Influence of long-term natural degradation processes on near-infrared spectra and sorting of post-consumer plastics.

The large-amount production and application of plastics since the 1950s has led to different environmental problems, and the production amount is still increasing. In 2015, 79 wt% of all plastic waste was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. Due to their negative influence to the environment, the problems of landfilling and marine litter need urgent treatments. Accordingly, measures like excavation of landfill sites and ocean clean-ups were conducted to reduce their environmental influences and move further towards a closed loop of material cycles. For a possible recycling, the valuable material fractions need to be separated from other materials. Besides, to ensure a high-quality recycling and enable the different recycling processes of plastics in different degradation levels, it is necessary to separate degraded and non-degraded plastics. In this study, the possibility to classify and sort landfill and marine litter plastics is investigated. For this purpose, waste plastics from different origins (lightweight packaging (LWP) waste, landfill, and marine litter) were collected and analyzed with the state-of-the-art technology in sorting plants: near-infrared spectroscopy. With self-developed programs, the classification possibility and performance was determined. The classification accuracy of degraded plastics (from landfill and marine litter) is improved from > 75% to > 97% through adjusting the sorting recipe. Besides, the long-term degraded plastics under natural environment were able to be separated from LWP waste: the same kind of materials can be classified according to their origin (LWP or after long-term degradation), which makes a quality control possible and enables an extra treatment for degraded plastics.