Abstract
This mini-review considers the densification of biomass blended with plastic wastes as an approach for waste management and sustainable fuel production from two perspectives; (1) We overviewed the pollutants generated during plastics combustion and their hazards. The control of these pollutants can be achieved as both reported in literature and by currently in-service municipal waste plants. (2) Advantages from densifying biomass/plastic blends as a solid fuel are indicated. Biomass/plastic briquettes or pellets are a potentially promising solid fuel with low costs, high volumetric heating values, high resistance to mechanical damage and good durability performance under humid conditions. Moreover, the combustion of biomass/plastic blends with less than 10% plastics has no substantial negative effect on pollutants emission compared with that of biomass. Perspectives on densifying biomass/plastic blends as a solid fuel are proposed to realize the scale-up of this technique.
Highlights
The cascading use of biomass to achieve a circular bioeconomy has been considered as a sustainable solution for an environmental friendly world (Patermann and Aguilar, 2018)
The co-densification of biomass and plastic wastes can be considered as a step closer to a circular bioeconomy that can achieve a reduction of over 80% of greenhouse gas emission compared with the use of coal (Eriksson and Finnveden, 2009)
Densification of biomass/plastic blends can produce a solid fuel with higher volumetric heating values than lignocellulosic biomass
Summary
The cascading use of biomass to achieve a circular bioeconomy has been considered as a sustainable solution for an environmental friendly world (Patermann and Aguilar, 2018). The use of these binders does not show significant improvement in the energy density of biomass briquettes or pellets, due to the low heating values of these materials. The co-densification of biomass and plastic wastes can be considered as a step closer to a circular bioeconomy that can achieve a reduction of over 80% (assuming 90% wood and 10% plastics) of greenhouse gas emission compared with the use of coal (Eriksson and Finnveden, 2009).
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