Recent advancement and prospective of waste plastics as biodiesel additives: A review

Recently, commodity plastics have been shown to be a promising additive to improve the fuel properties of biodiesel, which offers a promising solution to the plastic pandemic. As many environmental and societal issues arise from plastic pollution, repurposing technologies are paramount in order to meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). A potentially cost-effective approach can be achieved by using waste plastics as biodiesel additives - resonating to the expression 'to kill two birds with one stone'. However, given the novelty of such investigation, current optimization studies show varying results on the ideal plastic-to-biodiesel ratio as well as the reaction parameters. The difficulty in determining the exact optimum values is due to the many variations of biodiesel properties and the complex behaviour of plastic polymers, which are seldom discussed in review papers. Hence, to address the literature gap, this paper offers the necessary fundamentals of biodiesel and plastic dissolution; facilitating future researches to advance the application of plastics as viable biodiesel additives. Accordingly, the topics covered include the fuel and solvent properties of biodiesel related to its' composition, as well as the polymer dissolution phenomena. Finally, as the focal aim of the paper, a synopsis on the recent advancement of plastic-added biodiesel is presented; in particular, those that are related to the blend characteristics, fuel properties, combustion quality, and environmental impact. (C) 2019 Energy Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.