Understanding Damage During Mechanical Recycling

Challenge

Mechanical recycling is an efficient method to remake plastics and extend their lifetimes beyond single-use applications. However, degradation during the recycling process can often lead to manufacturing inconsistencies and low confidence for product performance when using recycled materials. Despite the maturity of the plastics and recycling industries, the origin of degradation during plastics processing is often ambiguous and ascribed to a combination of thermal, oxidative and mechanical sources. This ambiguity can lead to a misdiagnosis of manufacturing challenges for recycled materials and results in slow optimization of processing conditions or reduced quality of the final products.

Solution

Supported by the SMI Hub, our interdisciplinary team brings together expertise from across chemistry, polymer physics, and plastic engineering, to develop novel tools that are capable of rapid, in-line analysis of plastic degradation over the course of its processing. Using these tools, we aim to develop general strategies to mitigate the mechanical degradation of recycled plastics to improve their material properties and increase the number of times they can be usefully recycled.

Impact

Over the next 4 years, our team aims to validate our novel mechanochemical tools and to establish commercial partnerships to pilot the technology. By developing methods to rapidly evaluate the sources of degradation during mechanical recycling, we strive to improve the quality of recycled feedstocks across the UK, helping industry meet increasingly stringent regulatory standards while maintaining competitiveness in the global markets.