Gasoline like fuel from plastic waste pyrolysis and hydrotreatment

Recycling of plastic waste is desirable to lower environmentalpollution and fulfil the requirements of circular economy. Energeticutilization is another possibility, however, municipal solid wastecontaining plastics is usually combusted to generate heat and electricity.An attractive way of dealing with plastic waste is pyrolysis, which has thepotential of producing liquid hydrocarbons suitable as a transportationfuel. The pyrolysis results of three plastics produced in the largestamount globally, namely polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene as wellas their mixtures are presented. The experiments were performed in alaboratory scale batch reactor. The pyrolysis oils were further processedby distillation to provide gasoline and diesel like (distillation cuts at210 and 350 °C) hydrocarbons. The gasoline fractions were analysed by GC-MSand the composition was compared with the EU gasoline standard. It wasfound that the oils from PE, PP and PS contain compounds present instandard gasoline. Mixing PS with PE and PP before the pyrolysis, or theoils afterward produces much closer results to standard requirements as PSpyrolysis generates mostly aromatic content. As standard maximizes theolefin content of gasoline to 18 Vol%, hydrogenation was also performedusing Pd based catalyst. The hydrogenation process significantly reducedthe number of double bonds resulting in low olefin content. Results showthat the pyrolysis of plastic waste mixtures containing PE, PP and PS is aviable method to produce pyrolysis oil suitable for gasoline-like fuelextraction and further hydrogenation of the product can provide gasolinefuels with low olefin content.