Recycling disposable cups into paper plastic composites

Published Date
Waste Management
November 2014, Vol.34(11):2113–2119, doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2014.05.020

• Author 

• Jonathan Mitchell ^a,b,c,
• Luc Vandeperre ^b
• Rob Dvorak ^c
• Ed Kosior ^c
• Karnik Tarverdi ^d
• Christopher Cheeseman ^a,

• aDepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK
• bDepartment of Materials, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK
• cNextek Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2AB, UK
• dWolfson Centre for Materials Processing, Brunel University, London UB8 3PH, UK

Received 23 September 2013. Accepted 25 May 2014. Available online 30 June 2014. 

Highlights

• •
  A new recycling outlet for disposable cups has been developed.
• •
  Disposable cups were shredded to form flakes and used to reinforce polypropylene.
• •
  Mixes contained maleated polyolefin coupling agents had improved interfacial adhesion.
• •
  Disposable cups can be reused as reinforcement in novel polypropylene composites.

Abstract

The majority of disposable cups are made from paper plastic laminates (PPL) which consist of high quality cellulose fibre with a thin internal polyethylene coating. There are limited recycling options for PPLs and this has contributed to disposable cups becoming a high profile, problematic waste. In this work disposable cups have been shredded to form PPL flakes and these have been used to reinforce polypropylene to form novel paper plastic composites (PPCs). The PPL flakes and polypropylene were mixed, extruded, pelletised and injection moulded at low temperatures to prevent degradation of the cellulose fibres. The level of PPL flake addition and the use of a maleated polyolefin coupling agent to enhance interfacial adhesion have been investigated. Samples have been characterised using tensile testing, dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and thermogravimetric analysis. Use of a coupling agent allows composites containing 40 wt.% of PPL flakes to increase tensile strength of PP by 50% to 30 MPa. The Young modulus also increases from 1 to 2.5 GPa and the work to fracture increases by a factor of 5. The work demonstrates that PPL disposable cups have potential to be beneficially reused as reinforcement in novel polypropylene composites.

Keywords

Recycling

Resource efficiency

Disposable cups

Paper plastic laminates

Plastic composites

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  Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 2075945971; fax: +44 2075946124.
  
  

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