In the search for carbon-neutral waste-to-resource processing routes: coupling plastic waste pyrolysis and CO2 capture towards Circular Economy
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Abstract
Among the emerging alternatives for the recovery of plastic materials, pyrolysis has proven to be very promising from several points of view for the upcycling of plastic waste. Despite its economic and environmental benefits, pyrolysis is an energy-demanding process, and combustion is one of the most economical energy-supply alternatives due to the higher cost of other energy sources. In consequence, even though the entire process might be environmentally favorable, there is still a considerable amount of carbon dioxide emissions (around 150g of CO2 per kg of plastic waste). To promote a carbon neutral, or even carbon negative, process, the coupling of carbon capture technologies and pyrolysis arises as a suitable solution to improve the process from the environmental perspective. Currently, several alternatives are available for CO2 separation including capture from post-combustion, pre-combustion, oxy-combustion, chemical looping combustion, as well as ambient air capture. The most commercially available and mature post-combustion capture process is chemical absorption, usually with aqueous amine solutions. Among them, MEA has good CO2 transfer rates, has a low price, and is biodegradable. However, it may suffer from toxicity and solvent losses due to evaporation and degradation; additionally, at higher concentrations, the MEA solution is highly corrosive to the equipment. Therefore finding alternative CO2 absorbents is an arising challenge. The captured CO2 is usually stored, but it can be utilized to synthesize valuable chemicals such as carbon monoxide, formic acid, methane, methanol, ethanol, or ethylene via electroreduction. However, these technologies are currently underdeveloped, and it is hard to predict their performance at an industrial scale. In this contribution, the pyrolysis of Mixed Plastic Waste at 500ºC has been chosen for plastic waste upcycling, as it has proven to be a very promising alternative according to several objectives, as shown by the synthesis and assessment framework previously developed: further specifications are also presented in that contribution. The required energy to carry out the pyrolysis was obtained with a fired heater, using as fuel the hard-to-separate mixture of heavy compounds from the pyrolytic liquid, therefore avoiding the need to use any other fuel. This process was coupled with a CC Unit, using chemical absorption with 30 wt.% MEA to separate the CO2 from the flue gases. The entire process was simulated and designed with Aspen Plus and its economic performance was evaluated using the APEA®. The obtained capital cost was annualized accounting for a 10-year depreciation scheme with a 15% fixed interest rate. The same procedure was applied to the CC Unit and their economic performances were compared to assess the impact of integrating them. A preliminary economic assessment has been performed on the proposed coupled plastic waste pyrolysis and CC process. The results show that including this new unit in the pyrolysis has a relatively low impact on its overall cost and thanks to the heat integration, a lower impact on the tentative profit. The integration of both processes offers a symbiotic effect and provides a more environmentally favorable process, leading to zero carbon emissions, the upcycling of waste, and the production of valuable chemicals. It is important to remark that the profit could be increased with the addition of CO2 electrolytic technologies. As a future work, it is expected to continue exploiting the symbiotic potential of the proposed integration by coupling CC with in situ conversion steps, which should offer further significant improvements in terms of compensation of previous environmental impacts (circularity), overall energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness, as well as the synthesis of a variety of carbon-based chemicals. This fact could in turn increase the economic performance even more if carbon emissions trading is considered.


