Recycling of Barrier/Multilayer Scrap, 1990 Polymers, Laminations & Coatings Conference Proceedings

The development of plastic industry especially packaging converting industry including multilayer materials of the simple nature or with barrier layers made by coextrusion and different forming technologies, has generated substantial growth. Multilayer products are available in the packaging industry with a spectrum of plastics and containers.

As a result of current interest and needs for such multilayer products, intensive studies are being made on the feasibility for the recovery of scrap which contains different resins to useful products or being buried in one of the coextruded layers as functional layer or being blended with virgin polymers in one of the layers of the multilayer product.

Recycling of multilayer structures containing barrier resin is technically more complex than recycling of scrap containing two stable different polymers.

This paper has the target to describe the possibility and the development of a system for primary scrap -technological scrap- being reused in one of the layers of coextruded materials or being used as new useful products.

We will describe the main models based on flat die extrusion, it means: coextrusion coating, and film coextrusion, sheet coextrusion.

All models can be applied to simple extrusion also.