Waste Plastics Reuse

Material recycling is the objective for every material, but at some point reuse or collection, separation and further recycling will no longer yield a useful product. The so-called plastic waste still contains a high calorific value which can be recovered to produce heat or electricity. Even better it may be possible to recover the chemical feedstock originally manufactured from oil. These two possibilities are reviewed. 

The main driving force towards recycling has been national and international plastic waste management policy. Within the EU, the policy is based on waste hierarchy, meaning that the first choice is waste prevention and then waste recovery (reuse, recycling and energy recovery), with preference to material recovery. Thus the type of legislation found is ... 

Plastics Waste Management Disposal, Recycling, and Reuse, edited by Nabil Mustafa... 

Ideally we would like to reuse plastic waste to form directly new plastic products, but mechanical reprocessing of used plastics into new products has so far limited application. It is restricted to the treatment of relatively pure and well-defined waste, mainly from polymer processing factories. Mechanical reprocessing of municipal plastic waste results in new products of quality inferior to their virgin plastic ones. Separation of waste to streams of the same polymer type on the other hand is still very expensive. This fact restricts the applicability of mechanical reprocessing in polymer waste that is homogeneous in type and properties. 

Plastic waste can be either landfilled, reused, converted to energy by combustion, reclaimed and reprocessed into new products, or converted into monomers or simple chemicals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advocates three Rs reduce, reuse, and recycle. The approaches to handle the plastic waste problem are reduce the amount of waste to be discarded reuse a signihcant amount of the waste discarded and recycle as much of the waste as possible. 

With the introduction of oil-based polymers such as poly[ethylene], poly[propylene], poly[styrene], poly[ethylene terephthalate] and poly[vinyl chloride] the packaging industry has been truly revolutionised. Despite the advances in polymer synthesis and processing, their end of life still poses a problem [159]. The first choice for processing plastic waste is reuse, but only some plastics can be reused after proper processing, and... 

Such short life cycles can be found with the recycling of production waste , which is often environmentally very friendly as well as economical, because pure grade materials are being reused. At present, this form holds the largest share of plastics waste recycling as a whole. 

AU plastic waste including htter is a material of value in terms of the embedded energy and the nonrenewable materials that comprise it. It is clearly a resource or a raw material that must ideally be recycled and its material and/or energy resources extracted for reuse. Degradability and compostability do not facilitate this key sustainability objective. 

Plastics waste management does not exist in a vacuum waste plastics are affected by and impact upon many different aspects of national life, i.e., there is a balance between the utilisation of plastics waste and its production and processing. The majority of plastics waste generation is related to material comfort items however, recycling/ reuse initiatives for mixed plastics are limited [1]. 

All feasible and reasonable steps should be taken to recycle and reuse materials from plastics waste and convert this waste into useful marketable products. 

Current development activities are focused on the processes and practices of reprocessing plastic waste materials, with emphasis on the processes and practices that reduce emissions and integrate the LCA of technologies and materials. Plastics processing management involves the reuse of plastics waste from industry, and primary and secondary recycled material, to limit the environmental impact and preserve natural resources. 

Plastics Waste Management - Disposal, Recycling and Reuse, Ed., N. Mustafa, Marcel Dekker, New York, NY, USA, 1993. 

---