Garbage wells and two scales 2001-2002

Garbage wells and two scales 2001-2002

Around 2002, the destination of plastics was being weighed on two scales. In Europe, the actual results shown by Germany's DSD showed that material recycling of containers and packaging was 51 percent and chemical recycling was 49 percent in FY2001, with the former gaining the upper hand for the first time in the statistics. This is the result of the system and cost optimization. In Japan, on the other hand, oil processing facilities supported by the system have been established, and the number of oil processing facilities under the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law reached 25 in FY2002. The Sapporo site was led by the Toshiba Group, Mitsui & Co.

In Kitakyushu Eco-Town, Koya Kosan has built a waste plastic oil processing plant in conjunction with organic solvent recycling, with a capacity of approximately 1,000 tons per year. The plant is designed to use the produced oil as distillation fuel in-house and sell the surplus to external customers, thereby optimizing the on-site flow by linking the oil conversion to peripheral processes instead of completing the oil conversion independently.

Local technologies are also sprouting. Hokkaido Ecosys, a cooperative in Obihiro, conducted research on oil conversion technology that thermally decomposes polyethylene using natural zeolite produced in Hokkaido as a catalyst, aiming to improve yield and oil quality by designing a catalyst that makes use of local resources.

In the context of related technologies, equipment that crushes mixed resin in pretreatment and pyrolyzes it using reverse thermal gradients and inclined tubes had entered the diffusion stage, making it possible to obtain product oil equivalent to A fuel oil. The portion that cannot be removed by oil conversion is turned into material, and the product oil is valorized as in-house fuel or sold externally. In other words, the concept is a hybrid operation that combines material and chemical.

In short, it was a time when the European trend of "maximizing materials first" and the Japanese solution of "on-site optimization of the oil conversion module" were advancing in a two-pronged manner. Chemicals may not play the leading role, but they live only when they are connected to heat demand and solvent processes by receiving highly polluted and mixed flows. The Sapporo and Kitakyushu cases demonstrated this operational knowledge and showed a realistic approach to connecting distribution, equipment, and fuel destination with a single pipe.