engleski

European Legislation and Thermochemical Recovery of Plastic Waste – Energy Recovery from the Sustainable Economy Development Point of View

Only recently the EU started to address the problem of plastic waste more directly through its legislation, but also as a part of larger sustainability-oriented plans and legislation frameworks. In all of this, the focus was put on material recovery, and regarding energy recovery legislation is not elaborate enough because of which it classifies all thermochemical conversion technologies in the same category regardless of their final products. Therefore, this research analysed environmental, resource and energy intensity of energy recovery technologies for plastic waste to review the existing legislative technology classification for thermochemical waste recovery technologies. To give appropriate results, EU legislation on sustainable development was reviewed and legislatively most important impact categories were used, as well as those identified by previous research, as the most suitable for waste management and recovery system analysis. Results show that gasification with ethanol production and pyrolysis technologies for treatment of plastic waste show the best results compared to other analysed solutions by all analysed indicators, except for acidification where pyrolysis shows the worst results. Thus, it can be concluded that gasification and pyrolysis technologies can lead to better environmental impacts when compared with plastic waste incineration and help the EU to reach sustainable development goals. Thus, environmental impacts are largely dependent on the final products and sustainability of products it replaces on the market. Results of this analysis provide an overview of the environmental sustainability of the mixed plastic waste recovery, based on which current views on individual thermochemical recovery technologies may be re-examined.

Sustainable development ; life cycle assessment ; cumulative energy demand ; legislation overview ; legislation changes

nije evidentirano