Page 43 - Plastics News August 2026
P. 43
FEATURE NEWS
Mix Of Technologies Required To Recycle Engineering Plastics
A and homogenous waste streams. Mechanical re-
mix of recycling technologies is neces-
sary to ensure that a broad variety of
cycling is particularly well suited for packaging
plastics can be recycled. Unlike high-
volume commodity plastics such as the polyole- waste materials with large volumes of relatively
pure polymers and limited amounts of additives.
fins used in packaging, specialty plastics often Nevertheless, quality and hygiene requirements
require recycling technologies tailored to their can restrict the use of mechanically recycled
specific properties and applications. This ap- materials in new packing products. There are
plies, for example, to compounded polyolefins, limits to mechanical recycling for plastics used
polyurethanes and polyamides. These materials in technically demanding applications, as suit-
are designed for demanding uses, such as au- able waste streams are often scarce and plastic
tomotive applications, where standard plastics products frequently contain complex polymer
often do not provide the required performance. compositions.
This is the subject of a recent article by BASF re-
searchers in the prestigious U.S. academic jour- In contrast, solvent-based recycling is suitable
nal Accounts of Materials Research. for more complex waste plastics. In this process,
a solvent is used to selectively dissolve, sepa-
Achieving circularity for plastics from hetero- rate and clean one type of plastic. For example,
geneous waste streams requires two things: polyamides can be recovered from scrap vehi-
scalable sorting processes and the right mix of cles and used again in the manufacturing of new
recycling technologies. The suitable approach components.
depends on the material itself as well as on the
composition of the waste stream. “There is not Another important recycling technology is de-
one single standard technology for recycling polymerization. Here, plastics are broken down
engineering plastics,” emphasized lead author into their building blocks and put back togeth-
Dr. Bernhard von Vacano, head of the Plastics er again. BASF researchers have developed
Circularity Research Program at BASF. “Instead, loopamid, an innovative process that enables
it is crucial to have an intelligent mix of various circular textile-to-textile recycling of polyamide
6. Waste textiles can thus be transformed back
complementary technologies adapted to par- into polyamide fibers with the same high-quality
ticular plastic waste streams. The aim is to pro-
duce high-quality recycled materials and achieve standards as conventional polyamide 6. In early
a closed loop for engineering plastics.” 2025, BASF started up its first commercial loo-
pamid production facility at its Caojing site in
Various paths for plastic recycling Shanghai, China.
The most common technology is mechanical re- Plastics from very heterogeneous waste streams,
cycling, in which plastics are sorted, crushed and which often end up in incineration plants, can be
melted. This process is energy-efficient but does recycled in thermochemical processes, such as
not work with all plastic types and requires clean pyrolysis or gasification. These technologies re-
August 2026 PLASTICS NEWS 47
