Creation of advanced recycle process to waste container and packaging plastic - polypropylene sorted recycle plastic case

Abstract

To address the dual problems of the depletion of natural resources and the environmental impact of a growing volume of wastes, effective recycling of various products and materials has become an important challenge. Especially, the amount of plastic waste is extremely large, and thus it is very important to establish effective process of recycling them as soon as possible. However, the mechanical properties and durability properties of the products made from waste plastics are inferior to those of products molded from virgin plastics, and thus their application area is presently limited. The reason of above phenomena has been thought to be caused by chemical degradation. However, we recently found that the main cause of this inferior property was reproducible physical degradation from the investigation of preconsumer recycle polypropylene. In this study, we used recycled post-consumer container and container and packaging plastics (polypropylene component was sorted) and investigated that the physical properties of them were reproducible or not. And we found that the tensile mechanical properties of them were reproducible almost to the virgin revel by changing molding conditions. This results indicate that in the case of recycled post-consumer container and packaging plastics, they are not chemically degraded and can use to value-added fields.