Plastics - The Facts 2017: An Analysis of European Plastics Production, Demand and Waste Data

Plastics – the Facts is an analysis of the data related to the production, demand and waste management of plastic materials. It provides the latest business information on production and demand, trade, recovery as well as employment and turnover in the plastics industry. In short, this report gives an insight into the industry's contribution to European economic growth and prosperity throughout the life cycle of the material

Optimal Facility Location and Sizing for Waste Upcycling Systems

For reducing the carbon footprint of products containing polymers, recycling and upcycling of waste can make important contributions. While for certain polymers, especially for thermoplastics, melting and re-forming is attractive, although it leads to a degradation of the material properties, for others, and also after a certain degree of degradation in general, chemical processing is the most attractive option for recycling (also called upcycling). This means that from the end-of-life or production waste, valuable molecules are produced that can be fed again into the production of high-value polymers, leading to circular value chains. Such value chains can replace or reduce the use of fossil-based raw materials in polymer production, but actually realizing such value chains is a complex task. It requires setting up systemic solutions, from the collection of end-of-life or production waste over dismantling, sorting, pre-conditioning to chemical processing and downstream separation. The resulting systemic solution must be viable from an economic and from an ecologic point of view. Therefore, such systems must be analyzed and optimized from a system-wide perspective. In this work, we present a framework to model, simulate, analyze and optimize circular supply chains, and we demonstrate the potential of our framework with a case study of a value chain for the upcycling of rigid polyurethane foam waste in Germany

Recycling of polystyrene-based external thermal insulation composite systems - Application of combined mechanical and chemical recycling

The material recycling of complex waste streams such as external thermal insulation composite systems (ETICS) is challenging, which is why their recycling in the sense of a circular economy is currently hardly established. Therefore, the combined mechanical and thermochemical recycling of ETICS based on expanded polystyrene (EPS) is investigated experimentally and by simulating full process chains in order to evaluate circular economy opportunities. Model ETICS as example for building and construction waste is pretreated mechanically, followed by either pyrolysis and / or gasification steps, and full mass and energy balances are derived. By the combined recycling, inorganic compounds can be separated to a large extent allowing a pre-concentrate generation. The plastic-rich pre-concentrate is converted into either pyrolysis oil with a high styrene monomer content of 51 wt% or to synthesis gas in the subsequent thermochemical conversions. The holistic approach enables a high carbon recycling rate between 53 and 68 wt%. In addition, the investigation reveals technology limitations and opportunities to be further developed and optimized