(538l) Recycling of Plastic Wastes By Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation

Owing to the wide usage of plastics in the fields of packaging, construction, health care, automotive, and electronics, the inundation of plastic waste has become a big threat to the environment. Post-industrial plastic wastes (PIW) generated during production and processing steps in the packaging industry include multilayer and printed films, which are difficult to recycle due to their complex structure and existence of colorants and additives. Thus, the fate of most PIW is to end up in landfill or incineration. Recently, our group has successfully demonstrated a new strategy named Solvent-Targeted Recovery And Precipitation (STRAP). By virtue of STRAP, we can deconstruct multilayer materials into their constituent resins by selective dissolution which is guided by thermodynamic calculations of solvent-polymer solubility. Polyethylene, ethylene vinyl alcohol, and polyethylene terephthalate with near 100% material efficiency can be extracted individually from multilayer films and verified to be comparable to virgin resins by FTIR spectra. Printed multilayer plastic films also show comparable results and colorants are able to be removed during the dissolution process. A techno-economic analysis indicates that the STRAP process can be economically feasible with a large-scale processing capacity. Furthermore, we also applied STRAP on a hygiene product, i.e., disposal face masks, to recover and recycle their polypropylene component. A life-cycle assessment indicates that the polypropylene recovered from STRAP process can reduce the resource consumption and environmental impacts compared to the virgin resins production. In the future, our aim is to extend this technology to post-consumer plastic waste and other types of plastic wastes, which could shed light on the road to recycling different plastic wastes and multi-type feedstocks.