Scale-up and sustainability evaluation of biopolymer production from citrus waste offering carbon capture and utilisation pathway
File(s)open.201900015.pdf (2.85 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Poly(limonene carbonate) (PLC) has been highlighted as an attractive substitute to petroleum derived plastics, due to its utilisation of CO2 and bio-based limonene as feedstocks, offering an effective carbon capture and utilisation pathway. Our study investigates the techno-economic viability and environmental sustainability of a novel process to produce PLC from citrus waste derived limonene, coupled with an anaerobic digestion process to enable energy cogeneration and waste recovery maximisation. Computational process design was integrated with a life cycle assessment to identify the sustainability improvement opportunities. PLC production was found to be economically viable, assuming sufficient citrus waste is supplied to the process, and environmentally preferable to polystyrene (PS) in various impact categories including climate change. However, it exhibited greater environmental burdens than PS across other impact categories, although the environmental performance could be improved with a waste recovery system, at the cost of a process design shift towards energy generation. Finally, our study quantified the potential contribution of PLC to mitigating the escape of atmospheric CO2 concentration from the planetary boundary. We emphasise the importance of a holistic approach to process design and highlight the potential impacts of biopolymers, which is instrumental in solving environmental problems facing the plastic industry and building a sustainable circular economy.
Date Issued
2019-06-01
Date Acceptance
2019-02-01
Citation
ChemistryOpen, 2019, 8 (6), pp.668-688
ISSN
2191-1363
Publisher
Wiley
Start Page
668
End Page
688
Journal / Book Title
ChemistryOpen
Volume
8
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
©2019 The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Sponsor
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Grant Number
EP/N034740/1
EP/L017393/1
Subjects
biopolymer
carbon dioxide fixation
copolymerisation
life cycle analysis
resource recovery
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2019-03-07