The W2Plastics Project Halfway Achievements

The W2Plastics project aims at a fundamental change of the present status of plastics recycling by creating a breakthrough technology for the recycling of polyolefins from complex wastes, i.e., wastes such as Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW), household waste and Automotive Shredder Residue (ASR). Polyolefin’s are a very important family of polymers, constituting 45% of the total plastics consumption in Europe (EU) and complex wastes provide the vastest, presently unused potential resource of secondary polyolefin’s. In spite of that, only one million ton out of 14 million tons yearly sold in EU is being recycled into high-end applications. Nowadays, Polyolefin recyclers focus mainly on the relatively pure post-industrial or single-product wastes, since these wastes can be made into high-purity product materials by existing and cost-effective process technology. Post-industrial wastes are increasingly exported outside the EU, however, and so the Polyolefin recycling industry and their end-users are forced to look for alternative resources. The European FP7 Project: W2Plastics is developing a number of novel concepts, in particular Magnetic Density Separation (MDS) and Ultrasound process and quality control by HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI), into a new technology to recover highpurity polyolefin’s from complex wastes at low cost. The unique promise of this new concept derives from its ability to accurately separate many different materials in a single process step, resulting in an environmentally friendly and cheap process.