Water and energy have always been crucial for the world's social and economic growth. Their supply and use must be sustainable. This review discusses opportunities for membrane technologies in water and energy sustainability by analyzing their potential applications and current status; providing emerging technologies and scrutinizing research and development challenges for membrane materials in this field.
Worldwide, high plastic consumption leads to huge waste production. Macro and microplastic litter affects habitats everywhere, but especially marine environments. Unfortunately, plastic is particularly difficult to retrieve from the sea, since it tends to break up into smaller pieces due to wind, water movement and solar irradiation. Hence, its end-of-life handling and management has become a major issue. Most of the time recovered plastic waste is landfilled or burnt, since it is composed of an assortment of different polymers and/or has been polluted by salt or other marine substances. For these reasons, new recycling methods for marine litter, pursuing cleaner production criteria, are urgently required. This article presents a brand-new sustainable material, an eco-friendly foam made of waste microplastics incorporated into a bio-matrix.
Plastics represent a serious waste-handling problem, with only 10% of the plastic waste (PW) generated world-wide being recycled. The remainder follows a linear economy model, involving disposal or incineration. Thermochemical recycling provides an opportunity to close the material cycle, and this work shows how this can be achieved using the existing petrochemical infrastructure. The transformation of a generic petrochemical cluster based on virgin fossil feedstocks into a cluster that is based on PW has the following proposed sequence: (1) the feedstock is partially replaced (45% on carbon basis) by PW; (2) the feedstock is totally replaced by PW; (3) the process undergoes electrification; and (4) oxy-combustion and carbon capture and storage are introduced to achieve 100% carbon recovery in the form of monomers or permanent storage. An alternative transformation pathway that includes the introduction of biomass is also considered.