Circular Economy Candidates

During the last years, the term "circular economy" (CE) has appeared more or less everywhere. Regarding chemical processes, the ultimate fashion consists in re-design all the acitvities related with some kind of industrial production in terms of exploitation of wastes as raw materials.
Wastes can arise from the same process or from other processes.
This system is often presented in opposition of the old "linear economy" (LE) model, where the wastes produced during a process represent a cost.
In CE model, wastes become raw materials in a close loop producing economical and environmental advantages (Figure 1).

Linear VS Circular Economy models.

The applicability to the CE scheme is limited by the availability of oportune raw materials, processes and technologies. Thus, the number of productions which can be developed in a circular economy fashion is limited.

Finding new combination of raw materials and processes which can be good candoidates for this production scheme is currently one of the main topic in research.

Soon I will post an overview about the possibility to develop such model starting from Waste Cooking Oils.

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Waste Cooking Oils as Raw Material

Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) pertain to the family of the Used Vegetable Oils (UVOs) are considered wastes dangerous for the environment. Their production is massive and it is exponentially growing. As WCOs are mostly derived by frying processes, they are present as waste everywhere in our planet. Collection , disposal and recycling of WCOs is very important in order to reduce in part the impact of human activity on the environment. I have been dedicating some time to specific research activity about the recycling of this waste, studying innovative ways for convert it in valuable raw material for industries. Although WCOs have been recycled mostly for bio-diesel production, they can be exploited for produce bio-lubricants, asphalt binders, bio-plasticizers, animal feed, green-solvents, and more (see “ Innovative application of waste cooking oil as raw material”, https://doi.org/10.1177/0036850419854252 ). Recently, we explored in particular the employment of recycled WCO...

Available Technologies and Materials for Waste Cooking Oil Recycling

Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) represent an unique platform of raw materials for several industrial production. WCO is a waste, cheap and available in large amounts worldwide. It is composed by a mixture of fatty acids which can be easy and fast transformed in useful chemicals. In this context, the quality and quantities of industrial processes dedicated to WCO transformation is limited by the availability of proper technologies and materials . With the aim to furnish an overview of the current state of the art related with the transformation of WCOs, I have collected with the help of my Colleagues most of the research papers published in the last 5 years related with the chemical transformation and the physical treatment of WCOs . Click here for download the full study.

Degumming of Waste Cooking Oils

With the term "degumming" is usually described an important step in the purification of edible vegetable oils. It consists in washing the crude oil with water and is aimed to remove phospholipids and waxes from the unrefined oil. For more informations click here . Why we should apply this treatment to Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) which don't contain waxes or phospholipids? It was 2012 when I proposed for the first time to degum WCOs. In the following years I had the possibility to take part to three main studies about the effect of water treatment on the composition or WCOs. Thanks to some collaborations between the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Sassari, we could monitor the volatile fraction of samples of WCO prior and after several different water treatments. We found that water is able to remove selected chemicals and that is possible to modulate this effect by acting on the pH and temperature ( click here to be redirected to the paper ). Nev...

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