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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Chem. Eng.
Sec. Sustainable Process Engineering
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fceng.2024.1463638
This article is part of the Research Topic Catalytic Conversion of Waste Plastics into Valuable Products View all articles

Catalytic revalorization of plastic waste phthalate plasticizers into simple aromatics and alkenes

Provisionally accepted
Simon Windels Simon Windels 1,2Nienke Seynaeve Nienke Seynaeve 1,2Wouter Stuyck Wouter Stuyck 1,2Dirk De Vos Dirk De Vos 1,2*
  • 1 Center for Membrane Separations, Adsorption, Catalysis and Spectroscopy for Sustainable Solutions, Department of Microbial and Molecular Systems, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
  • 2 KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In order to deal with legacy additives in plastic waste streams, multiple extraction processes are being developed. For sustainability and economic reasons, these processes call for the parallel implementation of revalorisation routes for the extracted toxic compounds, especially when dealing with large volumes as in the case of phthalate plasticizers. On account of its intrinsic value, the recovery of the aromatic fragment from such end-of-life phthalate ester mixtures was prioritized in this work. To that end, a hydrolysis-decarboxylation process was designed using hydrophobic zeolites and heterogeneous Ptcatalysts, in water as a safe and environmentally benign solvent. By carefully tuning the reaction parameters, the selective formation of phthalic acid, benzoic acid or benzene can be achieved in nearquantitative yields, next to the recovery of alkene and alcohol side chain fragments (yields up to 99%).

    Keywords: Heterogeneous catalysis, green chemistry, Plastic waste utilization, Phthalate plasticizers, Revalorization

    Received: 12 Jul 2024; Accepted: 26 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Windels, Seynaeve, Stuyck and De Vos. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Dirk De Vos, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

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