Recycling of blended plastic waste streams

The use of MFCs to replace glass or carbon fiber reinforced composites has been heralded as a potential solution for applications requiring greater processability and increased recyclability. Indeed, the suitability of MFCs for recycling is seen as one of the most promising avenues of MFC development. This is because MFCs are comprised solely of thermoplastic polymers with no foreign inclusions and so have two immediate advantages over many forms of polymer composites  

1) Unlike thermoset materials, thermoplastics can be reprocessed a number of times  

2) MFCs do not require the separation of a nonpolymeric reinforcement such as glass or carbon fiber from the matrix polymer. 

This low level of plastic recycling can be directly attributed to two main factors (i) the difficulties associated with separation of plastic packaging from municipal waste streams, and (ii) costs ballooning up to ten times for commingled streams compared to well defined single soirrce streams such as PET bottles [68]. 

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