Study of Mechanical Properties of Recycled Polyethylene of High and Low Density

High and low density polyethylene materials constitute about 48% of total weight of plastics waste in Europe, that depends on the frequent use of these materials in packaging applications. This paper analyze the recycling effect on the mechanical properties of high and low density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE). A mechanical recycling process was tested for the plastics waste of high and low density polyethylene, then a tensile and impact tests were performed on different mixing ratios for each of the both materials ranging from 100% of the virgin material and up to 100% of the recycled material with a difference of 10% of the sample to the other. This paper discusses the tensile properties of tensile stress at the fracture, elongation and modulus of elasticity and the impact test results for HDPE and LDPE were compared with each other.

Can Non-Recyclable Plastic Waste Be Made Environmentally Sustainable?

After death the fraction of living matter which is not biodegraded (shells, bones, corals, carbonaceous deposits) becomes environmentally sustainable. This is not the case for plastics so that these wastes should be either recycled or made environmentally inert and stored in secure repositories as a resource for future generations. Chemistry has offered different solutions to this problem, and each brings about advantages and disadvantages when compared to other options. One further possible route could consist in the enrichment of the plastics waste in carbon content (“carbonization”), in analogy with the production of charcoal from wood, but we hope to stimulate a debate about all the other possible routes among scientists and engineers in the involved fields.

CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTIES OF PLASTIC WASTES: POSSIBILITY OF REINFORCING MATERIAL FOR SOIL

The current statistic shows that the percentage of plastic has significantly increased in the landfill and leads to environmental issues due to its non-biodegradable characteristic. However, these challenges can be turned into opportunities by reusing and recycling such waste for civil engineering applications. Hence, the focuses of this paper are to analyze the possibility of utilizing plastic waste in the soil reinforcement field using VOSviewer software and to evaluate the chemical, thermal, physical, and mechanical properties of the plastics (plastic straw, plastic bottle, and plastic bag). The data for this study was collected from the articles published in Scopus. Nevertheless, there are very limited articles that relate soil reinforcement with the thermal, chemical, physical, and mechanical properties of plastic waste. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the properties of plastic waste, which were plastic bottles, plastic bags, and plastic straw. The properties of plastic waste have been investigated to ensure it meets the requirement for soil reinforcement technology. The Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectra indicated the presence of carbon and hydrogen chains in those plastics waste. The plastic straw, plastic bag, and plastic bottle were degraded at 382°C, 456°C, and 449°C, respectively. This finding indicated that all of these plastics waste were thermally stable in the tropical temperature. Moreover, the densities of the plastics waste were less than 1 g/cm3, which contributes to the lightweight material and it’s very crucial to eliminating the self-loading from the reinforcement material.