New polymer additives may improve plastic recycling and make new materials
New polymer additives may improve plastic recycling and make new materials
Plastic recycling is becoming a major ecological problems today, more and more people realize the importance of waste plastic recycling, the researchers are now looking for ways to reuse existing plastic, in order to reduce the waste of material or find more environmentally friendly alternatives. Not long ago, a team of researchers led by researchers at Cornell university solved a problem that severely hampered the recycling of plastics. Jeffrey Smith, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell university. Geoffrey Coates has been talking about recycling, noting that only 2% of plastic is recycled. That means nearly a third of discarded plastic is in the ecological environment, and 14 percent is used for burning or recycling, while 40 percent of plastic is used as garbage in landfills. These dismal data on plastic recycling have inspired coates to seek better ways to recycle plastic. One of them is through the cooperation with the university of Minnesota, the researchers developed a block polymer, when added to two of the world's top plastic mixture, can produce a kind of new mechanical toughness of polymer can solve the existing problems. Are serious problems in the plastic recycling for many years, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) accounts for two-thirds of the world of plastic, they both have different chemical structure, and because no fused the two technical, recovery after they cannot be used again. The success of Minnesota's Cornell team could change that. When a small amount is produced by the combination of four block or four block polymer added to the alternating segment of polyethylene and polypropylene, the material is superior to their two block or test the strength of the two block polymers. The result, they say, is that many researchers have tried for years but haven't succeeded. To test the material, the team used different multi-block polymers as the glue to weld the two plastic strips together and then mechanically separate them. The welds made of binary polymer are relatively fast failure, but the welds made of the four block additives are kept well and the plastic bars are not broken.
