Page 66 - Plastics News Issue November - 2024
P. 66
IN THE NEWS
edged that some of the most dangerous types products. Chemical recycling differs from me-
of plastic are stirs, cups, and packaging material chanical one, it is not for instance turning plastics
designed for one-time use. They are intended into pellets so as to make new shapes. There’s a
for a short-term application but are deployed in change in the chemical constitution of the plastic
the environment for up to 200 years. and breaks it back to the individual units known
as monomers. These monomers can then be re-
All kinds of plastic wastes turn out to have a assembled into new high quality plastic material
number of impacts on the environment. People or any other useful chemicals.
and wildlife as well can be affected, marine life
in particular, will find a piece of plastic looking This creative process make it possible to recy-
like any of its regular food items, which in the cle more types of plastic, especially those that
end may harm or even kill it. Also, when plastics cannot be recycled mechanically, for instance
reach their decomposition stage of micro plas- contaminated or composite types of plastics. It
tics, they are absorbed into the food chain-inter- also provides a remedy for end-of-life mechani-
face ranging from fish to the freshwater human cal recycled plastics that are no longer reusable
drinking water. due to decline in quality.
Recycling procedures which are utilized com- Types of Chemical Recycling Processes
monly proved to be quite useful but are confined
to handle various kinds of plastic waste. There are several different methods of chemi-
cal recycling, each with its unique process for
The former and most prevalent form involves breaking down plastic waste:
collecting, sorting, washing and remelting of a. Pyrolysis: On the basis of the recycling
plastics to produce new products. However this mechanism, the chemical recycling can be
process has the following drawbacks. Only se- divided into the following types: At the mo-
lected types of plastics can be recycled, and ment they encompass: pyrolysis, hydroly-
the quality of the resulting recycled plastic di- sis, solvolysis and methanolysis. There is
minishes with time. Some of the plastics for in- the process of massively heating the plastic
stance multi-layer packaging and those that are waste with minimum involvement of oxygen
contaminated cannot go through the normal to split it into molecules by-products like oil,
route of being recycled mechanically. This is why gases and char. The products formed can
chemical recycling can step in and help out, it be burnt to produce energy or vice versa be
accomplishes a similar task yet is not an inferior recycled to other raw materials to manufac-
process in any way. ture plastics. Pyrolysis is also effective with
What is Chemical Recycling? plastics that are difficult to recycle by me-
chanical methods hence it can be used in re-
The actual term chemical recycling comprises cycling of plastics such as polyethylene (PE)
a series of technologies that are considered to and polypropylene (PP).
recycle plastic waste through its depolymeriza-
tion, that is to say, the molecules comprising the b. Gasification: The process known as gasifica-
material are dissected to create new ones that tion involves denying the plastic waste ox-
can be used to make new plastics or valuable ygen at the same time exposing it to high
66 PLASTICS NEWS November 2024
