Department of Environmental, Biological, Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Via Vivaldi 43, 81100 Caserta, Italy.
Sci Total Environ. 2020 May 20;718:137233. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.137233. Epub 2020 Feb 15.
The plastic waste disposal strongly raised in importance in the recent past and it is approaching a critical situation worldwide, so requiring putting in practice the criteria of circular economy by avoiding meaningless policy responses against the plastic materials. The world of plastic materials includes a wide range of goods in all the sectors of our life: packaging, construction, biomedicals, etc. The answer to the plastic waste disposal is build an industrial network characterized by reliability, flexibility, sustainability, utility in the industrial cycle and ability to provide useful products to the market. The traditional processes including recycling and energy recovery fulfil only a part of these conditions and need to be assessed in correlation to their real effect on the circular economy such as the uses of the obtained products in the anthroposphere's life cycle, the burdens generated by the processes itself, etc. Among the possible processes that can be more sustainable if compared with the traditional ones, in a real circular economy perspective, those based on thermochemical exploitation of products obtained by plastics are discussed and assessed. The results show that it is possible to transform an expensive and non-resolving plastic waste management system in an industrial network having an intrinsic economic sustainability and, overall, a well-defined role in the economic chain of plastics. The results show that an integration between the present system with the production of petrochemical products, including oil/gasoline/syngas/…, strongly improve the economic performance of the overall waste system, allowing a larger savings of not-renewable resources, a limited greenhouse burden, a release in the market of valuable products instead of poor quality materials and the minimization of waste destined to be landfilled.
在最近的过去，塑料废物处理的重要性大幅提高，并且在全球范围内已经接近危急状况，因此需要通过避免针对塑料材料的无意义政策反应来实施循环经济标准。塑料材料的世界包括我们生活各个领域的各种商品：包装、建筑、生物医学等。处理塑料废物的方法是建立一个以可靠性、灵活性、可持续性、工业循环中的实用性以及为市场提供有用产品的能力为特点的工业网络。包括回收和能源回收在内的传统工艺仅满足这些条件的一部分，需要根据它们对循环经济的实际影响进行评估，例如获得的产品在人类生命周期中的用途、工艺本身产生的负担等。在与传统工艺相比可能更具可持续性的可能工艺中，讨论并评估了基于塑料制品热化学利用的工艺。结果表明，有可能将昂贵且无法解决的塑料废物管理系统转变为具有内在经济可持续性的工业网络，并且总体上在塑料经济链中具有明确的作用。结果表明，将现有系统与石油化工产品（包括石油/汽油/合成气/...）的生产相结合，可以大大提高整个废物系统的经济性能，允许更多地节省不可再生资源，温室负担有限，有价值的产品而不是低质量材料进入市场，以及将注定要填埋的废物最小化。
