Plastic waste has become one the biggest challenges impacting humankind. Low degradation rates of plastic leads to prolonged environmental problems, and there are climate change issues with the release of greenhouse gas both during the production, recycling and environmental degradation. Different recycling methods exist, but only a few are commercially employed. All current methods have shown some commercial promise; however, they have significant limitations.
It is well-known that PET recycling is hampered by issues of PET quality deteriorating on recycling using current recycling methods. These issues will be addressed using a new proprietary technology developed at UNSW by Dr Agarwal / Prof Zetterlund that entails conversion of PET (waste PET and virgin PET) into an aqueous dispersion of submicron-sized PET nanoparticles without exposing the PET to high shear forces and high temperature. This method allows simple mixing of an aqueous dispersion of recycled PET with an aqueous dispersion of virgin PET. The mixed dispersion can subsequently be converted to the corresponding bulk material in the form of pellets etc. Overall, this project relates to the objective of exploring the strategy to prepare mixed (virgin:recycled) PET with the highest possible amount of recycled PET for potential use in food and beverage packaging applications.
