A Study on Environmental Assessment of Residue from Gasification of Polyurethane Waste in E-Waste Recycling Process

With expanding economic growth, the consumption and changing period of electronics products have increased rapidly in last couple of decades in Korea. A refrigerator generally contains 10% of polyurethane. Since the amount of used refrigerators collected at recycling facilities of E-wastes (electronic waste) has increased since 2007, the generation of polyurethane waste has also increased. Polyurethane recycling technologies have been investigated for polyol production and sound-absorbing materials, which are not commercialized yet due to high cost of the technology. However many kinds of plastic wastes are being used as SRF (solid refuse fuel) like RDF (refuse derived fuel), so polyurethane in E-waste could be utilized as valuable fuels, since it has high calorific values and contains low sulfur, low chlorine, and less hazardous substances[Park, C. S. (2013).]. Using a fixed bed reactor, gasification experiment was conducted onpellet type SRF made of polyurethane at 1,000 °C temperature for study purpose. Environmental assessment on gasification residue was also performed byleaching test and the loss on ignition[Kim, C. S., 2008]. The main objective of this experiment was to assess whether polyurethane gasification residue is hazardous for environment or not and also to find out it is recyclable or not.