Polymer Waste Management

Johannes Karl Fink

• Publisher: Wiley-Scrivener
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119536086
• eBook ISBN: 9781119536390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Ingegneria chimica e biochimica

The world is literally awash with plastics and this book practically provides a broad overview of plastic recycling procedures and waste management.

With the huge amount of plastics floating in the oceans, fish and other sea creatures are directly suffering the consequences. On land, city leaders and planners are banning one-use plastics as well as plastic bags from grocery stores in an effort to stem the use. Many countries have made official announcements and warnings concerning the pollution caused from plastic wastes. These urgent developments have stimulated the author to study the problem and write Polymer Waste Management.

Plastic recycling refers to a method that retrieves the original plastic material. However, there are many sophisticated methods available for the treatment and management of waste plastics such as basic primary recycling, where the materials are sorted and collected individually. In chemical recycling, the monomers and related compounds are processed by special chemical treatments. Other methods, such as pyrolysis, can produce fuels from waste plastics. These methods and others are treated comprehensively in the book.

This groundbreaking book also discusses:

• General aspects, such as amount of plastics production, types of waste plastics, analysis procedures for identification of waste plastic types, standards for waste treatment, contaminants in recycled plastics.
• Environmental aspects, such as pollution in the marine environment and landfills.
• The advantages of the use of bio-based plastics.
• Recycling methods for individual plastic types and special catalysts.

Chapter 1
General Aspects

Economic, ecological, and technical aspects of plastic waste handling have been summarized in monographs (1–4).

Plastics have become an indispensable ingredient of human life. They are non-biodegradable polymers mostly containing carbon, hydrogen, and a few other elements such as chlorine, nitrogen, etc. Rapid growth of the world population has led to increased demand for commodity plastics (5).

The total plastics production in the world is shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Plastics production in the world (6).

Year	Mt
1950	1.5
1977	50
1989	100
2002	200
2009	250
2011	280
2015	322

A list of acronyms and initials used in the waste management industry has been published (7).

1.1 History of the Literature

The issue of recycling of plastics was not important for scientists before the 1970s. The amount of literature concerning plastics recycling is collected in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 The literature with plastics recycling in the title of the papers found in Google Scholar in March 2018.

Time range	Number of references
1970–1975	21
1976–1980	25
1981–1985	34
1986–1990	132
1991–1995	412
1996–2000	384
2001–2005	262
2006–2010	248
2011–2015	195
2016–2018	65

As can be seen from Table 1.2, the boom started in the mid-1980s.

1.2 Amount of Wastes

The plastic wastes produced in the European Union in 2007 was about 52.5 Mt (8, 9). In 2008, 60 Mt were produced in Europe and the global production in 2008 was 245 Mt (10). In 2007 the amount of post-consumer plastic wastes obtained in the EU that year was 24.6 Mt, which is similar to that in 2008 (8, 10).

The total waste generated per year in 2010 in Pakistan was about 31 Mt per. In big Pakistani cities such as Karachi, about 7 to 8 Mt of solid waste is generated. It is estimated that about 6% to 8% of solid waste is post-consumer plastic waste, while only 10% of this amount is recycled (11).

The quantities of recycled poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) in Europe are shown in Table 1.3.

Table 1.3 Quantities of recycled PVC in Europe (12).

Year	Amount/[t]
2003	14255
2004	18077
2005	38793
2006	82812
2007	149463
2008	194150
2013	360000
2014	440468

Also, the problems of plastics wastes in other countries have been highlighted, such as, in India (13) and Bangladesh (14, 15).

Consequently, there is a growing social concern related to the management of the plastic wastes, which should proceed according to a hierarchical approach in agreement with the following order: waste minimization, reuse, recycling, energy recovery and landfilling (16).

In 2014, nine countries in Europe reached a recovery ratio of more than 95% of the post-consumer plastic waste (6). The amounts are shown in Table 1.4.

Table 1.4 Plastics recycling in European countries (6).

Country	Recycling	Energy recovery	Total
	Amount in % per weight
Switzerland	24.5	75.3	99.8
Austria	28.0	71.6	99.6
Netherlands	30.3	68.9	99.2
Germany	37.9	61.2	99.1
Sweden	37.8	60.6	98.4
Luxembourg	28.5	69.3	97.8
Denmark	33.7	63.9	97.6
Belgium	31.2	65.8	97.0
Norway	39.7	56.6	96.3

1.3 Metal Content in Wastes

1.3.1 Waste Poly(ethylene) and Pure High Density Poly(ethylene)

The metal content of both waste poly(ethylene) (PE) and pure high density poly(ethylene) (HDPE) used in a specific study (9) is shown in Table 1.5.

Table 1.5 Metal content of poly(ethylene) samples (9).

Metal	Pure HDPE	Waste PE
	/[%] per weight
Al	0.002	0.015
Ca	0.001	0.070
Cr	0.004	0.003
Cu	0.000	0.162
Fe	0.000	0.003
Mg	0.000	0.003
Na	0.001	0.013
Pb	0.000	0.009
Ti	0.000	0.151
Zn	0.021	0.006

In pure HDPE, the total metal content is very low and accounts for less than 0.03%. In contrast, the metal content in waste PE is much higher and accounts for roughly 0.4%. The main metals present are Cu and Ti with a share of 0.162% and 0.151%, respectively (9).

1.4 Analysis Procedures

1.4.1 Fluorescence Labeling

The demand for polymers in combination with their high durability following rather short life phases ensures the flow of plastic waste into landfills (17). Therefore, plastic recycling has become indispensable. In order to produce economically attractive products based on recycled plastics, mono-fractional compositions of waste polymers are required.

However, existing measurement technologies, such as near infrared spectroscopy used in sorting facilities, show limitations with regard to the separation of complex mixtures of plastic flakes, especially when dark and black plastics are part of them. An innovative approach to overcome these obstacles and provide high sorting purities is to label different types of plastics with unique combinations of fluorescence markers, also known as tracers, which can be considered as optical fingerprints. They are incorporated into the virgin plastic resins at ppm levels during the production process and do not affect either the visual appearance nor the structural and mechanical integrity of the materials.

The goal is to realize the practical use of this concept in industrial processes. An industrial applicable spectroscopic measurement system has been designed and implemented that can identify polymer flakes with a size of a few millimeters transported on a conveyor belt in real time based on the emitted fluorescence of incorporated organic markers. In addition to the implementation of the opto-electrical measurement system, a multi-threading software application has been developed and realized which controls the hardware and collects the measured data and finally classifies the data (17).

In recent years, great effort has been expended in the development of the automated identification and sorting methods for post-consumer plastics in the waste streams that are reaching recycling processes (18). The final properties of the recycled materials largely depend on the pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: General Aspects
• Chapter 2: Environmental Aspects
• Chapter 3: Recycling Methods
• Chapter 4: Recovery of Monomers
• Chapter 5: Recovery into Fuels
• Chapter 6: Specific Materials
• Index
• End User License Agreement