Technical description and performance evaluation of different packaging plastic waste management's systems in a...

The plastic waste disposal strongly raised in importance in the recent past and it is approaching a critical situation worldwide, so requiring putting in practice the criteria of circular economy by avoiding meaningless policy responses against the plastic materials. The world of plastic materials includes a wide range of goods in all the sectors of our life: packaging, construction, biomedicals, etc. The answer to the plastic waste disposal is build an industrial network characterized by reliability, flexibility, sustainability, utility in the industrial cycle and ability to provide useful products to the market. The traditional processes including recycling and energy recovery fulfil only a part of these conditions and need to be assessed in correlation to their real effect on the circular economy such as the uses of the obtained products in the anthroposphere's life cycle, the burdens generated by the processes itself, etc. Among the possible processes that can be more sustainable if compared with the traditional ones, in a real circular economy perspective, those based on thermochemical exploitation of products obtained by plastics are discussed and assessed. The results show that it is possible to transform an expensive and non-resolving plastic waste management system in an industrial network having an intrinsic economic sustainability and, overall, a well-defined role in the economic chain of plastics. The results show that an integration between the present system with the production of petrochemical products, including oil/gasoline/syngas/…, strongly improve the economic performance of the overall waste system, allowing a larger savings of not-renewable resources, a limited greenhouse burden, a release in the market of valuable products instead of poor quality materials and the minimization of waste destined to be landfilled.