Abstract: In 2019, nearly 370 million tonnes of waste plastic were generated, an amount that has been steadily increasing over the years. Here we assess hydrogen production from waste polyethylene in the context of a circular economy of plastics. Based on the gasification of polyethylene waste (wPG), we performed a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study following the ReCiPe method. Our results show that the wPG process coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS) performs very well environmentally relative to other H2 production routes, outperforming steam methane reforming (SMR) with and without CCS and biomass gasification (BG) in the three endpoint impact categories.

Authorship

Download reference