Host: Japan Society of Material Cycles and Waste Management
With expanding economic growth, the consumption and changing period of electronics products have increased rapidly last a couple of decades in Korea. A refrigerator generally contains 10% of polyurethane. Since the amount of used refrigerators collected at recycling facilities of E-wastes has increased since
2007, the generation of polyurethane waste has also increased. Polyurethane recycling technologies have been investigated such as polyol production and sound-absorbing materials, which are not commercialized yet due to high cost of the technology. However many kinds of plastic wastes are being used as SRF (solid
refuse fuel) like RDF (refuse derived fuel), so polyurethane in E-waste could be utilized as valuable fuels. In this study an attempt to fabricate pellet type of SRF from polyurethane waste was conducted to use them as fuels. The basic characteristics of polyurethane such as elemental composition, thermal
properties and proximate analysis were carried out to assess whether they could be used as fuels or not. Using a fixed bed test reactor, gasification experiments were also conducted at the temperature of 1,000 ºC by measuring exhaust gas compositions and gas pollutants.
