What really happens with your Christmas wrapping paper?
Christmas is just round the corner and under our trees are stacks of presents waiting to be ripped open by people of all ages. But what about all that paper that conceals our gifts? Britons use about 120 grams of plastic wrapping on their presents, and most of it is not recyclable. Enter a team of engineers at the University of Warwick in the UK that has come up with a new technique to process 100% of Christmas and other household plastic. This latest innovation will give our planet a huge boost. Experts say that only 12% of plastic waste undergoes the full recycling process. Most of the time, the remaining 88% is either burnt as fuel or thrown into a land fill. However, many consumers proactively separate their plastic waste, assuming that it will all be recycled. Another problem is that workers in recycling plants spend a lot of time separating and cleaning the waste. An extra headache for workers is that objects are usually made of more than one plastic; so different treatments are needed. Thanks to the Warwick researchers, the novel unit they created can cope with every piece of plastic waste and even break some polymers, like polystyrene, back down to its original monomers. The device uses pyrolysis (using heat in the absence of oxygen to break down materials) in a 'fluidised bed' reactor. The team was able to put myriad kinds of plastic inside the unit, which then reduced down the materials to useful products. A number of them were retrieved by simple distillation, the researchers said. The Warwick team succeeded in reclaiming a variety of materials from the plastic mix, namely: wax that can be then used as a lubricant; original monomers like styrene that can be used for polystyrene manufacture; terephthalic acid that can be reused in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic products; methylmetacrylate that can be used to make acrylic sheets; and carbon which can be used as Carbon Black in paint pigments and tyres. Even the char left at the end of some of the reactions can be sold for use as activated carbon. This unit will not only benefit the budgets of local authorities, but it will give our environment some much needed relief. In lab-scale tests performed by the engineers, distilled liquids and solids were produced. They can now be used for processing into new products, according to the team. They are currently working with Warwick Ventures, the technology transfer arm of the University of Warwick, to develop devices that will trigger the interest of both the authorities and disposal companies looking to create large-scale reactor units at municipal tips that can generate tanker loads of reusable material. 'We envisage a typical large scale plant having an average capacity of 10,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year,' explains Professor Jan Baeyens, a Warwick engineer and project leader. 'In a year tankers would take away from each plant over GBP 5 million [EUR 5.9 million] worth of recycled chemicals and each plant would save GBP 500,000 [EUR 589,000] a year in land fill taxes alone. As the expected energy costs for each large plant would only be in the region of GBP 50,000 (EUR 58,900] a year the system will be commercially very attractive and give a rapid payback on capital and running costs.'
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