Scientist and engineers are always producing better materials by manipulating the molecular structure that affects the final polymer produced. Manufacturers and processors introduce various fillers, reinforcements, and additives into the base polymers, expanding product possibilities.
Polymers are divided into two distinct groups: thermoplastics and thermo sets. The majority of polymers are thermoplastic, meaning that once the polymer is formed it can be heated and reformed over and over again. This property allows for easy processing and facilitates recycling. The other group thermo sets, cannot be remolded. Every polymer has very distinct characteristics, but most follow the following general attributes. :
Polymers can be very resistant to chemicals.
Polymers can be bother thermal and electrical insulators.
Generally, polymers are very light in weight with varying digress of strength
Polymers can be processed in various ways to produce thin fibers or very intricate parts.
Plastics deteriorate but never decompose completely, but neither does glass, paper of aluminum. Plastics make up 9.5% of out trash but weight compared to paper, which constitutes 38.9%. Glass and metals make up 13.9% by weight.
An option for plastics that are not recycled, especially those that are soiled, such as microwave food wrap, can be a waste-to-energy system (WTE). The controlled combustion of polymers produces heat energy. The heat energy produced by the burning plastics not only can be converted to electrical energy but also helps burn the wet trash that is present. Paper also produces heat when burned but not as much as plastics. Polymers affect every day life. These materials have so many varied characteristics and applications.
The number of plastics recycling businesses has tripled since 1990. Recycling of post consumer products is frequently viewed as the only viable solution for managing society’s waste/ however, the attributes that make plastics a convenient, resource efficient and versatile material to recycle. There are many types of plastic products form water bottles to the plastics in our computers. Each plastic in these products have unique properties, which make them suitable for a particular application but cannot be treated in the same way once they are disposed. Beyond recycling, there are other resource conservation and waste management strategies, such as energy and fuel recovery. These options provide a valuable complement to conventional recycling at the post consumer stage.
Advanced recycling: the term chemical recycling is most often applied to the depolymerisation of certain condensation or addition polymers back to monomers. Examples of these types of plastics are polyesters. Long chain polymers can be treated chemically and thermal to break the chains into short segments. When the treatment is done to re-create the chemicals form, which the polymers were initially made, we call that feedstock. If the treatment breaks the polymers into assortments of chemicals species, it is up to the processor to decide whether to recover specific chemicals for feedstock use or use the assortment of chemical species for fuel or use some combination of both end products. The resulting chemicals can then be used to make new plastics that can be in disguisable form the initial or virgin polymers.
Feedstock recycling: the thermal depolymerisation of polyolefin’s and substituted polyolefin’s (large molecules made up primarily of the elements carbon and hydrogen such as polyethylene) into a variety of smaller hydrocarbon intermediates is termed as feedstock recycling. A mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, is an important byproduct of a special class of feedstock recycling processes
It can all be used, as chemical feedstock’s for further up gradation to commercial products ay oil refineries and chemical plants. Recycling processes appear to be technically robust enough to warrant further development in the future. At this stage the technology is still developing.