Most efforts aimed at recycling post-consumer plastics into high-value applications involve separating polymers by chemical type since the collection process necessarily results in commingled plastics, and mixed plastics have poor mechanical properties. In our prior work on acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), we have shown that when the impurities present in the plastic are either immiscible with it or require higher temperatures for processing, more than 99% purity is needed to prevent a very significant loss in impact strength and ductility; satisfying this extremely stringent requirement is prohibitively expensive, and alternative approaches are required. Here, we demonstrate that reinforcing recovered ABS with wood particulates is a viable method of recycling ABS from end-of-life electronics. When ABS obtained from computer monitors and keyboards was extrusion compounded with an equal amount of wood flour and appropriate additives, the measured mechanical properties were only slightly different from the corresponding properties of virgin ABS containing the same amount of wood reinforcement. Thus, the added reinforcement is able to properly mask the composition-dependent variation of mechanical properties of the base polymer.
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