W2 PLASTICS

Recovery of High-Purity Plastics From Complex WasteStreams = Higher Economic Recycle Rates

W2 PLASTICS

A team from Delft University of Technology has developed a technology to provide plastics recyclers with a separation process for packaging waste.

There is a large potential reservoir of used plastic debris which does not degrade in the environment; instead it tends to accumulate, creating long-term environmental problems. These plastic wastes are complex mixtures of materials and difficult and expensive to recycle in an effective way. For this reason, only a small fraction of plastics wastes sold are recycled into products where the recycled replaces virgin resins. The reason for this huge gap is the low efficiency of the current sorting and separation technologies for the secondary plastics, which recover little value from the polymer, and in consequence create a low incentive to recycle.

Plastics production requires significant quantities of resources, both as a raw material (oil) and to power the production process (about two kg oil are necessary to produce 1 kg of plastics). By turning plastics wastes into high quality secondary raw material resource the W2Plastics solution can effectively decrease the amount of plastics which are currently either improperly disposed of or burned in incinerators.

W2Plastics technology is based on a newly developed Magnetic Density Separation (MDS) technology which recovers high-purity plastics from complex wastes at low cost. The most important feature of this new concept derives from its ability to accurately separate many different materials in a single process step, using an environmentally friendly and cheap process fluid. Because of its intrinsic flexibility, this technology can easily be implemented to separate any kind of plastic materials in an economically sound way.

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A robust MDS pilot plant able to recover more than 90% of high-grade polymers from complex wastes has been built and tested in an industrial environment. The MDS technology can be effectively used also to purify waste streams from the electric and electronic industry, the mining industry and the agriculture industry.