Removal of Contaminations from Waste PET Bottles in Chemical Recycling

Abstract

It is very important to remove contaminant fully from waste PET bottles for bottle-to-bottle recycling. In this paper the mechanism to remove contaminant is proposed on the experimental degradation of waste PET bottles to the monomers by ethyleneglycol. It is made up of the separation of contaminant during the degradation reaction. This model is confirmed to be correct on the recycling of deliberately contaminated PET samples using a series of surrogates based on FDA protocol. We conclude that the contaminant on waste PET bottles is fully separated from PET bottles under the proper separating condition, such as the quantity of extract, separating temperature and time.