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Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management

This work presents a hand sorting trial of Austrian plastic packaging, which showed that according to an extrapolation of the 170,000 t separately collected waste collected in Austria, 30 wt% are flexible 2D plastic packaging. Further, the applications for these materials have been catalogued. The c...

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Autores principales: Koinig, Gerald, Rutrecht, Bettina, Friedrich, Karl, Barretta, Chiara, Vollprecht, Daniel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9027166/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35458302
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym14081553
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author Koinig, Gerald
Rutrecht, Bettina
Friedrich, Karl
Barretta, Chiara
Vollprecht, Daniel
author_facet Koinig, Gerald
Rutrecht, Bettina
Friedrich, Karl
Barretta, Chiara
Vollprecht, Daniel
author_sort Koinig, Gerald
collection PubMed
description This work presents a hand sorting trial of Austrian plastic packaging, which showed that according to an extrapolation of the 170,000 t separately collected waste collected in Austria, 30 wt% are flexible 2D plastic packaging. Further, the applications for these materials have been catalogued. The composition of these films was evaluated via Fourier-Transformed Infrared Spectroscopy, which showed that 31% of all films were made of polyethene, 39% of polypropylene, 11% of polyethene–polyethene terephthalate composite, and 8% of a polyethene–polypropylene composite, further resulting in the calculation that of all flexible packaging, 20 wt% are multilayer films. These findings were used to calculate the latent potential for raising the current recycling quota of 25.7% to the mandated rate of 55% in 2030. To this end, scenarios depicting different approaches to sorting and recycling small films were evaluated. It was calculated that through improving the sorting of films the recycling rate could be increased to 35.5%. This approach allows for the recycling of monolayer films by avoiding contamination with foreign materials introduced by multilayer films that impede the recyclates’ mechanical properties. The evaluation showed that sorting multilayer films of this fraction could raise the recycling quota further to 38.9%.
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spelling pubmed-90271662022-04-23 Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management Koinig, Gerald Rutrecht, Bettina Friedrich, Karl Barretta, Chiara Vollprecht, Daniel Polymers (Basel) Article This work presents a hand sorting trial of Austrian plastic packaging, which showed that according to an extrapolation of the 170,000 t separately collected waste collected in Austria, 30 wt% are flexible 2D plastic packaging. Further, the applications for these materials have been catalogued. The composition of these films was evaluated via Fourier-Transformed Infrared Spectroscopy, which showed that 31% of all films were made of polyethene, 39% of polypropylene, 11% of polyethene–polyethene terephthalate composite, and 8% of a polyethene–polypropylene composite, further resulting in the calculation that of all flexible packaging, 20 wt% are multilayer films. These findings were used to calculate the latent potential for raising the current recycling quota of 25.7% to the mandated rate of 55% in 2030. To this end, scenarios depicting different approaches to sorting and recycling small films were evaluated. It was calculated that through improving the sorting of films the recycling rate could be increased to 35.5%. This approach allows for the recycling of monolayer films by avoiding contamination with foreign materials introduced by multilayer films that impede the recyclates’ mechanical properties. The evaluation showed that sorting multilayer films of this fraction could raise the recycling quota further to 38.9%. MDPI 2022-04-11 /pmc/articles/PMC9027166/ /pubmed/35458302 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym14081553 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Koinig, Gerald
Rutrecht, Bettina
Friedrich, Karl
Barretta, Chiara
Vollprecht, Daniel
Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management
title Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management
title_full Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management
title_fullStr Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management
title_full_unstemmed Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management
title_short Latent Recycling Potential of Multilayer Films in Austrian Waste Management
title_sort latent recycling potential of multilayer films in austrian waste management
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9027166/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35458302
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym14081553
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