Conversion of polyethylene to gasoline: Influence of porosity and acidity of zeolites

Abstract

Plastic waste is causing serious environmental problems. Developing efficient, cheap and stable catalytic routes to convert plastic waste into valuable products is of great importance for sustainable development, but remains to be a challenging task. Zeolites are cheap and stable, but they are usually not efficient for plastic conversion at a low temperature. Herein a series of microporous and mesoporous zeolites were used to study the influence of porosity and acidity of zeolite on catalytic activity for plastics conversion. It was observed that H-Beta zeolite was an efficient catalyst for cracking high-density polyethylene to gasoline at 240 °C, and the products were almost C₄–C₁₂ alkanes. The effect of porosity and acidity on catalytic performance of zeolites was evaluated, which clearly visualized the good performance of H-Beta due to high surface area, large channel system, large amount accessible acidic sites. This study provides very useful information for designing zeolites for efficient conversion of plastics.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

plastics conversion / polyethylene / zeolites / acidity / porosity

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 22293015, 22293012, and 22121002) and the Research Funds of Happiness Flower ECNU (2020ST2203).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11708-023-0897-1 and is accessible for authorized users.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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