Identification / Characterization of Constituents of Plastic Waste for Sustainable Waste Management

摘要

Economic growth over the last century has been matched by increases in the amount of wastes that society produces. Current predictions indicate a potential doubling of the generation of certain wastes by 2025. The environmental and the socio-economic impacts of waste management can be significant and wide-ranging; thus waste management is central to the sustainable development agenda. The creation of non-decaying waste materials of municipal solid waste has resulted in a waste disposal crisis. One conventional solution to this crisis lies in recycling waste in to useful products. Recycling has its own limitations of reuse and ultimately remains will be disposed off in to landfills. Research in to new and innovative use of waste materials is continually advancing. Many highway agencies, pvt. Organizations and individuals have completed or are in the process of completing a wide variety of studies and research projects concerning the feasibility, environmental suitability and performance of using recycled products in highway construction. But for using polymers in road construction characterization and identification of a material is the backbone for using them for suitable applications. The present paper focuses on the importance of characterization of waste. In recent years sophisticated instrumental techniques are playing an important role in identification and characterization of polymers. Advances in computer techniques have been combined with analytical instruments to give analytical speed, resolution and minimal sample requirements unimagined a few years ago. Ten different samples have been picked up from several kinds of waste so as to cover different categories of polymeric waste from the domestic, industrial as well as medical waste. The samples were characterized using thermal characterization techniques like DSC (differential scanning calorimetry), TGA (thermal gravimetric analysis) as well as FTIR (Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy). Laboratory studies are carried out for the identification and characterization of waste constituents with the change in property in a sample whilst that sample is subjected to a wide temperature regime. The melting and oxidative degradation behavior of plastic waste was obtained which helped in sustainable waste management by developing the various modified bitumen formulations of commercial importance in highway industry. With TGA mass of the sample has been recorded continuously while the temperature has been increased at a constant rate. The residue was identified with the help of instrumental methods.