Gravity separation and chemical imaging based tecniques for plastic packaging final waste recovery

Plastic polymers are characterized by a high calorific value and the post-consumer plastic waste can be 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 the disposal of waste, for the recovery of energy 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 thus investigated to characterize and separate post-consumer plastic packaging waste in order to reach the previous mentioned goal, that is: gravity separation (i.e. Reflux Classifier), FT-IR spectroscopy, HyperSpectral NIR Imaging based techniques and calorimetric test. The study demonstrated as the proposed separation technique and the HyperSpectral NIR Imaging approach applied for the removal of the PVC fraction from plastic waste and the further quality control of the resulting products, can be profitably utilised to set up analytical/control strategies finalized to obtain a low content of PVC in the final Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF).