Troublesome Waste Plastic? ... In Korea, 'Premium Oil' Is Extracted from It

Development of Technology to Convert Waste Vinyl into High-Quality Industrial Oil
Yield Over 60%... Ensuring Eco-Friendliness and Economic Feasibility

Waste vinyl / Photo by Korea Institute of Energy Research

[Asia Economy Online Issue Team] The path has been opened for waste vinyl, a representative environmental pollutant that takes hundreds of years to decompose, to be reborn as industrial oil. It is particularly noteworthy because the oil yield exceeds 60%, ensuring both environmental friendliness and economic feasibility.

The Korea Institute of Energy Technology recently announced that Dr. Lee Kyung-hwan's research team has developed a technology to convert waste vinyl into high-quality industrial oil through a newly developed pyrolysis plant.

The research team developed a technology that can increase the oil production yield from waste vinyl with low energy by operating for a long time at a constant reaction temperature. Existing technology involved inputting 5 to 10 tons of raw material into a single reactor and heating it for a long time to produce oil. After production, a lengthy cooling process was required, allowing operation only once per day. The oil produced through this process was only 30 to 40%, resulting not only in yield issues but also in low quality of the produced oil, limiting its utility.

Dr. Kyunghwan Lee's research team at the Korea Institute of Energy Research announced on the 14th that they have developed a technology to convert waste vinyl into high-quality industrial oil through a pyrolysis plant.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

However, Dr. Lee Kyung-hwan's research team utilized small vinyl pieces (fluff) that had undergone pretreatment as raw material, enabling continuous and rapid input of raw materials. While ensuring that the raw materials fed into the reactor were fully utilized, they improved quality through chlorine removal and distillation processes. In particular, the team explained that the newly developed pyrolysis plant operates continuously at a constant reaction temperature with low energy, securing an oil yield of 62%, unlike existing technologies that required long heating and cooling processes. This means that 620 grams of oil can be produced from 1 kilogram of waste vinyl.

Dr. Lee Kyung-hwan, principal researcher at the Energy Technology Institute, said, "Existing pyrolysis oil technologies were batch or semi-continuous small-scale low-grade processes with limitations in productivity and quality. This technology can produce high-quality oil through continuous operation, so it can be exported to overseas countries such as Southeast Asia, which are struggling with waste vinyl disposal."