PRA August 2016 Recycling

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Recycling

Defeating the recycling challenge and winning it Today’s recycling innovations enable wastage to become an integral part of environmental solutions. Featured are Dow’s latest compatibiliser for barrier films, a single-step process for recycling PC into PSU, a process for recycling landfilled plastic waste into hydrocarbon Plaxx, Erema’s Xtreme Renew recycling system for recycling rPET into preforms and Bühler’s latest sorting technology for rPET.

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ailing competitors are all set to covet the win at the forthcoming Summer Olympics in August in Brazil. But the slew of rubbish could slow down or damage boats. While the raw sewage at Marina da Gloria has been cleaned up, out on Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, sailors are still encountering rubbish like plastic bags. Certainly, Australian champion sailors, Mat Belcher and Will Ryan, would not want a repeat of the 2014 incident in Rio when a plastic bag had snagged on the foil of their dinghy. It almost cost them a gold medal when they dropped to last place after being forced to stop and clear the rubbish. They caught up enough places to secure the points to win gold, but it could have been disastrous. However, clean-up initiatives, are only winning part of the battle against marine pollution. A study by UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation finds that the more than 300 million tonnes of waste produced in 2014 could double over the next two decades. Today, waste gathered from clean-ups is no longer routed to dumpsites, and thanks to closed loop technologies for recycling, useful material is recovered, and most of it goes back to the manufacturing stream as virgin inputs. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Waste Reduction Model (WARM) says that an increase in recycling leads to a displacement of virgin sourced materials. Recycling common plastic types such as HDPE, PET and LDPE allows for as much as 90% of recovered materials.

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AUGUST 2016

While efforts to recycle waste plastics are flourishing, it is important to note that not all waste plastics are easily recycled. The EMF report reveals that globally, only 10% of the plastic produced is recycled. Recouping LDPE/PE barrier films One of the common materials that pose a challenge to recyclers is LDPE. The American Chemistry Council (ACC) explains that each of the resins used to produce films has unique properties that ideally should be preserved in the recycling process if film is going to be put to use in higher end applications. ACC says, “When an LLDPE stretch wrap and LDPE shrink wrap are mixed together, the material will not be acceptable for manufacturing new stretch or shrink wrap, but it probably will be acceptable for manufacturing plastic lumber, some agricultural films or even some high-gauge trash can liners and bags. What recyclers have to realise, though, is that as material moves down the chain, its value decreases.” Meanwhile, PE flexible barrier packaging, containing polar polymers such as EVOH or polyamide, has posed unique recycling challenges due to the variety of materials generally used as part of its make-up. But that is set to change, according to Dow Chemical with its RecycleReady technology that enables recycling of multi-material, multi-layered pouches, flow wrappers, and barrier films. It incorporates Retain polymer modifiers, a key enabler/barrier compatibiliser for the recyclability of the packages, according to Dow. Dow’s new technology allows for the recycling of stand-up pouches

Created through a collaboration with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) and other industry members, Dow says its technology helps converters create barrier pouches that answer consumer demand for more recyclable


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