As the Christmas decorations are stowed away for another year, perhaps we should be reflecting on the excesses that always seem to go with the festive season, whether it’s food, drink – or packaging.
According to the University of Warwick in the UK, on average we consume 120g of plastics wrapping on Christmas gifts, most of which is almost impossible to recycle. However, researchers at the university have devised a new technique which it says could process 100% of Christmas and other household plastics instead of the tiny fraction that is currently actually processed. Typically only 12% of such waste is truly recycled, the rest of which is often put into landfill or burnt as fuel, according to the University of Warwick.
Despite consumers’ best efforts to separate the different plastics, there are problems such as persistent labels; and mixed plastics, when used, are often impossible to separate.
The Warwick researchers have come up with a unit that uses pyrolysis, (using heat in the absence of oxygen to decompose materials) in a ‘fluidised bed’ reactor. Tests completed just before Christmas have reportedly shown that the researchers have been able to shovel into such a reactor a wide range of mixed plastics that can be reduced down to useful products, many of which can then be retrieved by simple distillation.
The products that the Warwick team have been able to reclaim from the plastics mix include: wax that can be used as a lubricant; original monomers such as styrene that can be used to make polystyrene; methylmetacrylate that can be used to make acrylic sheets; carbon that can be used as Carbon Black in paint pigments and tyres; and even the char left at the end of some of the reactions can be sold to be used as activated carbon at a value of at least £400 (€468) a tonne.
Although this is only a pilot scale plant, it can be scaled up, and should be of interest to local authorities and waste disposal companies. Jan Baeyens, the lead researcher on the project, comments: “We envisage a typical large scale plant having an average capacity of 10,000 tonnes of plastics waste/year. In a year, tankers would take away from each plant over £5 million (€5.85 million) worth of recycled chemicals and each plant would save £500,000 (€585,000) a year in landfill taxes alone.”
A happy and resourceful new year to you all!
Maureen Byrne,
Editor
Maureen Byrne
