Forecasting waste compositions: A case study on plastic waste of electronic display housings

Abstract

Because of the rapid succession of technological developments, the architecture and material composition of many products used in daily life have drastically changed over the last decades. As a result, well-adjusted recycling technologies need to be developed and installed to cope with these evolutions. This is essential to guarantee continued access to materials and to reduce the ecological impact of our material consumption. However, limited information is currently available on the material composition of arising waste streams and even less on how these waste streams will evolve. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology to forecast trends in the material composition of waste streams. To demonstrate the applicability and value of the proposed methodology, it is applied to forecast the evolution of plastic housing waste from flat panel display (FPD) TVs, FPD monitors, cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs and CRT monitors. The results of the presented forecasts indicate that a wide variety of plastic types and additives, such as flame retardants, are found in housings of similar products. The presented case study demonstrates that the proposed methodology allows the identification of trends in the evolution of the material composition of waste streams. In addition, it is demonstrated that the recycling sector will need to adapt its processes to deal with the increasing complexity of plastics of end-of-life electronic displays while respecting relevant directives.

Ease of disassembly of products to support circular economy strategies

“…The selected product category is Flat Panel Displays (FPD), which was identified in previous research as a category that benefits from a disassembly based process ( Peeters et al, 2014 , Alonso Movilla et al, 2016 , Peeters et al, 2013 , Peeters et al, 2015c ). Salhofer et al estimate that the total mass of FPDs reaching EoL will account for 569,000 t in EU 25 by 2018, which equals 1.2 kg per capita per·year ( Salhofer et al, 2011 ).…”

Degradation of Styrenic Plastics During Recycling: Impact of Reprocessing Photodegraded Material on Aspect and Mechanical Properties

“…Nowadays, the main WEEP are styrenics: namely high impact polystyrene (HIPS) and acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) and their respective blends with PPE (polyphenylene ether) and PC (polycarbonate) [25][26][27]. HIPS and ABS represent together 55 w% of WEEP according to Maris et al [25], and 80 w% according to Stenvall et al [28].…”

MIR spectral characterization of plastic to enable discrimination in an industrial recycling context: II. Specific case of polyolefins

“…However, they are limited, respectively by overlapping densities and large use of carbon black as a colorant, especially in Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and plastics from End of Life Vehicles (ELV). Styrenics will tend to overlap more and more because of the increasing use of blends (mainly ABS-PC, ABS-PMMA, HIPS-PPE) (Peeters et al, 2015). Unloaded polyolefins are generally retrieved thanks to water sink-float separation.…”