Recycling of Plastics from Automotive Shredder Residues: Sourcing post-industrial waste and automotive shredder residues

In the production process and at the end of a vehicle's service life, plastic-rich waste streams arise, that cannot be recycled at large scale yet. This waste contains polyolefins with and without mineral fillers and fibers, fiber-reinforced polyamides as well as ABS, PC and blends thereof as well as other valuable technical thermoplastics. With innovative process chains, including density-based, tribo-electrostatic, and spectroscopic sorting, these can be enriched into polymer fractions of high purities but residual contaminants still hamper recycling. Thus, so far industrial recycling activities focus mainly on polyolefins with low mineral contents. The solvent-based CreaSolv® Process1 follows the approach of selectively dissolving thermoplastic materials and purifying the polymer solution. During the process soluble contaminants like flame-retardants as well as insoluble contaminants like fibers and fillers can be removed from the targeted thermoplastic material to recover pure regrinds for high-quality recompounding. In this manuscript, application of innovative process chains in combination with solvent based purification will be exemplarily demonstrated.