Views: 6 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2025-03-27 Origin: Site
Every year, the total amount of waste plastic generated globally exceeds 400 million tons. These plastic wastes are landfilled, incinerated, or released into the natural environment, causing severe soil pollution, marine ecological crises, and climate change issues. How to efficiently manage waste plastic and extract its resource value has become a core challenge in global environmental protection. Among various solutions, waste plastic-to-fuel pyrolysis technology stands out for its unique environmental benefits and economic value, emerging as a key driver in advancing the circular economy.
Landfilling and Incineration: Although low-cost and simple to operate, these methods occupy significant land resources. Plastic degradation takes centuries, during which toxic substances can leach into groundwater, posing threats to human health. Additionally, these processes release hazardous substances such as dioxins and heavy metals, while their high carbon emissions exacerbate global warming.
Physical Recycling: This typically refers to mechanical processes like cleaning, shredding, and melting to reprocess waste plastics into pellets or products. However, this approach is only viable for clean, single-material plastics (e.g., PET bottles) and remains ineffective for mixed or contaminated plastics. Globally, only about 9% of waste plastics are recycled through physical methods, with the majority ultimately discarded as waste.
Chemical Recycling: Breaking through the limitations of "low-value plastics," chemical recycling decomposes plastics into small molecular raw materials through chemical reactions, enabling the production of new plastics or fuels. Key technologies in chemical recycling include pyrolysis, catalytic cracking, hydrolysis, alcoholysis, and gasification. Among these, hydrolysis and alcoholysis are only applicable to specific types of plastic waste. For complex mixed plastics, particularly "low-value waste plastics," pyrolysis stands out with unique advantages. It can process mixed or even contaminated plastic products, achieving perfect closed-loop resource utilization. With its broad adaptability to diverse feedstocks and high resource conversion efficiency, pyrolysis has become the "game-changing solution" to plastic waste, effectively transforming urban plastic waste into "urban oil fields." Take Niutech, a leader in the pyrolysis sector, as an example. Specializing in the R&D and production of pyrolysis technology and equipment, Niutech has implemented large-scale, continuous plastic pyrolysis systems in multiple countries and regions. These systems process tens of thousands of tons of plastic waste annually, converting diverse waste plastics into oil products that are integrated into the petrochemical supply chain. Through these innovations, Niutech has successfully established numerous "urban oil fields" worldwide.
The Denmark project processes 30,000 tons of waste plastic annually, with the produced pyrolysis oil supplied to local refineries, equivalent to reducing petroleum consumption by approximately 12,000 barrels per year.
The Thailand pyrolysis project converts plastic waste into pyrolysis oil, which is further processed into gasoline and diesel to power vehicles, substantially lowering energy costs.
With advancing technologies and the global decarbonization drive, pyrolysis refining is projected to process 10%-15% of global plastic waste within the next decade, curbing carbon emissions while unlocking a 100-billion-dollar green circular economy market.
