Thermoset Plastics Recycling.. The next big scale up challenge for Chemical Engineers?

The impact of #plastics on the environment is well documented. Plastics are an integral part of modern life and annual growth is circa 3%. Plastics are not ‘going away’ but there is an increasing emphasis on #recycling plastics and the ‘circular economy’. Less well known is that circa 30% of plastics are #Thermoset Plastics … complex polymeric molecules that cannot melt and be recycled. Researchers are studying ways to recycle Thermoset Plastics .. either by redesigning the #polymers with ‘reorganizable crosslinks’ or reprocessing using ‘associative dynamic bonding’ (#vitrimers). A recent paper by researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA explores associative dynamic bonding… and this is an area that begs to be piloted and scaled up by #Chemical #Engineers to explore the practicality and cost of what could be a game changing process.