Liquid Fuel From Plastic Waste

With the growing requirements of urbanization and its consequence on the rise in population, consumption of plastics increases with the passes of the time. Plastic is used widely due to having the properties like low cost, easy processable and light weight. Dumping of plastic waste known as “white pollution” is becoming more and more severe. Increased plastic waste volume directly links to the adverse effects caused on environment by means of greenhouse gases emissions that happens at every stage of manufacturing, among which extraction, transportation raw materials, manufacturing, disposed plastic’s treatment, etc., can be considered as an integral part of plastic’s life cycle. This article reports about the scenario of plastic and the different technologies to convert waste plastic into usable energy. Landfill requires large area to sink the waste, incineration – blast furnace for plastic waste emits toxic gases and the production cost is high. Recycling of waste plastics is a conventional strategy to convert into usable products. Widely used strategies are thermal degradation and catalytic cracking, discussed in details as well as other methods includes gasification, hydrocracking, chemical depolymerization and photodegradation. Thus, an effort was made to highlight the concept of conversion of waste plastic as an alternative source of fuel.