A solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation scheme for the recycling of up to ten polymers from post-industrial mixed plastic waste
Kevin L. Sánchez‐Rivera, Panzheng Zhou, Е. В. Радкевич, Anisha Sharma, Ezra Bar‐Ziv, Reid C. Van Lehn, George W. Huber
Abstract
) separates polymers within a plastic waste stream by selective dissolution. In this work, the STRAP framework, which combines computational modeling and experiments, was applied to develop a series of steps to separate up to 10 polymers from post-industrial mixed plastic waste (MPW) and the main components recovered were LDPE, HDPE, and PET. The STRAP steps were initially demonstrated with a physical polymer mixture containing LDPE, HDPE, PS, PVC, EVOH, PET, PP, PA6, PA66, and PA66/6, in which recoveries of 89% or higher were achieved for each polymer. This paper demonstrates a solvent selection approach that can be applied to separate unknown plastics materials into purer components.