In this study, the amount of plastic waste produced in Korea and the state of its treatment are analyzed. In addition, trends in sales prices of recyclable resources are identified and used as basic research data in countermeasures for the rejection of recyclable waste collection companies. According to the state of waste generation and disposal nationwide in 2017, the amount of plastic waste generated increased by 7.2% annually over the five-year period starting in 2012, reaching 7.1 million tons in 2016. In the case of composition ratio, 36.7% of household wastes occupy. In the case of the plastic recycling market, the demand for recycled waste plastics and plastics decreased due to sluggish domestic and overseas economies since 2015, and the prices of synthetic resins such as PE, PP, and PS of pellets dropped by about 20%. As for the selling prices of recyclable resources in apartment houses in March 2017, the average selling price including plastics is 1071 won/ month·generation. When plastic was excluded it was 941 won/month·generation, which amounts to about a 130 won/month·generation difference. The average selling price of recyclable resources over the period of March- May 2018 is about 697 won/month·generation. In March 2017, it was found to decrease by about 26% of the sale price.
The purpose of this study is to provide environmentally sound management on the import of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEEs) by investigating the hazardous elements, and the hazardous characteristics thereof, in this waste, and by reviewing the extant criteria causing them to exhibit an Annex III characteristic on Basel Convention. The investigation of imported WEEEs found that the importing volume has gradually increased since 2009 and 95.9% of imported WEEEs, which are mainly classified as Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and its scrap in 2015, is designated as restriction wastes. Also, it is important to designate and unify the hazardous element list and the characteristics of WEEEs because the analytical items and their test methods submitted in the test report are designated differently for each local authority. We confirmed that three kinds of criteria are applied to determine whether the target wastes are hazardous or not: the content criteria for 8 kinds of elements on import bans of wastes, the content criteria for 8 kinds of elements sufficient for allowing wastes to be imported, and the leaching criteria for 13 kinds of elements to classified as a specified waste. Among them, five elements (hexavalent chromium, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury) are managed for the WEEEs in Korea. Therefore, it is necessary to catalog the total contents of hazardous chemicals caused by hazardous characteristics of other elements (beryllium, antimony, etc.), as can happen to WEEEs.
We investigated the effects of leaching concentration (0.1 ~ 1.0 M) and time (1 ~ 120 min) on the phosphorus recovery from ash and dried sewage sludge produced by titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4) flocculation by acidic (H2SO4 and HCl) or alkaline (KOH and NaOH) leaching. The extraction efficiencies of dried sludge were 2.7 ~ 12.6% for H2SO4, 2.5 ~ 10.5% for HCl, 3.6 ~ 9.6% for KOH, and 7.1 ~ 9.9% for NaOH with 1 M, and the maximum efficiency was obtained within 45 min. The maximum %P extracted of sludge ash was 83.1 for H2SO4, 80.2 for HCl, 51.2 for KOH, and 51.2 for NaOH with 1 M, obtained within 45 min. The rate constants (min−1) for the leaching of P from sludge ash were found to be 1.199 for H2SO4, 1.026 for HCl, 0.264 for KOH, and 0.622 for NaOH. The P leaching increased with the increase in leaching concentration, and the maximum leaching for ash was obtained within 0.3 M, regardless of acidic or alkaline leaching. The overall results indicate that the ash of TiCl4 flocculated sewage sludge can be treated with H2SO4 to efficiently recover P.
In this study, the low-temperature vacuum swing adsorption (low temp. VSA) process was applied to the activated carbon adsorption tower for treatment of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to extend the replacement period of the adsorbent and to solve the difficulties of operation management. A practical application study was performed based on continuous operation in the field. The VSA process removes the adsorbate by reducing the pressure at a relatively low temperature (90℃ or less) to compensate for the disadvantages of the conventional thermal swing adsorption (TSA) process. A pilot scale VSA process with a size of 30 m and 2 min−1 was applied to the small scale painting plant, which is the main source of VOCs, and subject to 100 adsorption/desorption cycles. After the sampling of activated carbon every 20 cycles, the specific surface area and derivative thermogravimetric analysis (DTA) analysis were investigated to analyze the change of activated carbon characteristics with increasing cycles. During 100 continuous cycles, toluene gas was arbitrarily supplied to the pilot VSA process to compare toluene adsorption capacity with respect to raw activated carbon. More than 99% of the VOCs emitted from the paint plant were adsorbed and removed during the operation of the VSA process. The increase in cycle did not affect the specific surface area and micropores of activated carbon. However, the physical adsorption amount of the non-desorbed adsorbate remaining in the micropores tends to increase; therefore, it is considered that the effective adsorption amount decreases as the number of regeneration increases. As a result of the toluene adsorption test of the pilot plant after 100 consecutive cycles, 91% removal efficiency relative to the raw activated carbon was maintained. Thus, stable application of low-temperature VSA equipment is feasible in field application.
The treatment of sewage sludge using hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) can be an attractive alternative to conventional sludge disposal, but it should be accompanied by a drying process that uses Refuse-derived Fuel (RDF). However, the largest proportion of the energy demand in sludge-drying techniques is for heat sources, which has led to increased operation and maintenance costs. Recovering residual heat to apply to sludge drying significantly reduces both the operating cost and the greenhouse gas emissions. Suitable integration can be realized between drying technology and waste-to-energy (WtE) plants through the recovery of waste heat in WtE conversion as a heat source for sludge drying. This present paper investigates the indirect disk drying performance of the hydrothermal carbonization of sewage sludge using a low-temperature heat source in a laboratory and proposes an integration process with the drying technology of hydrothermal carbonization using waste heat. This paper concludes with experimental results that indirect disk drying technology can be applied in waste-heat recovery systems.
In this study, to cope with the renewable portfolio standard system, a thermochemical process was applied to coffee residues. After the basic thermal characteristics analysis, it was judged that the gasification process could be applied because the volatile matter in coffee residues was high. The temperature and equivalent air ratio were set by using the data and the gasification characteristics with varying equivalent ratios were evaluated. Also, the experiments were conducted in a downdraft fixed bed reactor which was easy to operate and generates less tar. The best experimental results at equivalent ratio of 0.3 were obtained with syngas composition, lower heating value of product gas, gas yield, and tar yield of 16.94%, 1,410 kcal/Nm3, 2.04 Nm3/kg and 33.33 mg/L respectively. Also, cold gas efficiency and carbon conversion rate as the most important indicators of gasifier performance were 63.83% and 88.59% respectively. Comparing the gasification characteristics with sawdust in the same reactor, the value of coffee residue was higher in the cold gas efficiency but the amount of tar was higher. However, we could apply the gasification technology to coffee residues if we carried out studies to improve the gasification efficiency and to reduce the amount of tar. Furthermore, we take into consideration the fact that the supply of coffee residues was insufficient to use as a single feedstock and the consequent necessity to study the means of using it with other available fuel materials.
This study examined the potentials for greenhouse gas reduction by material recovery and energy recovery from municipal solid waste between 2017 and 2026 in Daejeon Metropolitan City (DMC), which is trying to establish a material-cycle society by constructing a waste-to-energy town by 2018. The town consists of energy recovery facilities such as a mechanical treatment facility for fluff-type solid refuse fuel (SRF) with a power generation plant and anaerobic digestion of food waste for biogas recovery. Such recycling and waste-to-energy facilities will not only reduce GHGs, but will also substitute raw materials for energy consumption. The emissions and reduction rate of GHGs from MSW management options were calculated by the IPCC guideline and EU Prognos method. This study found that in DMC, the decrease of the amount of MSW landfilled and the increase of recycling and waste-to-energy flow reduced GHGs emissions from 167,332 tonCO2 eq/yr in 2017 to 123,123 tonCO2 eq/yr in 2026. Material recycling had the highest rate of GHG reduction (-228,561 tonCO2 eq/yr in 2026), followed by the solid refuse fuels (-29,146 tonCO2 eq/yr in 2026) and biogas treatment of food waste (-3,421 tonCO2 eq/yr in 2026). This study also shows that net GHG emission was found to be -30,505 tonCO2 eq in 2017 and -105,428 tonCO2 eq, indicating a great and positive impact on future CO2 emission. Improved MSW management with increased recycling and energy recovery of material waste streams can positively contribute to GHGs reduction and energy savings. The results of this study would help waste management decision-makers clarify the effectiveness of recycling MSW, and their corresponding energy recovery potentials, as well as to understand GHG reduction by the conversion.
Removal of siloxane compounds is very important to protecting the biogas energy conversion system from decreased efficiency and parts damage. Among various siloxane removal technologies, adsorption towers are mostly used for performance and ease of operation. However, due to the difficulty of measuring the concentration of siloxane compounds in the gas stream and the complicated matrix of siloxane compounds, adsorption characteristics are not well known. In this study, the adsorption characteristics for multi siloxane components are experimentally studied. Four siloxane components are vaporized in the nitrogen stream supplied continuously to a lab-scale adsorption tank with commercially available silica gel or activated carbon and an FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) analyzer was used for the online siloxane analysis to find out the adsorption characteristics. While a mixture of L2, L5, D4 and D5 adsorption capacity of silica gel and activated carbon are similar -11.13 and 11.56wt% respectively-adsorption characteristics of each adsorbent was well distinguished in terms of breakthrough behavior. Silica gel shows sequential breakthrough for each siloxane compound and a more noticeable unique time range for Rc > 1, while relatively simultaneous breakthrough was shown for activated carbon adsorbents.
Polluting gases emitted from industrial sites take compound forms consisting of gaseous and particulate phases. Localization of PTFE membrane filters has thus been initiated to remove particulate materials and mercury, which is a heavy and hazardous metallic element. More specifically, a PTFE membrane filter was fabricated by thermal laminating technology to vary porosity on the filter surface for removal of particulate materials thereon. Optimized equi-biaxial stretching ratio control enables minimization of large-size pore formation with an average pore size of 0.58 μm and improved air permeability of 8.03 cm3/cm2/sec. Various adsorbents were tested for removal of mercury vapor by surface treatment of the PTFE membrane filter. The filter’s surface was further altered using functional amine group compounds: one composed of silane coupling agent (APTMS) was found suitable as a mercury adsorbent. When ACF with a large surface area was used as support material, mercury removal efficiency increased threefold to 0.162 mg/g-ACF. Furthermore, the developed PTFE membrane filter was tested in its capacity of differential pressure and filtering efficiency using a pilot scale particulate removal unit. Stable and consistent differential pressure was maintained during long-term operation and less frequent periods of filter shutdown due to pores filling with 99.96% of particulate removal efficiency, which was more than satisfactory filtration efficiency.
In the case of solid refuse fuel manufacturing facilities, residues, which are left-over from the process, are buried at a rate of 34% of incoming amount, and some are disposed of by combustion. The residues were upgraded by mechanical biological treatment and subject to attempts at combustion, and the bottom ash generated from combustion tests was applied to fabricate bricks for recycling. The brick was manufactured by substitutions of stone powder, cement, sand ranging from by 3 to 30% according to experimental conditions. These could be used as an interlocking block for the sidewalk or open spaces. The basic characteristics of the bottom ash and the water absorption, bending strength, compressive strength, and dimensions of the mixed bricks were tested. Results showed that 10% of the stone powder substitution was regarded as an optimal condition, and the brick quality was satisfactory under given standards, because the pozzolanic and hydration reactions occurred effectively.
This study investigated both leaching of heavy metals and ecological toxicity when coal bottom ash (CBA) generated by power plants has been used to reduce both erosion and turbidity of surface runoff at construction sites. The Korean leaching test (KLT) method, sequential extraction method, and acute toxicity test using Daphnia magna were performed to evaluate the environmental impacts and the ecological risks of CBA. According to the results of the KLT method of CBA, trace amounts of Cu were leached at limit of quantitation whereas metal leaching was not monitored for other heavy metals. Through the sequential extraction method of CBA, the relatively high leaching potential was found for As and Pb due to greater fraction of exchangeable (F1) and bound to carbonates (F2), and reasonable probability of leaching under the reducing/anaerobic environment was expected for Cu due to high faction of bound to Fe?Mn oxides (F3). However, significantly low probability of leaching was expected for Cd, Cr, Ni, and Zn with grater fractions of bound to organic matter (F4) and residual (F5). Additionally, total amount of heavy metals in CBA was lower than criteria for soil pollution concerns, and were similar or slightly lower levels than the ‘15 National soil average concentration excluding Cr6+. Finally, acute toxicity test using Daphnia magna display no impact for mobilization and lethality in either the prefiltration or post-filtration experiment, indicating that the ecological toxicity was insignificant with zero values of toxic unit. Consequently, no environmental impacts or ecological toxicity are expected when CBA generated by power plants has been used to reduce both erosion and turbidity of surface runoff at construction sites.