During last decades, the great population increase worldwide
together with the need of people to adopt improved conditions of living led to
a dramatically increase of the consumption of polymers (mainly plastics). Materials
appear interwoven with our consuming society where it would be hard to imagine
a modern society today without plastics which have found a myriad of uses in
fields as diverse as household appliances, packaging, construction, medicine,
electronics, and automotive and aerospace components. A continued increase in
the use of plastics has led to increase the amount of plastics ending up in the
waste stream, which then becomes a threat to the
environment when the wastes are not decomposable(Hamad
et al., 2013). Environmental
issues are becoming prioritized in most government and community development
agendas. This has motivated the search for economically efficient and
ecologically effective material and energy recycling technologies (Petts, 2000). For example, the development and
use of strategic technologies driven by recycling credit scheme and the
imposition of the landfill tax to preserve landfill void for the future
disposal of untreatable residues in England(Read
et al.,1998). The potential
environmental impacts from plastics are categorized under global warming,
acidification, eutrophication and photochemical ozone creation(Bos et al.,
2007).
Polypropylene account for around 22% of the total production
of plastics in 2008, making it the second largest plastic produced beside polyethylene
which is 23.7% (Plastic waste Management
Institute, 2009).Polypropylene plastics or also known as polypropene,
are materials that are used worldwide since the 19th century (Scheirs, 1998). Polypropylene plastics are
widely used in our daily life as kitchen utensils, in toy productions, as
insulators for electrical devices, and also in industrial sites as safety
equipment(Gaurina-Medijumurec, 2014). Since polypropylene is widely used today in
industries and also at home, its production has increase drastically over the
years with increasing production of polypropylene made products. Therefore,
polypropylene products is a major contributor to the pollution in the world
today and now acting as a threat to both man and the whole biodiversity(Anthony, 2003). Itsnon-biodegradability makes
post-consumer polypropylene a major environmental issue. Disposal of
polypropylene waste by burning is not an environmentally friendly as the gases
released are toxic.
Several options have been considered to reduce polypropylene waste
such as reuse and recycling (Aurrekoetxeaet
al., 2011). The most common examples of reuse are with glass containers,
where milk and drinks bottles are returned to be cleaned and used again(Hamad et al.,
2013). Reuse is not widely practiced in relation to plastic packaging of
plastic products in general tend to be discarded after first use. However,
there are examples of reuse in the marketplace. For example, a number of
detergent manufacturers market refill sachets for bottled washing liquids and
fabric softeners. Consumers can refill and hence reuse their plastic bottles at
home, but in all of these cases the reusing of the plastic bottles and
containers do not continue for long time especially in the food applications
which makes recycling the best alternative.
Mechanical recycling and chemical recycling are the most widely
practiced of these methods. However, from industrial point of view, the
mechanical recycling is the most suitable because its low cost and reliability (Hamad et al., 2013). Mechanical
recycling also known as physical recycling, the plastic is ground down and then
reprocessed and compounded to produce a new component that may or may not be
the same as its original use (Cui and Forssberg,
2003).
As
to this, the recycling of post-consumer polypropylene polymer products is one
of the factors in reducing the amount of wastes material produced every day (Harold, 2003). However, until today, the
research on the mechanical properties of recycled polypropylene is not widely
explored in open literature. Besides that, not much input of the properties of
the recycled products either in mechanical or physical properties is comparable
with the pure polypropylene materials. Thus, the study on the mechanical
properties of the recycled polypropylene product is necessary.
The main objective
of this project are:
a) To design and
fabricate a mold for purpose of this research
b) To determine
how physical and chemical properties of polypropylene changes with recycling.