Reducing Antisolvent Use in the STRAP Process by Enabling a Temperature-Controlled Polymer Dissolution and Precipitation for the Recycling of Multilayer Plastic Films.

The recently reported processing strategy called solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation (STRAP) enables deconstruction of multilayer plastic packaging films into their constituent resins by selective dissolution. It uses a series of solvent washes that are guided by thermodynamic calculations of polymer solubility. In this work, the use of antisolvents in the STRAP process was reduced and solvent mixtures were considered to enable the temperature-controlled dissolution and precipitation of the target polymers in multilayer films.

Computational Approach for Rapidly Predicting Temperature-Dependent Polymer Solubilities Using Molecular-Scale Models.

One promising approach to recycle multicomponent plastic waste (e. g., multilayer plastic films) is selective dissolution.