Waste to Energy: Catalytic Gasification of Household Recyclables

As landfills approach capacity and take up valuable land space, metropolitan areas have realized the need for waste disposal alternatives. Thus, there has been a widespread use of waste incinerators. Although modern incineration technology has improved efficiency, there is an increasing need in formulating “greener” alternatives to incinerators.

Gasification converts organic and carbonaceous materials into a combination of gaseous products known as “syngas,” or synthetic gas. This process greatly reduces hazardous emissions. The syngas produced by gasifiers has a wide range of uses, including their conversion into diesel, ethanol, methane, methanol and other synthetic fuels.

A low temperature gasification has been investigated in our laboratory. Wet Thermal Catalytic Oxidation of long-chain polymers. WTCO has shown great potential to gasify different model polymers. Low-temperature gasification promoted by Ru and Pt-Based catalysts has been characterized. Our group is now focusing on gasification studies of high-fidelity simulants and scale-up for continuous processing.

In this research we examine a conceptual design of Low-Temperature Wet Thermal Catalytic Oxidation (WTCO) promoted by Ru-based and Pt-based catalysts as a gasification technology to process household recyclables.