Valorisation of eyewear bioplastics through HTC and anaerobic digestion: Preliminary results

Abstract

Bioplastics are increasingly replacing traditional plastics in many sectors, but the legislative and operative frameworks for their disposal remain unclear: they should be collected and treated together with the organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW), but often do not biodegrade satisfactorily in the plants that treat OFMSW. This work focuses on a type of cellulose diacetate employed in the eyewear industry to analyse hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) as a pre-treatment before anaerobic digestion (AD). The results show that HTC can hydrolyse this bioplastic even at moderate temperatures, reaching an almost total dissolution in the liquid phase at 210 °C and, at higher temperatures, producing hydrochar. When the HTC slurry obtained at 210 °C is fed to mesophilic or thermophilic AD, both the amount and the production rate of biogas are enhanced compared to the raw bioplastic. In particular, in thermophilic conditions, the amount of produced biogas undergoes at least a threefold increase compared to the untreated cellulose diacetate. Thus, this work confirms that a prior HTC step may be a suitable approach to enhance the disposal and energy recovery of bioplastics through AD.