Abstract
As the consumption of coffee increases worldwide, the amount of spent coffee grounds (SCG) is gradually increasing every year. Some of these grounds are recycled for composting, but most are discarded, which causes widespread financial and social costs. We developed a bio-based plastic pellet by blending polypropylene (PP) with waste biomass SCG to convert it into a sustainable, recyclable eco-friendly material. It was confirmed that extrusion compounding for SCG/PP composite pellets and injection molding with good formability are possible. To evaluate the formability of the composite pellets, American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) test specimens were prepared for evaluating mechanical properties by injection molding. As a result of the measurement of the test samples, the mechanical properties of SCG/PP composite pellets were generally lowered as the SCG content increased. However, the impact strength of SCG/PP composite based on the HOMO-PP matrix improved as the SCG content increased. In addition, Young’s modulus of SCG/PP increased as the SCG content increased. In the future, this study will be applied to manufacture of products that requires non-toxic products, such as disposable products and food containers, realizing commercialization of eco-friendly products and thereby replacing finite petroleum resources and practicing resource circulation and environmental protection.
Highlights
Most common household items around us are made of plastic, which provides a lot of convenience in our lives
Since most conventional plastics are manufactured as disposable products, they are not decomposed at the time of disposal, thereby causing environmental pollution and health risk problems [1,2]
We propose a realistic solution to reduce the amount of plastic used, until the development of complete technology that does not use plastic materials and the establishment of an improved industrial environment in the future
Summary
Most common household items around us are made of plastic, which provides a lot of convenience in our lives. Some of them are trying to increase the decomposition rate by reducing the amount of plastic and by manufacturing bioplastics which are composite materials, including biomass from organic waste resources [5,6]. Studies on the addition of fly ash, which is generated in the process of burning coal, to polymers have been conducted [13,14,15] From this viewpoint, we selected spent coffee grounds (SCG) as biomass and developed bio-based plastic with an SCG content of more than 25% by an extrusion and injection molding process. To solve the social disposal cost of SCG and to propose a new recycling plan, this study examined the possibility of recycling SCG by developing eco-friendly bio-based high value-added plastic composite pellets [26,27].
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