Pyrolysis Study of mixed plastics waste

Abstract

There is limited work reported on the pyrolysis of mixed plastics waste. The objective of this work is to investigate the effect of interaction of various types of plastics on the quality and yields of liquid oil obtained from pyrolysis. The plastics chosen in this work were polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS) since their combination contributes to approximately 80% of the plastics waste in India. In addition, previous studies showed that polyolefins (HDPE, LDPE, PP, and PS) were best suited for chemical recycling through pyrolysis. Experiments were performed in a bench-scale batch reactor with individual components (PE, PP and PS) and binary mixtures of them in various proportions. In this study, the dependent variables were the yields and quality of pyrolysis products. There was non- linearity observed in the liquid and gas yield and product composition with varying mixture constitution. This study on interaction effects is envisaged to help in further development and scale-up of the plastic pyrolysis process.