Chemical Engineering March 2014 - 13

Partner with
the Best
Recovering and purifying byproduct
and waste ethylene glycol
G
lyEco Inc. (Phoenix, Ariz.; www.glyeco.com) has
developed a process for recovering and purifying
ethylene glycol from a number of industrial
byproduct and waste streams so that it meets an
ASTM International (West Conshohocken, Pa.;
www.astm.org; formerly American Society for Testing
and Materials) specification for use in virgingrade
antifreeze.
Processes for recycling ethylene glycol currently
exist, explains Richard Geib, GlyEco's chief technical
officer, but they are based on used antifreeze
- a relatively expensive feedstock that is in short
supply - and result in ethylene glycol that generally
does not have the purity required for top
grades. GlyEco's process enables the recycling of
ethylene glycol not only from used antifreeze, but
also from several different minimal-cost industrial
byproducts and waste streams. These waste
streams include byproduct from the manufacture
of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, ethylene
oxide medical sterilization, aircraft de-icing
fluid and others.
A unique feature of the GlyEco process is a pretreatment
step where ethylene-glycol-containing
streams from different industries and with varying
chemical compositions are put through a series
of proprietary physical and chemical operations
that make them all similarly suitable for
the primary treatment step. After careful analysis
of potential feedstock streams, GlyEco developed
" laboratory processes to chemically modify problematic
components of these streams so that they
could be purified to a very high level using relatively
standard unit operations, such as filtration,
phase separation, vacuum distillation and ion exchange, "
Geib says. Several species of organic impurities,
inorganic ions, acid and color need to be
removed sufficiently to achieve virgin-grade ethylene
glycol.
In the primary treatment step, a sophisticated
vacuum-distillation system separates relatively
pure ethylene glycol from more- and less-volatile
contaminants. That is followed by a post-treatment
step, where remaining ionic species, acid and
color are removed to produce ethylene glycol that
meets the virgin-antifreeze-grade specification,
Geib points out.
Recycled ethylene glycol from GlyEco's process
has a significant cost advantage over virgin ethylene
glycol from petrochemical facilities, Geib says.
GlyEco's plant in Elizabeth, N.J. is producing and
selling commercial quantities of virgin-grade ethylene
glycol in the first step of a phased startup
that is expected to reach 10 million gal/yr by the
later part of 2014.
With over 50 independent subsidiaries
and more than 220 engineering
and sales offi ces spread across the
world, SAMSON ensures the safety
and environmental compatibility of
your plants on any continent.
To offer the full range of high-quality
control equipment used in industrial
processes, SAMSON has brought
together highly specialized companies
to form the SAMSON GROUP.
SAMSON AG · MESS- UND REGELTECHNIK
Weismüllerstraße 3
60314 Frankfurt am Main · Germany
Phone: +49 69 4009-0 · Fax: +49 69 4009-1507
E-mail: samson@samson.de · www.samson.de
SAMSON GROUP · www.samsongroup.net
A01120EN
Circle 38 on p. 68 or go to adlinks.che.com/50974-38
http://www.glyeco.com http://www.astm.org http://adlinks.che.com/50974-38 http://www.samson.de http://www.samsongroup.net
Chemical Engineering March 2014

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