Abstract

Pooja Wadhwani¹ and S. L. Garg²

At present polymer waste recycling essentially involves conversion of polymer waste material once again in pellet forms and incorporate the latter with virgin polymers to reuse it. From an economic point of view, this appears as an efficient recycling method, but as far as environmental problems, are considered, recycling truly involves regeneration of original raw materials, monomers or oligomers. This paper highlights the recent developments in this direction. The recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste could be used to recover many monomers such as dimethyl terephthalate (DMT), Terephthalic (TPA) and mono ethylene glycol (MEG) and many other chemicals. For monomer recovery, there is a range of feed stock recycling technologies, which involves unzipping the molecules of PET waste to take materials back to its original chemical components. Hence reutilization of polymer waste into monomers not only solves the environmental problems but also contribute significantly to the economy of the industry.

Polymer waste recycling; Monomer recovery; Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)

[ View HTML Full Text]