Composite Manufacturing from Recycled Medical Gloves Reinforced with Jute Fibre

Abstract

The disposal of many rubbish materials affects the environment because they persist for a long period of time on the earth without degrading. Among the rubbish materials, medical gloves are the one that are disposed to the environment daily from different health centers all over the world. This leads to great environmental problems on soil, ground and surface water, plants, animals and human beings. Emission of bad odour and luck of storing place are the other problems of the disposed medical gloves into the landfills. The goal of this study is to recycle these disposable gloves and manufacture a full composite end product used for partition of shelves or different rooms. In this investigation an attempt has been made to determine the recyclability of medical gloves. The study was done by using molten gloves reinforced with jute fabric, which impart better strength for the composite end product. Thermal sterilization method at a temperature of 100°C was used for disinfecting the medical gloves. After sterilization the gloves wear melted using metal pot and composite was manufactured using hand layup technique. The manufactured composites were tested to study the mechanical properties of the composite, tensile strength, flexural strength, impact strength and hardness. The mean tensile strength of the composite (563.009, 664.7577 MPa), the mean compression of composite (1.3, 2.47 MPa) and the mean bending strength (0.99, 1.35 MPa) were recorded for two and three jute fabric layer composite product respectively. The results indicated that the recycling of medical gloves under the use of composite manufacturing gives very strong end product functional for the partition purpose.