Mechanical or Secondary Recycling

In the approach taken by Abbas and co-workers (1978) they assumed the parallel arrangement of properties, and, hence, the properties of the product are given by 

Example 11.4. Determination of the Percent of Original Properties for a Linear Decay in Properties 

The decay in tensile strength of an injection molded sample is given by the following equation  

The numbers in parentheses result from evaluating Eq. 11.14. Now, for a recycle ratio of 0.2, the reduction in properties is only 1.2% or the polymer retains 98.8% of the original properties. For a recycle ratio of 0.5, 91% of the original properties are retained. Actually, after about 3 recycle steps, there is very Uttle change in the properties.  

TABLE 11.5 Plastic in Municipal Solid Waste of Hamilton, Ohio 

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