A solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation scheme for the recycling of up to ten polymers from post-industrial mixed plastic waste

Abstract

Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP^TM) 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.