%0 Journal Article
%T Facile Route to Generate Fuel Oil via Catalytic Pyrolysis of Waste Polypropylene Bags: Towards Waste Management of >20£¿ Plastic Bags
%A Neeraj Mishra
%A Sunil Pandey
%A Bhushan Patil
%A Mukeshchand Thukur
%A Ashmi Mewada
%A Madhuri Sharon
%A Maheshwar Sharon
%J Journal of Fuels
%D 2014
%R 10.1155/2014/289380
%X A novel strategy of waste recycling of polypropylene plastics (PP) bags for generation of commercially viable byproducts using nanoforms of nickel as catalyst is presented in this work. After pyrolysis of waste PP bags (>20£¿¦Ìm) under continuous argon flow, 90% conversion efficiency to high petroleum oil was observed at 550¡ãC. To assess the physicochemical attributes of formed oil, flash point, pour point, viscosity, specific gravity, heating value, and density were also measured and found to be very close to ideal values of commercial fuel oil. Moreover, GC-MS was used to resolve the range of trace mass hydrocarbon present in the liquefied hydrocarbon. Our robust recycling system can be exploited as economical technique to solve the nuisance of waste plastic hazardous to ecosystem. 1. Introduction Due to the nondegradability of PP plastics, their heavy accumulation in the environment is causing hostile effects on ecosystem including soil erosion [1]. Conventional routes to recycle PP plastics such as mechanical recycling, land filling, incineration, and chemical recycling [2] suffer from many hostile impacts such as landfill waste, clogged waterways, occupational health hazards, energy consumption, animal death, water contamination, foreign oil dependency, toxic pollution, soil degradation, costly production/recycling of plastics, and landscape litter. Additionally, these techniques have following limitations.(1)Low-conversion efficiency.(2)No valuable by products are formed; rather one form of plastic is converted to another, which has no commercial value.(3)Requiring high energy and manual efforts.(4)Heavy pollutants are generated during the process. Keeping these cardinal issues under consideration, a facile route to convert waste plastics into high-performance fuel oil using high temperature pyrolysis is discussed in this paper. Fuel oil generated by our method was found to have all the characteristics to be used as fuel oil in factories. Since waste plastics like polypropylene (PP) contain 85% the carbon and rest is hydrogen, this makes them extremely suitable for feedstock recycling with the production of valuable hydrocarbon products. This fact can be explained with the difference in the activation energy of two polymers. PP requires lower activation energy to break the C£¿H bond than polyethylene (PE) because carbon chain of PP polymer contains tertiary carbon atoms which have considerably lower resistance against degradation [3]. There are several products obtained from the catalytic pyrolysis of PP which are carbon nano-materials (CNMs) of
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jfu/2014/289380/