Abstract
Due to the increasing amount of polyurethane waste, chemical recycling of these materials is a topic of growing interest for many researchers. The primary purpose of polyurethane feedstock recycling is to recover the starting polyol. In this study glycerolysis using glycerine from two sources and two purity grades is proposed as a method of chemical recycling. The main effort of this paper focuses on the employment of commercial glycerine of analytical grade and waste glycerine without purification derived from the biodiesel production, as a decomposing agent for polyurethane recycling. In this study, the influence of polyurethane to glycerine mass ratio (PU/GL) and the type of decomposing agent on the chemical structure by FTIR, 1H NMR and GPC was examined. FTIR analysis of the glycerolysates showed absorption peaks similar to the virgin polyol. Those results are in compliance with GPC chromatograms, which showed for all samples, well-defined peak at ca. 13 min of retention time. The molecular weight of glycerolysates was ranging from 800 to 1300 g mol−1 depending on PU/GL mass ratio. The novel decomposition agent, namely waste glycerine derived from biodiesel production was successfully used in glycerolysis process.
Highlights
Global polyurethanes (PUs) production is currently more than 15 million tons and is expected to reach over 22 million tons by 2020 [1]
This indicates that the applied glycerolysis conditions allowed polyurethane degradation to obtain the glycerolysates, but not pure virgin polyol, whose molecular weight measured by gel permeation chromatography (GPC) is 1240 g mol−1
Two types of glycerine reagents have been tested, waste glycerol from biodiesel production and chemical grade purity glycerine, whereas potassium acetate has been used as glycerolysis catalyst
Summary
Global polyurethanes (PUs) production is currently more than 15 million tons and is expected to reach over 22 million tons by 2020 [1]. The application of crude (or waste) glycerine from biodiesel production as a decomposition agent allows obtaining recovered polyol in a similar manner as in glycolysis reaction.
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