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Hydrogen production from plastic waste processing: A review
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This review pulls together existing research on turning plastic waste into clean-burning hydrogen fuel instead of letting it pile up in landfills or oceans (where it can break down into microplastics that end up in our water, food, and bodies). Scientists are testing several methods, like heating plastic without oxygen (pyrolysis) combined with steam or special catalysts, and some approaches already work at pilot scale, though they're not yet cheap or efficient enough for widespread use. The bigger picture: if perfected, this technology could offer a win-win, reducing plastic pollution while producing low-carbon energy.
Plastic waste is both a critical pollution problem and a promising resource for low-carbon hydrogen. This review summarizes thermochemical and emerging routes for H 2 production from plastic waste, focusing on pyrolysis-integrated methods, i.e., pyrolysis catalytic steam reforming (PCSR), pyrolysis catalytic dry reforming (PCDR), pyrolysis catalytic oxidative steam reforming (PCOSR), pyrolysis plasma catalytic reforming (PPCR), and microwave-assisted pyrolysis (MAP), alongside photo-reforming (PR), electro-reforming (ER), and flash Joule heating (FJH). The different alternatives were compared in terms of H 2 yields, gas compositions, and the influence of operating variables such as temperature, catalysts, and feed characteristics. Moreover, the subsequent H 2 purification via pressure swing adsorption (PSA) and membranes is also assessed. Among reported systems, PCSR and PCDR show the highest and most scalable H 2 production, with pilot-scale demonstrations, while PR and ER provide high-purity H 2 under mild conditions but remain limited in throughput. Remaining challenges include catalyst deactivation, energy and carbon efficiency, process integration, and techno-economic feasibility, which must be addressed to enable large-scale deployment of plastic-to-hydrogen technologies within a circular H 2 economy.
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Researchers reviewed thermochemical technologies — such as pyrolysis and gasification — that can convert plastic waste into usable fuels, offering a promising approach to reducing the massive volumes of non-biodegradable plastic that currently accumulate in the environment as microplastics.
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