(337cs) Waste Plastic Characterization to Support Recycling

According to Greenpeace USA report, US households generated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, out of which only 2.4 million tons (4.7%) were recycled. There are many barriers to recycling. One is low-cost automated sorting of mixed plastic fractions into usable fractions.

Our industry partners are developing AI assisted sorting of mixed waste plastic using machine vision. A key performance metric is the determination of purity and contaminant identification in the sorted fraction.

Solvent dissolution facilitates fractionation of polymer mixtures into major and minor categories and complements other analytical methods. The utility of solvent dissolution, TGA, DSC, CHNS, ICP, FT-IR, and other methods to characterize the sorted waste plastics from municipal solid waste facilities will be the focus of the presentation. Contamination even below 1% can be determined by solvent dissolution followed by functional group analysis and crystallinity measurement. The utility of the characterization data such as polymer composition, thermal stability, crystallinity, and metal contamination for the application of pyrolytic conversion of plastics to fuel will also be discussed.