Exergy Footprint Assessment of Cotton Textile Recycling to Polyethylene

Circular economy implementations tend to decrease the human pressure on the environment, but not all produce footprint reductions. That observation brings the need for tools for the evaluation of recycling processes. Based on the Exergy Footprint concept, the presented work formulates a procedure fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Energies (Basel) 2022-01, Vol.15 (1), p.205
Main Authors: Plesu Popescu, Alexandra, Cheah, Yen Keong, Varbanov, Petar Sabev, Klemeš, Jiří Jaromír, Kabli, Mohammad Reda, Shahzad, Khurram
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biogeochemistry
Carbon footprint
chemical recycling
Climate change
Consumption
Cotton
cotton textile recycling
Energy
Environmental impact
Exergy
Exergy Footprint
Footprints
GHG emissions
Greenhouse effect
Greenhouse gases
Polyethylene
Polyethylenes
Recycling
Sustainability
Thermodynamics
Water shortages
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Summary:Circular economy implementations tend to decrease the human pressure on the environment, but not all produce footprint reductions. That observation brings the need for tools for the evaluation of recycling processes. Based on the Exergy Footprint concept, the presented work formulates a procedure for its application to industrial chemical recycling processes. It illustrates its application in the example of cotton waste recycling. This includes the evaluation of the entire process chain of polyethylene synthesis by recycling cotton waste. The chemical recycling stages are identified and used to construct the entire flowsheet that eliminates the cotton waste and its footprints at the expense of additional exergy input. The exergy performance of the process is evaluated. The identified exergy assets and liabilities are 138 MJ/kg ethylene and 153 MJ/kg ethylene, reducing the Exergy Footprint by 75% and the greenhouse gas footprint by 43% compared to the linear pattern of polyethylene production. The exergy requirements for producing raw cotton constitute a large fraction of the liabilities, while the polyethylene degradation provides the main asset in the reduction of the Exergy Footprint.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en15010205