Upcycling of waste artificial turf forhigh‐performancewood‐plastic composites

Abstract

AbstractPlastic recycling is an essential tool to address the issue of plastic waste pollution. Unfortunately, current mechanical recycling processes for commingled plastic waste such as waste artificial turf (WAT) are limited by the inherent dilemma of separation challenge, high cost, and low‐quality products. In this work, solid‐phase shear milling (S3M) process was applied to prepare high‐performance WAT/wood flour (WF) composites, which addressed the challenges of poor compatibility and poor mechanical performance. Due to the strong shear force of S3M equipment, the strong hydrogen bonding in WF fibers was broken and the particle size of the WAT/WF mixture decreased from 452 to 47 μm. The well‐dispersed WF significantly improved the mechanical strength of WAT/WF composites from 17.6 to 26.4 MPa and melt processing ability. Moreover, the maximum tensile strength and modulus of the composites further improved to 32.6 and 2477 MPa through solid‐phase stretching with a 4% draw ratio. Compared with traditional WAT/WF composites, our research achieved the enhancement of 85.2% and 81.3% for tensile strength and modulus respectively. This work not only provides a promising strategy to resolve WAT environment pollution but also prepared value‐added high‐performance products for wood‐plastic applications.