Carbon dioxide emission reduction through cleaner production strategies in a recycled plastic resins producing plant

In this work, a study was conducted to estimate carbon dioxide (CO2) emission of plastic resins produced from recycled plastic wastes in a medium-sized plant in Malaysia. The feasibility of using cleaner production (CP) strategies to reduce CO2 was evaluated. For this purpose, a CP audit was conducted to quantitatively identify major entities that contributed to CO2 inside the boundary of the plant. The result showed that the plant generated 0.84 kg CO2/kg resins produced, which contributing to 1.9 million tons of overall annual CO2 generated from Malaysian plastic industry. In detail, 73.8% of the emission generated in the studied plant was contributed by electricity consumption, followed by solid waste generation (23.3%) and diesel consumption (2.3%). The value is lower than a virgin plastic resins producing plant, which has a CO2 value of 2 kg CO2/kg resins produced. After the audit, a total of four potential CP options were generated focusing on reducing energy consumption. Implementation of these options was expected to reduce CO2 generated from energy consumption by 0.11 kg CO2/kg resins produced, a reduction of about 18%. The study proved that CP strategies could be implemented to reduce CO2 of recycled-plastic resins producing plant.