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Upcycling of Plastic Waste
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This study reviews emerging upcycling technologies for plastic waste — including pyrolysis, gasification, solvolysis, and chemo-biotechnological conversion — that transform discarded plastics into value-added products such as graphene, biofuels, biodegradable polymers, and battery materials, offering more sustainable alternatives to conventional recycling and landfilling.
Annual global production of plastics has reached 368 million metric tonnes, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the production of plastic waste (PW) and associated environmental problems. The existing conventional techniques of PW management, including mechanical recycling, incineration and landfilling, cannot be considered as sustainable solutions owing to several technoeconomic and environmental infeasibilities. Upcycling refers to the valorization of waste material into value-added goods with potentially higher value than its raw feed. Plastic waste upcycling has received a lot of attention recently as a potentially effective way to achieve economic legitimacy by turning PW into goods of additional value. The current techniques can be majorly divided into thermal upcycling, and chemical upcycling, chemo-biotechnological upcycling techniques. Thermal upcycling includes carbonization, pyrolysis, and gasification technologies to recover by-products, including solid char, liquid oil and syngas, which are considered to be energy dense or can be further processed to products for use in energy and environmental applications. Chemical upcycling techniques majorly include solvolysis, hydrogenolysis, and photocatalysis for the recovery of monomers and several organo-chemicals of value. A chemo-biotechnological approach is majorly used to produce biodegradable polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) – a type of bioplastic – which are widely used in the fields of biotechnology, packaging and other industrial applications. These technologies help in the recovery of value-added products like graphene sheets, porous carbon compounds, carbon nano particles, carbon dots, activated carbon, biofuels, biodegradable polymers, three-dimensional printing filaments, acids, detergents, plasticizers and different types of batteries. However, the main obstacle in achieving commercial success for valorization of PW into new by-products of value is achieving economic viability where further research must be focused upon. So, valorization of plastics through several upcycling techniques following the principles of circular economy could be a solution for sustainable waste management.
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