Thermal technique makes clean crude replacement from mixed plastic waste

This is the assessment of Adrian Haworth, sales and marketing director of Recycling Technologies, a company that has developed WarwickFBR, a recycling system that converts mixed plastic waste (MPW) into PlaxOil, a heavy fuel alternative that that can be sold or used in localised on demand combined heat and power (CHP) plants.

Haworth explained that the PlaxOil is produced by its WarwickFBR system following pyrolysis of MPW.

To do this, the system first shreds and dries the MPW. It then injects blended product into a fluidised bed where the long hydrocarbon chains in the polymers are broken down by pyrolysis - a multi-step process in which organic materials are decomposed by heat in the absence of oxygen - to form an energy rich gas. This gas is then filtered to remove contamination, cooled and condensed to provide PlaxOil.

According to Recycling Technologies, around 30 million tonnes of plastic waste goes to landfill or incineration in the EU every year because it consists of a mix of polymers, which would have to be separated for conventional recycling.