2023 - IIT Madras develops a technique to merge diverse plastics into strong & recyclable materials

In new research that could potentially revolutionise the #plastics #recycling industry, researchers at IIT Madras, Columbia University, and Colorado State University in the US have developed a technique to merge diverse #plastics into strong and #recyclable materials.

With the new technique, different types of plastics can be combined to produce new composite plastics that are not only strong but can also be reprocessed and recycled. Traditional plastic recycling methods have some issues due to the immiscibility of diverse #polymers. The group of researchers employed a specially designed universal dynamic crosslinker (UDC) to successfully blend usually incompatible plastics.

Prof. Tarak Patra, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras, told PTI, “Although India’s plastic recycling rate of 13 percent exceeds the global average of 9 percent, there are technical hurdles hindering further progress in plastic recycling. Plastic waste is made of many different kinds of polymers, and these polymers do not mix easily.” “Thus, recycling currently involves a lot of separation, which is time-consuming and inefficient. If all the plastics can be made compatible, they can be treated as one unit without the need for segregation,” Patra said.

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