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Post Industrial Polyolefin Recycling Process
Polyolefins, or plastics are used in a wide range of applications and some plastics items, such as food packaging, become waste only a short time after being purchased. Other plastic items lend themselves to be reused many times over. Reusing plastic is preferable to recycling as it uses less energy and fewer resources. According to most estimates, 80% of post-consumer plastic waste is sent to landfill, 8% is incinerated and only 7% is recycled. Since the production of plastics uses 8% of the world's oil production, it is in our best interests to recycle plastics. In addition to reducing the amount of plastics waste requiring disposal, recycling plastic will reduce the consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels, energy, the amount of solid waste going to landfill and the amount of carbon emissions. There are several types of plastic recycling available:
- Plastic Scrap (also called process scrap) - is the recycling of any polymers left over from the production of plastics.
- Post Consumer - is the recycling of plastic material arising from products that have undergone a first full service life prior to being recovered.
- Mechanical - refers to processes which involve the melting, shredding or granulation of waste plastics.
- Feedstock - refers a range of recycling techniques to make plastics, which break down polymers into their constituent monomers, which in turn can be used again in refineries, or petrochemical and chemical production.
The diagram below is a flow chart describing the mechanical recycling process for polyolefin scrap. In this process, plastics are first sorted either by trained staff who manually sort the plastics into polymer type and/or colour, or by automatic techniques such as X-ray fluorescence, infrared and near infrared spectroscopy, electrostatics and flotation. Once sorted, the plastic is either melted down directly and moulded into a new shape, or melted down after being shredded into flakes and than processed into granules called regranulate.
The flow chart above is a typical set up for recycling polyolefin scrap
by mechanical recycling. The other two options for plastic recycling include:
- Feedstock Recycling: specific for polymeric materials, also in a mixed form.eg. chemical depolymerization, pyrolysis,gasification, hydrogenation.
- Energy Recovery: suitable for mixed/contaminated plastics. The calorific content of plastics is recovered by burning the plastics waste alone or together with fossil fuels.
Energy savings of several recycling options in comparison to landfill.
|
RECYCLING OPTION |
ENERGY SAVING (MJ/kg) |
|
Mechanical |
30.0 to 38.0 |
|
Syngas |
10.0 |
|
Hydrogenation |
23.8 |
|
Thermolysis |
29.3 |
|
Monocombustion |
26.4 |
|
Municipal waste incineration |
15.9 |
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