Circular aspirations
A circular economy for plastic would also slash the volume of new petrochemical feedstock needed to be extracted for its production. Another huge environmental bonus, it makes sense financially too: $80–120 billion of plastic packaging material is lost from the global economy each year after just one use, according to the 2016 Ellen MacArthur Foundation report.
Plum PCP Converter
Advanced Upcycling technology to provide a globally sustainable solution to end-of-life waste plastics
Plum's patented PCP convertor uses internal heating core
The Value of Waste Plastics
Conversion of waste plastics to fuels by pyrolysis has been touted as a cost-effective way of avoiding the cost of landfilling as well as producing useful output streams of transportation fuels such as road diesel.
An emerging route that can add value to waste plastics is depolymerisation into monomers which are the 'building blocks' for the manufacture of new plastics. For example, polystyrene waste packaging can be thermally converted to styrene monomer with 100% recovery (i.e. complete conversion). Styrene monomers have a high economic value compared with diesel and so depolymerisation by pyrolysis is a viable and lucrative value-added recovery route for waste plastics such as PS and EPS.
Upcycling Process
1.
Advanced recycling technologies complement traditional recycling by converting post-consumer plastics into valuable products
2.
If all the post-consumer plastics in municpal solid waste were converted to fuel instead of landfilled, these plastics could power up to 9 million cars per year
3.
Advanced recycling technologies offer the opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60%-70% over new forms of crude oil extraction
Naphtha - the Panacea of Chemical Recycling Technology
Plum's PCP upcycling technology decomposes waste plastics back into naphtha, or similar hydrocarbon mixtures. These are then re-processed back into new plastics using existing infrastructure.
Pyrolysis is the dominant plastic decomposition method, where the carbon–carbon bonds in polymer backbones are broken by heating them up in an oxygen-free atmosphere. Low or high pressure is also often used to facilitate bond breakage.
Plum's Plant is designed to process around 20 tonnes per day of post-consumer waste plastics. Plastic feedstock including polystyrene, polyethelenes, and polypropylene are our target feedstock as they are not econmically viable to recycle mechanically, and are typically what ends up in landfill.
Plum's process uses a patented low-temperature heating reactor that causes the polymer molecules to break down. The vapour is then able to be condensed into naptha-like component that can be used to replace feedstock for virgin naphtha, currenlty being fed by crude oil, which is then used in primary plastic production.