Energy and monomer recovery from polymer wastes

In this paper the products obtained through thermochemical processing of several polymer-based wastes are characterised. The influence of chemical composition of raw materials on the characteristics of obtained products has been investigated by using fixed bed reactor. The aim of this work is to identify the best use of products recovered after pyrolysis of plastic wastes collected from chemical and biochemical laboratories. This work is developed in a laboratory bench installation design to perform O2-free processing at atmospheric pressure. The process parameters such as pyrolysis temperature and adapted heating rate have been determined through the transposition of thermal and kinetic information provided by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Gas-chromatography techniques have been used to identify the chemical composition of gases (GC/TCD) and liquids (GC/FID-MS). It was established that polymer wastes can led to a valuable liquid products, with encouraging energetic properties that allow their blending with fuels currently used without altering the performances of burning devices.