RECYCLING | ADDITIVES
Stabilisers and property and process improvers are hard at work to protect plastics through use, recycling, and reuse. Jennifer Markarian writes about current products
Let’s go round again: additives revive plastics
The trend towards increasing recycled plastic content continues as countries move toward plastics circularity. At the same time, there is a growing expectation that recycled plastics should have good performance. Additives play a key role in enabling compounders and recycled resin suppliers to meet this expectation. “The gap between virgin plastic and recycled plastic performance needs to be closed not only by boosting performance of recycled-virgin blends by compounding, but also by ensuring in the recycling step of the value chain that the best quality recycled resin is produced,” said Jeroen Frederix, SI Group Market Development Manager, Circular Economy. “It is important to ensure polymers are well protected during the recycling process, where unfortunately today we see that polymers after a first lifetime [may] enter the recycling process with insufficient protection against further heat cycles.” To this end, SI Group has developed its Evercycle
www.compoundingworld.com
product portfolio for plastics recyclers which include optimised stabilisation packages for specific material streams and end applications. Frederix points to Evercycle PET-103D for PET
bottle-to-bottle recycling as an example. During recy- cling, PET thermally degrades, which generates volatiles (such as acetaldehyde [AA]), causes loss of intrinsic viscosity (IV), and leads to yellowing. “Currently in the mechanical recycling process, the rebuilding of the food-grade rPET can be supported by adding blue colorants to offset the yellowing,” said Frederix. “A downside of the blue colorants is that they also negatively affect the material’s light- ness (L*), so when being recycled multiple times, the PET bottle loop becomes darker and darker. Here, stabilisers offer a novel approach for PET recyclers in preventing problems from occurring by stabilising the PET polymer chain in the recycling process, not only preventing yellowing but also reducing AA creation and IV losses during recycling.”
� October 2024 | COMPOUNDING WORLD 45
Main image: Gabriel-Chemie has introduced the MaxiLoop range of compatibilisers for plastics waste streams comprising different materials
IMAGE: GABRIEL-CHEMIE
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