Recycling and energy recovery solutions of end-of-life reverse osmosis (RO) membrane materials: A sustainable approach

The objective of the present work is first to estimate the degradation level of an old RO membrane taken from Mauritania (North West Africa) in terms of water permeability, salts rejection, roughness changes and chemical analysis in order to diagnose its level of degradation during its first life during seawater desalination. Then old RO spacers (main part of old RO element) in polypropylene (PP) where combined with low density polypropylene well encountered in Tunisia to elaborate a new flat sheet membrane dedicated to membrane distillation (MD). Last part is dedicated to RO raw materials as alternative fuels feedstock via pyrolysis. Indeed membrane sheets and spacers are still having higher heating values than most of biomass fuels and we have presently estimated, using thermal analysis, their potential.