From Waste to Industrial Raw Materials
KIT Demonstrates Technologies for Circular Economy at Pilot Scale
With rising energy costs, dwindling resources, and growing volumes of trash, humanity has a waste problem. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have created a new development platform for a more sustainable circular economy: the Carbon Cycle Lab (CCLab). Their research includes a project for chemical recycling of plastic waste, which is being shifted to pilot scale. The project’s aim is to include previously non-recyclable waste in material cycles.
Global plastic production has increased significantly over the past 70 years, reaching about 414 million tonnes in 2023. However, the recycling rate is only 10 percent. Since energy costs are expected to continue rising while resources become scarcer, industrial transformation must include higher recycling rates. KIT is contributing to efforts to achieve higher rates with its new research platform, the Carbon Cycle Lab (CCLab). With their bioliq® project, KIT researchers had already developed a complete recycling process for biological residues. The CCLab now extends their work to the chemical recycling of plastic waste. “For a carbon-neutral circular economy, we need to return waste from industry, households, agriculture, and forestry to our material cycles, and we need to use renewable energy to do so,” said Professor Dieter Stapf, who heads KIT’s Institute for Technical Chemistry. A closed carbon cycle is better for the environment and conserves scarce resources, according to Stapf. “In our country, energy and resources are scarce and expensive,” he added. “In the future, our waste will be a raw material. Recycling it is efficient and economical and will help us reduce our dependency on fossil fuel imports, which has become especially urgent with the crisis in Ukraine."
The Carbon Cycle Lab Benefits from bioliq® Insights
KIT is already conducting extensive research on the use of biogenic residues and renewable resources to produce sustainable chemicals and fuels. In the bioliq® project, which was completed late last year, KIT scientists and their partners set up the first pilot plant capable of producing tonnes of gasoline from straw. “Much of what we have learned from bioliq® is going into CCLab,” said Professor Frederik Scheiff, head of the Fuel Technology Division at KIT’s Engler-Bunte Institute. “In the last operating campaign, we demonstrated a potential way forward by converting plastic pyrolysis oils to chemical raw materials for the first time. That was something nobody else had really done yet,” Scheiff said. “We’ve learned how to develop and scale such technologies, and we’ve showed that they can also be used to convert complex and previously non-recyclable plastic waste into chemical raw materials.”
Exploiting Previously Non-recyclable Waste
The new CCLab research platform is a logical continuation of the methods begun with bioliq® for recycling waste materials. High-quality recycling is impossible for most plastic products today because of their chemical composition and impurities. “We’re working in the CCLab on recycling materials that are still being burned or buried today, which causes greenhouse gas emissions,” Stapf said. Ultimately, the new technologies developed at KIT will enable the synthesis of new plastics from plastic waste without using oil or natural gas, and will separate or destroy the harmful substances and impurities in the waste. The resulting products will then undergo further processing to create raw materials for the production of new plastics. With the CCLab, the researchers aim to demonstrate the entire value chain. “The Carbon Cycle Lab is an important development platform for the sustainable circular economy. We’re shifting new technologies from research at KIT and in the Helmholtz Association to pilot scale,” Stapf said.
High Demand for Recycling
Such technologies are urgently needed; the EU’s recycling targets call for an additional 10 million tonnes of plastics to be recycled annually in Europe by 2035. For Germany, which produces a third of Europe’s plastics, that would mean another 2 to 3 million tonnes per year. “With the European Green Deal, the European Union plans to transition to a resource-efficient, carbon-neutral, and competitive economy. The CCLab is providing important insights into how that can work at an industrial scale,” Stapf said.
At KIT, the Institute of Catalysis Research and Technology, the Engler-Bunte Institute, and the Institute for Technical Chemistry are involved in the CCLab. In addition, there are technology transfer partnerships with numerous industrial companies. Since CCLab is part of the Helmholtz Association, it is funded by the German government.
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