Recycling of Traditional Plastics
Narinder Singh, Recep Demirsöz
Abstract
Nowadays, various plastic polymers have found their uses in different applications right from household commodities to high-end applications in space and aircrafts. In this chapter, various recycling applications have been discussed along with their uses. In recent years, low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) are used in most of the applications, most commonly in household products, including toys, carry bags and common polyethylene. Such polymers are also used in practical applications, such as polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). PET on the other hand is mostly used in beverage packaging and food packaging because of its grade. Other polymers such as HDPE and LDPE are not suitable for packaging because of their toxic content that restricts their use for limited applications. As far as the recycling is concerned, recycling has made it possible to reduce plastic solid waste and increased the application domain of plastic by enhancing its properties. Various reinforcements are available that can be used according to the application domain, such as for conductive applications, graphene reinforcement is done. Graphene is electrically conductive, and by reinforcing graphene, plastics can be made conductive even though mostly all the polymers are nonconductive in nature. Reinforced polymers are called composites. Composites have found their uses in different applications. In this chapter, an effort has been made to cover all the possible recycling techniques used in plastic waste recycling by reinforcing with some foreign particles to enhance their application domain.