Reciclado de residuos plásticos y aceites residuales en la producción de coque

Abstract

The environmental impact due to waste production, both domestic and industrial, has become a maximum priority of environmental policies in developed countries. Even though waste management has undergone a significant evolution in the last decades, the waste recovery continues being of great importance to achieve sustainable development and compatible with the environmental protection; so it has been necessary to allocate time and resources to develop processes to ensure that plastic recycling is an economically profitable process, and in this way, it helps to decrease the amount of residues designated to landfill disposal. As a result of recent European legislation for management and recovery of plastic wastes from packaging, is being promoted the development of new processes of mechanical and chemical recycling and energy recovery, in order to achieve the recycling objectives. Other type of wastes which gives good reasons for special attention are used oils, so common in our daily lives, and used in the operation of industrial machinery, automotive vehicles or transmission hydraulic systems, to mention some of the most significant examples. The loss of their properties after the continued use is unfortunately accompanied by the generation of residual oils, therefore, it is necessary to establish measures to minimize as much as possible the production of these hazardous wastes and promote that the generated wastes are managed by the alternatives which ensure environmental protection and health of people. The development of new recycling ways to allow the recovery of both types of residues is very important in order to keep as many options open, especially when an existing industrial process can be used and it is not necessary any operational variation made by the industry. In this sense, integrated steel plants can be considered as an option for those wastes with technical limitations for conventional recycling. The combination of the blast furnace route and coke plant in the steel industry, provide a way to expand feedstock recycling with economic, social and environmental benefits. In the present work we have studied the viability of this action via, the cocarbonization of the wastes with coal for the production of coke, which feeds the blast furnace to produce iron which subsequently will be transformed into steel. To achieve this general objective, the specific objectives focus on the study of the influence on the coking properties of an individual coal and three coal blends used by the industry for blast-furnace coke production, of the six more common thermoplastics in the domestic wastes (LOPE, HOPE, PP, PS, PET and PVC), and six mixtures of them, covering a wide range of compositions. Also, nine lube-oils were used. Oils have paraffin nature except one of them which is a synthetic oil containing organic esters. Two oils mixtures were prepared based on their thermal behaviour and as reference materials a coal-tar and a coaltar pitch were used.