Research
RezyBond
PET recyclate as a multifunctional raw material for polyol-based adhesives
Project number: 01IF22951N
Project duration
From: 01.07.2023 To: 30.09.2025Description
The demand for recyclate and recycling quotas for plastic products is on the rise, resulting in significant price inflation for recycled goods and putting great pressure on plastics processing companies. The current practice of using (inferior) plastic mixtures in high-quality pure plastics through mechanical recycling processes will eventually become unsustainable due to the ageing processes between usage cycles.Chemical recycling allows impure material streams unsuitable for mechanical recycling to be reused for manufacturing new plastics or products with minimal use of new fossil raw materials and without any loss of quality. Therefore, it is crucial to recognise the industrial value of chemical recycling processes to achieve a true circular economy. Numerous synthesis routes for PET recycling have been tested on a laboratory batch scale. However, there are only a few plant concepts for transferring these routes to an industrial scale. This creates inhibition thresholds when investing in research and development, which can lead to decisive competitive disadvantages for SMEs in the medium term.
The project aims to enable SMEs to perform chemical recycling of PET on commercial, continuous twin-screw extruders. The approach of this project is to initially limit the process to the extraction of polyol mixtures using chemolysis between the PET and various diols. During chemical recycling, oligomeric polyols are produced instead of monomers to be used as components of adhesives for bonding PET.
A demonstrator plant will be available to interested SMEs at the end of the project, located at SKZ.
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