Abstract
There are two main problems caused by the huge volume of expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) waste: the large amount of space that would be needed if it were to be disposed of in landfills and the excessive transport cost if it were to be recycled or incinerated. Consequently, the solution to these problems is the execution of two processes: the first one is the process of recycling the polystyrene with acetone, which allows us to separate the polystyrene from the other wastes, thereby reducing the volume by more than 98%. Then the resulting fresh polystyrene paste is used in the second process as a binder with 60 wt % of hemp shive to produce lightweight (porous) biobased-thermoplastic composites. The hemp shive particles significantly reduce the time of acetone evaporation to be three hours instead of three weeks for drying the net polystyrene paste. As a result, the recycling and the mixing processes produce a non-thermoformed lightweight composite. While the thermoforming process has been adapted to impr...
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