Chapter 6 - Thermal analysis in recycling and waste management

Abstract

Waste management includes the activities and actions required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal. This includes the collection, transport, treatment, and disposal of waste, together with monitoring and regulation of the waste management process. TA techniques are frequently used to assess the optimum conditions in the areas of waste management and recycling. In this chapter, we discuss some applications of TA techniques in assessing the optimum conditions in the vital areas of recycling and waste management. This includes assessing the identity of the mixed recycled plastics using DSC and TGA as a research method in the transformation processes of waste rubber and plastic products for energy carriers: waste-to-liquid (WtL) and waste-to-energy (WtE) processes, TGA characteristics, and kinetics of scrap tire-biomass copyrolysis. Some applications in the field of nuclear industry were given including the capture of organic iodides from nuclear waste, Sandia Octahedral Molecular Sieves (SOMS) and their related perovskites in nuclear waste management, nuclear graphite treatment using TGA, thermal characteristics of spent activated carbon (SAC) generated from air cleaning units, cold-cap reactions in vitrification of nuclear waste glass, TA in vitrification of radioactive spent ion-exchange resins (SIERs) in borosilicate glass, and finally TA in waste electronic recycling.