Technologies to upcycle plastic solid wastes into nanostructured carbon materials and their application in the removal of micropollutants
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
The world’s plastics production has been increasing stiffly over the years. Accounting only 2019, the global production
of plastics reached nearly 370 million metric tonnes, with ca. 15.7% of those produced in Europe.1 Recent projections
point towards a cumulative generation of plastic solid wastes (PSWs) of over 25,000 million metric tonnes by 2050.2
Among these, 36.4% are expected to be discarded in landfills or in the environment; a similar fraction (36.4%) should
be incinerated, and only 27.2% will be recycled.2 These forecasts point out that PSWs are mismanaged, mainly because
current technologies are unable to promote proper reusing/recycling of these materials.3
Proper waste management falls within the scope of upstream responses. However, several difficulties have
been hindering waste plastic recycling, such as the lack of economic attractiveness of the resulting products.4 Using
waste plastics as feedstock for the production of added-value products and materials has been proposed as the boost
needed to increase the attractiveness of plastics recycling. Among them are the preparation of carbon nanomaterials
(CNs), such as carbon nanotubes or graphene, using PSWs as carbon precursors. This represents a new strategy for
the valorisation of PSWs, consisting in the cracking of polymers that compose them and further synthesizing the CNs,
using the resultant degradation gaseous products, by catalytic chemical vapour deposition (CCVD). However, most
studies only report single pure polymers as model PSW to carry out a one-step process (pyrolysis and synthesis)
without targeting applications of the resulting CNs.5-7 The properties of the CNs obtained from PSWs could be fined
tuned for specific applications, as demonstrated in a previous work.8 These characteristics of the developed fine tuned
CNs make them highly suitable for the removal of micropollutants, as will be shown in this talk.
This work was financially supported by project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-031439 (PLASTIC_TO_FUEL&MAT)
funded by FEDER funds through COMPETE2020 – Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI), and by national funds (PIDDAC) through FCT/MCTES. The work was also partially funded by the Base Fundings - UIDP/50020/2020 of the Associate Laboratory LSRE-LCM and UIDB/00690/2020 of the Centro de Investigação de Montanha (CIMO) - by national funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC).
