Abstract
Abstract Plastic solid waste (PSW) presents challenges and opportunities to society regardless of their sustainability awareness and technological advances. A special emphasis is paid on waste generated from polyolefin sources, which makes up a great percentage of our daily commodities’ plastic products. In Mexico 7.6 millions of tons of plastic in 2012 were wasted, which low density polyethylene LDPE, and high density polyethylene HDPE were the most abundant. Increasing cost, and decreasing space of landfills are forcing considerations of alternative options for PSW disposal. Years of research, study and testing have resulted in a number of treatment, recycling and recovery methods for plastics that can be economically, and environmentally viable. The following work studies the possibilities of polyethylene recycling. Nowadays, non-catalytic thermal cracking (Pyrolysis) is receiving renewed attention, due to the fact of added value on a crude oil barrel and its very valuable yielded products, but a fact remains that advanced thermo-chemical recycling of polyolefin still lacks the proper design, and kinetic background to target certain desired products and/or chemicals. On the other hand some research have shown a good performance that can be used in a real plant. ASPEN Plus is used to simulate a non-catalytic thermal cracking process. The process behavior of simulation is similar to the experimental data from other authors. Using gibbs free energy to identify the chemical equilibrium in system, its global minimization allows identifying the amount of substances present in the process. The simulation results demonstrate that it could be produced 49 % and 34 % wt of ethylene and propylene respectively from gas yield at 850 °C. Then scale the plant to produce ethylene and propylene from the pyrolysis and ethanol from a direct hydration of ethylene. Aspen Process Economics Analyzer is used in order to find the feasibility of the pyrolysis and ethanol production. The total sales/total production cost ratio obtained for the integrated process approaches was 2.55.
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