PVC removal from mixed plastics by triboelectrostatic separation

Abstract

Ever increasing oil price and the constant growth in generation of waste plastics stimulate a research on material separation for recycling of waste plastics. At present, most waste plastics cause serious environmental problems due to the disposal by reclamation and incineration. Particularly, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) materials among waste plastics generates hazardous HCl gas, dioxins containing Cl, and so on, which lead to air pollution and shorten the life of incinerator, and it makes difficultly recycling of other plastics. Therefore, we designed a bench scale triboelectrostatic separator for PVC removal from mixed plastics (polyvinyl chloride/polyethylene terephthalate), and then carried out material separation tests. In triboelectrostatic separation, PVC and PET particles are charged negatively and positively, respectively, due to the difference of the work function of plastics in tribo charger of the fluidized-bed, and are separated by means of splitter through an opposite electric field. In this study, the charge efficiency of PVC and PET was strongly dependent on the tribo charger material (polypropylene), relative humidity (below 30%), air velocity (over 10 m/s), and mixture ratio (PET:PVC = 1:1). At the optimum conditions (electrode potential of 20 kV and splitter position of −2 cm), PVC rejection and PET recovery in PET products were 99.60 and 98.10%, respectively, and the reproducibility of optimal test was very good (±1%). In addition, as a change of splitter position, we developed the technique to recover high purity PET (over 99.99%) although PET recovery decreases by degrees.