Removing the Black Hole in Plastics Recycling

Summary

The past decade has made it abundantly clear that the human race must speed up its transition to a circular economy for plastics, where this valuable resource that is intertwined with our life’s evolutionary fabric, never turns into waste or pollution. As stakeholders in the plastic industry unfold a common vision of “No Plastics in Nature”, it is encouraging to note the progress made by manufacturers, corporates and governments across the globe in setting base-line targets for plastic waste reduction and improving its proper end-of-life management.

Yet, beyond goal-setting, the next essential imperative will be to efficiently measure and track circular actions and progress as we continue inching closer to 2030. By introducing waste traceability in recycled plastics, using digital verification of material composition and chain-of-custody documents through waste conversion supply-chains, there exists a viable and scalable solution to improve plastic waste management at a country, state, town or street level while inspiring more support from end-consumers too.

In verifying how sustainability commitments translate into real action, the need for reliable authentication systems that track how waste is being cut or managed across the plastic value-chain is also abundantly clear: Waste transparency supports circular economy principles in three major areas, viz. ensuring ethical and quality sourcing through provenance details, determining recycled material compositions to understand fitment for recycling and tracking material flows for better waste management on a system level.

By enabling sharing of certified data on waste collection to conversion digitally, plastic producers, brand owners and recyclers have the opportunity to trigger higher assurance and confidence in their recycled plastic portfolios and processes. With radical transparency, the outcome intended is equal stakeholder accountability and participation in keeping plastics in our economy and out of the environment.

In the next 30 years, the world will be discarding about 3.4 billion tons of total waste as estimated by the World Bank. That’s a high 70% jump from 2.01 billion tons disposed in 2016. If countries and industries are to make an effective transition away from a linear economy, validating recycled content claims made by inter-connecting stakeholders through an authenticated, traceable loop, is a reasonable way forward to trigger self-perpetuation.

Towards this end, AVI Global Plast has built a digital platform for waste traceability that shares Chain-of-Custody overview, documentation and certifications, right from waste collection to a new package. Such traceability can chiefly serve regulatory compliance, consumer safety and brand integrity needs. The latter especially holds relevance as regulators worldwide step-up screenings against “greenwashing”.

With a one-source digital dashboard for recycled plastics, brand owners can track circular packaging through their transformative journeys with ease. Besides offering key certification & documentation, AVI’s waste traceability platform is designed to let partners access to raw material break-up (post-consumer waste, post-industrial waste, virgin content) for measuring sustainability progress. In terms of environmental impact, estimates of CO2 emission savings, landfill avoidance and the number of post-consumer PET bottles recycled are also made available.

Since going circular would heavily rely on inspired and informed consumers, triggering positive behavioral change towards more recycling and segregation at source is crucial too. Here, a digitalized recycled packaging platform like AVI Trace makes QR codes available for every batch of recycled packaging supplied. This QR code can be printed on finished packages, letting consumers access complete packaging provenance and positive environmental impacts at the touch of a smartphone. The expected consequence is to influence purchase decision-making and loyalty towards more transparent and reliable sustainability claims by brands.

In summary, this white paper highlights the needs and benefits of introducing radical transparency in recycled plastic packaging value-chains. It supports the collective imperative of achieving circularity by the turn of this decade and sheds light on why waste traceability matters today, what loopholes must first be closed to achieve full circularity and the potential business benefits that may be reaped with improved data confidence through digitalized waste management pathways.

Summary

How do you walk the walk after you’ve talked the talk? You pledged your company to sustainability goals such as increasing plastic recycle content and reducing carbon footprint – but, how do you get there? There’s more to Plastics Technology Innovation than Industry 4.0. There’s just so much you can do with software and hardware. Optimization cannot be achieved without first making more efficient use of the materials in the products you make

My mission in life is to teach the more efficient use of raw materials and – as an entrepreneur who has been signing payroll checks for half-a-century – and an inventor with thousands of global patents by me and my customers – I will show how it can be done. We will look at how polymers are made – and how they are compounded – and provide solutions that will reduce cleaning and sorting and allow you to mix all the polymers and fillers in a melt compounder and make a better product faster.

The extruder becomes a reactor for coupling and catalysis of all the materials in the recycle fed into the hopper. Here’s how:

If Ziegler, Natta & Kaminisky used Titanium and Aluminum catalysts to produce Addition Polymers;

If Titanate catalysts are used to produce Condensation Polymers;

If heteroatom Titanate coupling agents compatibilize Fillers with Polymers;

Monte claims: Why not use Titanate and Aluminum as a catalyst and coupling agent for compatibilizing the Fillers and Polymers (both Addition and Condensation) used in the Plastic to be Recycled.

Current plastic recycling and sustainability goals are limited by the intrinsic incompatibility of many polymers and the negative effect of fillers and impurities on end-product properties thus requiring a high degree of expensive sorting, separating and cleaning. Another barrier is the melt processing of polymers causes chain scissoring resulting in recycle and regrind materials having inferior properties compared to virgin. Current compatibilizers offered to recyclers are based on co-polymers or maleic anhydride modified polymers. Co-polymer compatibilizers require extensive sorting to match up the polarities of the recycled materials and maleic anhydride depolymerizes condensation polymers such as PET and Nylon obviating their use in post-consumer recycle. MAH technology claims to be a coupling agent, which is true for rebuilding molecular weight – but, misnomered when applied to coupling filler and organic interfaces.

Ziegler–Natta catalysts have been used in the commercial manufacture of various polyolefins since 1956. Ziegler showed a combination of TiCl4 and Al(C2H5)2Cl gave comparable activities for the production of polyethylene. Natta used crystalline α-TiCl3 in combination with Al(C2H5)3 to produce the first isotactic polypropylene. Kaminsky discovered that titanocene and related complexes emulated some aspects of these Ziegler-Natta catalysts but with low activity. He subsequently found that high activity could be achieved upon activation of these metallocenes with methylaluminoxane (MAO) −[O−Al(CH3)]n). Monte uses either a Monoalkoxy or Neoalkoxy Titanate in combination with Al2SIO5 mixed metal catalyst in Powder & Pellet forms for In Situ Macromolecular Repolymerization and Copolymerization in the melt – i.e. Polymer Compatibilization… AND … The Neoalkoxy Titanate proton coordinates with inorganic fillers and organic particulates to couple/compatibilize the dissimilar interfaces at the nano-atomic level thus reducing the need for expensive sorting of materials in Recycled Plastics.

About the Speaker

Salvatore J. Monte, President of Kenrich Petrochemicals, Inc.; Bachelor Civil Engineering-Structures, Manhattan College; M.S.-Polymeric Materials, NYU Tandon School of Engineering; Member Plastics Hall of Fame 2021-the Plastics Academy; Society Plastics Engineers Fellow & Honored Service Member; Licensed P.E.; Plastics Industry Association Recycle Subcommittee-Compatibilizers; Board of Governors, Plastics Pioneers Association-MTS Newsletter Chair; 32-U.S. Patents – most recent US Patent 2020/0071230 A1 dated Mar. 5, 2020; Lectured Worldwide on Titanate & Zirconate Coupling agents; 450-American Chemical Society CAS Abstracts of published “Works by S.J. Monte”; Classified Top Secret for Solid Rocket Fuel and Energetic Composites Patents for the Insensitive Munitions Program; Lifetime member of the National Defense Industrial Association; Lifetime Member of the BOD-SPE ThermoPlastics Materials & Foams Division – Annual Scholarship named: Salvatore J. Monte Thermoplastic Materials & Foams Division Scholarship; External Advisory Committee-UCF NanoScience Technology Center; former Chairman of the NYRG-ACS Rubber Division; former President of the SPE P-NJ Section; Testified several times before Congress on Trade and IP Protection; Business Man of the Year 2015-Bayonne Chamber of Commerce; Federated Society Coatings Technology C. Homer Flynn Award for Technical Excellence; Recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award; Rotary Paul Harris Fellow; UA Million Miler; Member PIA, ACMA, SPE, ACS, ACS Rubber Division, ASCE, AIChE, SAMPE, the GRAPHENE COUNCIL, the Vinyl Sustainability Council.

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