The Smart Way to Reclaim Plastics: New environmentally friendly materials incorporate post-consumer plastics as a feedstock, not regrind

摘要

GE Plastics' pledge to develop environmentally friendly materials is starting to bear fruit. The company developed new PBT-based resins and polyester-based elastomers whose feedstocks come substantially from post-consumer waste. To make these materials, GE uses a proprietary manufacturing technology that transforms post-consumer PET - mostly from bottles - into one of the chemical building blocks of PBT. According to Vikram Gopal, the company's program manager for crystalline plastics, GE first depolymerizes the PET and then chemically "upgrades" it so it can be reacted with BDO to produce PBT. "What we've been able to do is use this post-consumer feedstock to replace DMT or TPA, the feedstocks used in the two conventional PBT processes," he explains. In all, more than 85 percent of the PBT's usual feedstocks are replaced by the feedstock derived from post-consumer waste.