title: Gravity packaging final waste recovery based on gravity separation and chemical imaging control.
abstract: Plastic polymers are characterized by a high calorific value. Post-consumer plastic waste can be thus considered, in many cases, as a typical secondary solid fuels according to the European Commission directive on End of Waste (EoW). In Europe the practice of incineration is considered one of the solutions for waste disposal waste, for energy recovery and, as a consequence, for the reduction of waste sent to landfill. A full characterization of these products represents the first step to profitably and correctly utilize them. Several techniques have been investigated in this paper in order to separate and characterize post-consumer plastic packaging waste fulfilling the previous goals, that is: gravity separation (i.e. Reflux Classifier), FT-IR spectroscopy, NIR HyperSpectralImaging (HSI) based techniques and calorimetric test. The study demonstrated as the proposed separation technique and the HyperSpectral NIR Imaging approach allow to separate and recognize the different polymers (i.e. PolyVinyl Chloride (PVC), PolyStyrene (PS), PolyEthylene (PE), PoliEtilene Tereftalato (PET), PolyPropylene (PP)) in order to maximize the removal of the PVC fraction from plastic waste and to perform the full quality control of the resulting products, can be profitably utilized to set up analytical/control strategies finalized to obtain a low content of PVC in the final Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF), thus enhancing SRF quality, increasing its value and reducing the "final waste".
authors.affiliation: DICMA, Department of Chemical Engineering, Materials and Environment, Sapienza - University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: giuseppe.bonifazi@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Bonifazi
authors.affiliation: DICMA, Department of Chemical Engineering, Materials and Environment, Sapienza - University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: silvia.serranti@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Silvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Serranti
authors.affiliation: DICMA, Department of Chemical Engineering, Materials and Environment, Sapienza - University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: fabio.potenza@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Potenza
authors.affiliation: DICMA, Department of Chemical Engineering, Materials and Environment, Sapienza - University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: valentina.luciani@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Luciani
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CN Delft, The Netherlands. Electronic address: f.dimaio@tudelft.nl.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Di Maio
mesh_terms: D002151:Calorimetry; D006112:Gravitation; D011143:Polyvinyl Chloride / Q000032:analysis*; D019064:Product Packaging; D059027:Recycling / Q000379:methods*; D012037:Refuse Disposal; D062611:Solid Waste / Q000032:analysis*; D017550:Spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared; D018505:Waste Management / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D062611:Solid Waste; D011143:Polyvinyl Chloride
keywords: End-of-life; Hyperspectral imaging; Post-consumer plastic packaging; Quality control; Solid recovered fuel