How Analytical Chemistry is Enabling Efficient Polymer Recycling
How Analytical Chemistry is Enabling Efficient Polymer Recycling
Sustainability-conscious customers are increasing pressure on companies to reduce plastic packaging waste, and to use more renewable resources. Companies are also taking greater responsibility for ensuring their products and practices have minimal impact on the planet. In turn, those pressures are being pushed upstream to packaging producers, and from them to polymer manufacturers and their raw materials suppliers.
Regulatory pushes for recycling are starting to add pressure, too. The European Commission’s single-use plastics directive mandates minimum levels of recycled content for PET bottles, for example, and the commission is currently revising its Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, which is expected to apply similar mandates for all plastic packaging. Trade association Plastics Europe has suggested 30% would be appropriate and a similar figure has been suggested by the American Chemistry Council in the US.
Developing greener chemicals and materials to enable a shift to more sustainable practices presents numerous challenges. Analytical chemistry plays an important, if often unrecognised, part in meeting those challenges – from ensuring that new materials are as safe as the materials they are replacing, to assessing whether a polymer made from renewable feedstocks performs as well as its established petroleum-derived counterparts. Analytical techniques also have a huge role to play in plastic recycling, by giving an insight into how safe reprocessed materials are, and how they behave.
‘When you reformulate a plastic with renewables, is it still safe?’ says Ben MacCreath, strategic programme development manager at Waters Corporation. ‘Changing to renewable sources means a whole new set of unwanted by-products from plastics will need to be captured, identified and quantified – that’s a huge task for the analytical lab. People rely on our analytics to work out what’s in there, and how much of it there is. What can leach out into the environment? Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS), for example, can be used to detect problematic compounds that might migrate out of the plastic.’
