Progress in separating plastic materials for recycling

Abstract

In order to deal with the problems facing the plastics processing industry research, work is focused primarily on designing, developing and testing a variety of separation and sorting techniques able to recover plastics from wastes, which can be re-used or re-processed to form new products. In this regard, technologies developed in mineral processing can be of great help. Various techniques for separating plastics materials have been recently developed. These techniques can be divided in two main categories, i.e. wet separating techniques and dry separating techniques. This paper presents the recent progress in separating plastics reviewing the potential of the available techniques.