New products from high-grade polymer particulate waste streams
TransFIRe researchers at Northumbria University have developed a method to convert waste polyethylene terephthalate (wPET) into an unsaturated polyester for use in protective coatings applications, thereby also lowering the demand of virgin petrochemical feedstocks typically required to produce these polyesters. State of the art mechanical separation of mixed plastics which are predominantly PET at recycling centres works by converting large objects into a “flake” which can be separated efficiently into very high purity recycled wPET content. However, a proportion of the throughput can only be purified to 90-99% PET purity due to the presence of small and often highly coloured flakes of other plastics, and hence has no commercial value. This fraction of the wPET process is incinerated or sent to landfill rather than used in closed loop recycling. These so called “flake losses” account for around 160 ktpa of PET lost from the closed loop recycling process in Europe [...]
