Recycling of Plastic and Rubber Wastes, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Plastics, or synthetic polymers, are omnipresent in our daily lives and characterised by their advantageous material properties, such as the light weight, plasticity, and durability of thermoplastics and thermosets. In addition, elastomers—or rubber with longer, cross-linked polymer chains—have enabled reversible elasticity, opening up a wide array of applications from household products to the medical, energy, agriculture, construction, automotive, and avionic sectors. No one can imagine life without plastic currently, but today, we—and especially future generations—are confronted with the reality that improper waste collection and insufficient recycling have led to massive environmental pollution. For this reason, many countries as well as the United Nations have agreed to implement a range of measures, from sustainable production and consumption to waste prevention, collection, and recycling. Regarding CO₂ reduction and the Paris Climate targets, it is noted that this Special Issues does not address topics around waste-to-energy transition or waste incineration. Since innovative solutions should cover the entire value chain of plastics and the efforts of all scientific disciplines are required, this Special Issue focuses on the following topics:

• Recycling-oriented collection systems, especially for polymer composites and post-consumer wastes;
• Novel technologies for separation by polymer type to improve the quality of recyclates;
• Approaches towards sustainable value chains and process optimisation to advance feedstocks, molecules, materials/compounds/composites, and end-products;
• Innovations in mechanical recycling and remelting processes;
• Innovations in chemical recycling;
• Quality assessments of recycling products and the identification of emerging markets;
• The identification and risk assessment of substances of (very high) concern and emerging pollutants in recyclates and other polymeric recycling products (“trade-offs” by cross-contaminates);
• Material flow, socio-economic, and life or value cycle analysis of possible recycling routes in the circular economy.

Dr. Florian Part
Guest Editor

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• plastic recycling
• recycling of polymer composites
• recycling of packaging materials
• polymer degradation
• plastics from electronic equipment and WEE
• car tire recycling
• compounding
• re-granulation
• thermochemical recycling
• end-of-waste criteria of recycled plastic
• life cycle and socioeconomic assessment of recycling routes