Circularizing PET-G Multimaterials: Life Cycle Assessment and Techno-Economic Analysis.

The recycling of multimaterials such as payment or access cards poses significant challenges. Building on previous experimental work demonstrating the feasibility of chemically recyclable payment cards made from glycol-modified poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET-G), we use life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis to investigate two chemical recycling scenarios and evaluate their potential environmental and economic benefits. Recovering all components from the depolymerized products (Scenario 1) achieves substantial environmental benefits across most categories, reducing global warming by up to 67% compared to only recovering major components (Scenario 2).