SUSTAINABILITY | PVC


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Nekker, a Belgian PVC medical waste sorting system, opened and had processed 1m tonne by the end of the year. Meanwhile in France, a number of hospitals are working with Terra, a circular economy specialist, and Medtronic studying the feasibility of recycling. Dialysis lines, soft PVC medical devices and rigid PVC video-laryngoscope blades, which are widely used in medical settings, could make a significant contribution to medical PVC recycling in the future. Many doses of medication are safely delivered in aluminium/PVC blister packs and the VinylPlus PharmPak project aims to show in a study how effectively blister packs can be recycled. Larger scale trials at Fraunhofer IVV, Dresden, Germany, found that dissolution technology could be used with feed from blister packs to successfully make rigid films. These could be re-used in blister packs. Mechanically


recovered materials from blister packs can be used in profiles and PVC pipes.


Above: Legacy additives in waste PVC applications, such as cables, are the focus of research work in the PVC4- Cables initiative


Plasticiser presence Recycling is not about reusing material made yesterday with modern additives, materials with legacy additives will find their way into PVC waste streams for many years and VinylPlus continued to devise ways to manage legacy products in waste streams building on work of the past 20 years. The European Plasticisers association commis- sioned a scientific study on the concentration of, and kinetics of the release of, plasticisers such as DINP, PIDP, DOA and DOTP which are currently being scrutinised by NGOs, the ECHA and other key European decision-makers. Work to detect and sort legacy additives continued with PVC4Cables, EuPC and VinylPlus in the application of hand-held detectors using near-infrared hyperspectral technology (NFIR). There are plans to automate this by applying


artificial intelligence machine learning to the results to eventually detect and identify the different plasticisers used. A separate strand based on X-ray fluorescence in-line at a pilot plant got underway in the year. This will tackle PVC cables, pipes, profiles and flooring containing phthalates and lead stabilisers. NFIR is being used in the projects to detect not only phthalates but also medium-chain chlorinated paraffins and X-rays to sort out the lead-based salts used as stabilisers. Results from Phoenix RTD show that this approach is good. Mechanical recycling is the main method of


preparing PVC for reuse. But other methods such as chemical and thermal processes were actively pursued in 2024. PVC is 43% hydrocarbon, and the Arcus project focussed on turning waste that could not be mechanically recycled into pyrolysis oil which could then be further processed by the petchem industry. A study by Arcus Greencycling Technologies, based in Ludwigsburg, Germany, found that “the pyrolysis oil produced from a mixed-plastic waste stream including 10% of PVC waste is of similar quality to an oil obtained without the addition of PVC”. This is pure enough to be used in steam crackers contributing to the circular economy for plastics. The company won gold in the Inovyn Awards announced in October for advancing PVC recycling through pyrolysis.


Dealing with chlorine The other component of PVC is chlorine. The VinylPlus RecoChlor programme turns PVC waste streams into energy and either sodium chloride – RecoSalt – in a dry process or, in a wet process hydrochloric acid. The salt process uses sodium hydrogen carbonate to scrub chlorine out of the gas generated by the process. Switzerland is mandating FLUWA technology at all of its munici- pal waste-to-energy (WTE) plants in 2026. This process uses the hydrochloric acid released during


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