폐플라스틱 열분해유 품질기준 마련 연구

Research on preparing quality standards for waste plastic pyrolysis oil

The pyrolysis industry has been in the spotlight again as it has been presented as a means of policy implementation since the end of '21. In particular, as the amount of waste plastics increased significantly due to the non-face-to-face packaged meals lasting more than three years through COVID-19, it was greatly highlighted as a means to convert it into new resources and was even presented as No. 89 of the government's 120 national tasks in '22. According to the revised Waste Control Act of '21, there are two types of waste plastics recycling: R-3-3, which can be utilized as raw materials for petroleum manufacturing, and R-9-3, which can be utilized as fuel. In this study, the research was limited to the R-9-3 type. The recycling standards of pyrolysis facilities are not significantly different from the quality standards of the existing R-9-2 type of refined fuel oil. Therefore, this study selected five facilities that are licensed as recyclers in Korea and whose performance is reported to the Korea Recycling and Resource Distribution Center (KORA), and sampled the composition of waste inputs to the facilities, pyrolysis oil and residues, exhaust gas and process gas emitted during process operation to examine whether they can comply with the standards in the currently revised Waste Management Act. We also visited five facilities producing refined fuel oil and renewable fuel oil, sampled their products to investigate how they differ from pyrolysis oil. Based on the results of these analyses, this study suggested the need to revise the quality standards for pyrolysis oil (R-9-3) in the future.