Review of Conversion Technologies of Waste Polystyrene into useful Products

Abstract

Polystyrene usage has risen significantly in recent years as a result of its wide variety of applications. The persistent consumer demand for polystyrene resulted in the accumulation of polystyrene waste in landfills, inducing environmental degradation. Since polystyrene is a petroleum-derived material, the increasing demand for it resulted in the depletion of petroleum, a non-renewable energy source. Research teams from all over the world have invented many methods for dealing with polystyrene waste, including recycling and energy regeneration. However, there are drawbacks to recycling methods, such as the fact that they need a lot of manpower in the separating procedure and pollute the water, reducing the process's sustainability. Because of these flaws, the experimenters have cantered their efforts on the energy harvesting approach. As petroleum is the primary component of polystyrene, the pyrolysis process for recovering fuel oil from polystyrene is an useful technology because the retrieved oil has a higher calorific value than commercially available gasoline. The current paper discusses polystyrene conversion technologies as well as the pyrolysis techniques for polystyrene, which generates end products such as oil, gas, and char. The impact of different processing parameters on the product yield has been addressed using more advanced techniques of conducting pyrolysis with a solvent.