that aim at sorting mixed fractions based on polymer content and/or degree of contamination rather than monomer (polymer) type fractions.
- Advanced sorting technologies are in continues development. These plants are successful in transforming mixed plastic waste into a feedstock with less heteroatoms that could lead to a more efficient chemical and mechanical recycling. However, this is not enough to make plastic packaging part of the circular economy. Suitable systems for collection of packaging waste and design of materials for reducing the complexity of the material that is on the market are also key in this journey; as well as changing in behavioral aspects.
- Pyrolysis is a robust technology that can be used to treat complex mixed plastic waste. ARCUS has developed a pyrolysis process demonstration unit that is able to absorb the variation in the feedstock composition to deliver a pyrolysis-oil fulfilling the quality requirements of chemical feedstock.
- Thermal systems based on fluidized bed – stream cracking combined with gas conditioning have the potential to treat mixed plastic waste while reducing the needing for advanced sorting and removing the hydrogenation step at the biorefineries.
Link to the presentations:
