Consideration of used FCC catalyst effect on the virgin HDPE degradation in a stirred reactor

Today, plastics provide a fundamental contribution to our society. This kind of material is very frequent in daily life as it is found in food packaging, electricity industry, toy industry,containers, etc. The huge amount of plastic waste that resulted from the dramatic increase in polymer production gives rise toserious environmental concerns, as plastic does not degrade and remains in the municipal refuse tips for decades. [1]. On the other hand incineration of waste polymers results in environmental danger because of emissions of very different combustion products. Therefore, the chemical degradation ofspent polymers towards clean liquid fuel or valuable chemicals has been undertaken in many papers [2-6]. Catalysts can promote the degradation reaction to occur atlower temperatures, which implies lower energy consumptions [7-8]. Moreover, the shape selectivity exhibited by certaincatalysts allows the formation of a narrower distribution of products, which can be directed towards fuels, chemicals and valuable hydrocarbons with higher market values. It is certainly possible to develop commercial processes based on used fluid catalytic cracking (FCC)[9].The goal of this study is to investigate the used FCC catalytic decomposition of HDPE and consideration of polymer/catalyst ratio effect on the product yield.