Reprocessing and recycling of materials to reduce or eliminate landfill waste are essential processes no industry can ignore nowadays, from both an economic and environmental point of view. This is a greaterchallenge for users of PE-X materials compared with thermoplastics materials. PE-X pipes and materials can be recycled but the characteristics of the material are different from thermoplastics due to crosslinking. Crosslinked materials cannot be melted for processing to manufacture other products, but recycled thermoplastics materials can be. Mechanical Recovery – simply grinding any type of PE-X material to a fine powder enables the product to be used as a filler in other plastics or compositions for other products. Such products would not include pressure pipes but for less critical articles such as decking, pallets and sheet. Chemical Recovery – A special solution for silane cross linked PE-Xb has been developed: The chemical Si-O-Si bond can be broken down under conditions of temperature and pressure using super critical alcohols as described in Japanese Hitachi patents. This concept has been further developed by Hitachi using compounding techniques but the commercial viability of such techniques has not been demonstrated. Thermal Recovery – is an attractive option for any PE-X material independent of the production process as the material has a similar calorific value to oil at 45 MJ/kg. Chemical recovery requires organised schemes which generally may not be in place today. For thermal recovery the required infrastructure and control needs to be in place. However mechanical recovery is something that a manufacturer of PE-X products can easily set up and implement into his process for simply shredding and pulverising waste and off spec product.
Contact:
European PEX Association, CH-8802 Kilchberg
contact@pexassociation.net | www.pexassociation.net
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