PET Conversion Team

Plastics are a rapidly growing segment of municipal solid waste and the amount of plastic waste generated by activities of the country depends on how well-established waste treatment systems are. As one of the commercially ubiquitous plastics, non-biodegradable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is applied mostly in the soft drink bottles production, packaging products, high strength fibers and films. In 2018, the amount of plastic waste accumulated in all states of USA is 35.68 million tons, whereas this figure is assumed to be 300,000 tons of plastic waste for Azerbaijan taking into account industrial production power and population of both countries. It should also be highlighted that global plastics production continue to witness a significant rise, increasing from 50 million tons to far over 350 million tons within only half century, in 2015.  Each year, the production and incineration of plastic emits about 400 million tonnes of CO2 globally, a part of which could be avoided through better recycling. The project follows the European strategy for plastic in September, which calls for all plastic packaging waste to be recyclable by 2030, since recycling one tonne of plastics can avoid the emissions of 2.5 tonnes of CO2 when produced from virgin materials, and 2.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions if incinerated (Tiseo, 2021; Smithers, 2015).

Rigid polyurethane (PUR) foams are traditionally manufactured from petroleum -based polyols and isocyanates and are commonly used as effective insulation materials for buildings, automotive industry, and other areas to prevent the heat lose and to lower noise level (Suh, Paark and Yoon, 2000) due to its sufficient thermal insulation property, low density, low moisture absorption and high strength to weight ratio properties. 

To hamper current concern regarding polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle waste, research was aimed to convert these bottles into valuable rigid polyurethane (PUR) foams through the most favorable glycolysis process. The effect of diverse mixing ratios of glycol/PET on polyol as well as foam properties was examined by using bio-oils (castor and glycerol). By obtaining eco-friendly polyols without using any petroleum based raw materials, issues including high viscosity and solidification at room temperature were also handled successfully. Moreover, castor oil and glycerol were used as polyol without applying any pretreatment-transesterification reaction for inserting OH group into structure chain, only applied with innovative approach of a mere physical mixing with PET polyol without any heat requiring pretreatments and the optimized content of polyol mixture was determined as 30 wt% PET-based polyol, 58 wt% castor oil, 10 wt% glycerol and 2 wt% water for synthesis of rigid PUR foams with appropriate properties such as low fragility, good dimensional stability. After that, optimum content was applied for obtained PET-based polyol samples which are in various molar ratios of PET/glycol as 1/4, 1/5.5, 1/8 and 1/12, accordingly. As a result, it can be achieved to improve compression strength by 3.5 times and to increase tensile strength and elongation of pressed form of PUR samples by 20% and 23%, accordingly. Briefly, this study can be help to partly tackle the landfilling problem related with PET wastes and significantly reduce the dependency of rigid PUR foam production on petrochemical industry.

Plastic waste is the biggest problem that needs to be solved in today's world. Therefore, I think that every idea that can solve this problem or support its solution will be useful for human society. Moreover, the PU we get from PET waste can be sold as a building material, and thanks to this, people will use a cheaper, eco-friendly building material.

cause our city has this problem consequently we invent this method for solving this problem

cause we are young and we need support

we are students at the moment. and we ant to study in mit 

it is used for the first time in this world