Recycle of Thermoplastic Wastes Using MCM-41 Catalyst

In today‟s modern life, recycle of materials has become among the greatest concern of scientist, researchers and environmental activist with a huge demand towards sustainable development and green technology. Plastic wastes significantly are rising and a lot of alternatives were being conducted and developed just for the sake of reducing this growing problem. Meanwhile, a new challenge has come to recycle variety types of plastic. Catalytic pyrolysis is a vital process to recycle polymer wastes in this particular project and silently it has become a matured and popular process that widely used to recycle various types of plastic wastes and the outcomes of this method are rather useful and may potentially become the solution to this matter which it has the tremendous capability to generate valuable oils and gases for petrochemical feedstock. With an assist from the Mobil Catalytic Material Number 41 (MCM-41), this plastic degradation method provides such a broad cases to be analyzed where the main objectives are to study the effect of the MCM-41 catalyst as well as to determine the effect of diverse ratio of plastic waste (HDPE and PP) as the input. In the procedure, the polymer cracking occurred via a batch process consist of the laboratory equipment where the mixture of the plastic and catalyst was heated at approximately 350oC at atmospheric pressure of 1 atm with nitrogen as the inert gas. Through this activity, the characteristic of the catalyst also has been studied in order to find out how important the catalyst as one of the key element that effecting the outcome. At the end of the experiment, the composition of the liquid as the target product formed after the reaction will be analyzed via GC, GC-MS and FTIR analyzer. As a result, the catalyst has achieved a great success of increasing the yield of liquid compared to non-catalytic pyrolysis, whereas, the vary polymer ratio offers a solution that proved plastic wastes can be recycled without the need of sorting them into their on specific type.