For decades, significant work has been conducted regarding plastic waste by dealing with rejected materials in waste masses through their accumulation, sorting and recycling. Important political and technical challenges are involved, especially with respect to landfilled waste. Plastic is popular and, notwithstanding decrease policies, it will remain a material widely used in most economic sectors. However, questions of plastic waste recycling in the contemporary world cannot be solved without knowing the material, which can be achieved by careful sampling, analysis and quantification. Plastic is heterogeneous, but usually all plastic waste is jointly handled for recycling and incineration. Separation before processing waste through the analytical approach must be applied. Modern landfill mining and site clean-up projects in contemporary waste management systems require comprehensive material studies ranging from the macro-characterization of waste masses to a more detailed analysis of hazardous constituents and properties from an energy calorific standpoint—where, among other methods, thermogravimetric research coupled with life cycle assessment (LCA) and economic assessment is highly welcomed.

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The growing use and transport of crude oil and oil products has led to increasing numbers of oil spillages of various scales. Oil sorbents have been extensively used for remediation of the consequences of such accidents. The aim of this study is to investigate the possible use of peat and its thermal treatment products for oil sorption. Peat as an oil sorbent has poor buoyancy characteristics, relatively low oil sorption capacity and low hydrophobicity. However, thermal treatment (low-temperature pyrolysis and synthesis of peat-based activated coal) helps to significantly improve its sorptive characteristics. Peat is a potential material for oil sorption because it has such advantages as low cost, biodegradability and relatively high parameters of specific surface area and porosity. The processes and structural changes taking place during low-temperature pyrolysis have been studied by means of IR spectroscopy, thermogravimetry and scanning electron microscopy.

The paper aims to review the state of the art in the field of pyrolysis and gasification of waste and to identify approaches that can be prospective considering the upcoming transformation of society. The results show that the transition to a circular, low carbon economy will significantly change the composition of municipal wastes, making thermochemical approaches more and more competitive. However, it does not mean that pyrolysis and gasification will outperform incineration in the field of traditional waste to energy. Novel thermochemical waste management approaches must not be viewed as competitors, but rather as the successors of the traditional mass‐burn incineration. The transition to a circular, low carbon economy will result in an emergence of new needs, new products and thus in possibilities of new pyrolysis and gasification‐based business models different from the waste to energy concept. Negative emissions, energy storage, stabilization of renewable grids as well as renewable fuels must be mentioned as examples of such new products. Thus, thermochemical processing technologies should be embedded into the wider concept of circular, low carbon economy as the source of energy for recycling, a technology of tertiary recycling of synthetic polymers and as a way to transform nonrecyclable rejects into fuels, negative emissions, and other marketable products. This article is categorized under: Bioenergy > Systems and Infrastructure

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