This book shows the true and often-underestimated market potential of plastics recycling, with analysis from economic, ecological, and technical perspectives. It is aimed at both technical and non-technical readers, including decision makers in material suppliers, plastic product manufacturers, governmental agencies, educators, and anyone with a general interest in plastics recycling. An overview of waste handling systems with a focus on the U.S. market is provided. Different methods of waste handling are compared from both economic and ecological perspectives. Since plastic waste recycling is essential from an ecological point of view, common strategies and new approaches to both increase the recycling rate and improve recycling economically and technically are presented. This includes processing and material properties of recycled plastics. Finally, a worldwide outlook of plastic recycling is provided with analysis of additional worldwide markets, encompassing highly developed, fast-developing, and less developed countries. This revised and expanded second edition also contains a new section on fiber-reinforced plastics and considerations for recycling them as well as numerous updates on the data and the context analyzed throughout the book. The spreadsheets used in the economic analyses are also offered as a bonus for the reader to download from plus.hanser-fachbuch.de/en. True to the authors mission, this book is printed on recycled paper.

Dr.-Ing. Natalie Rudolph is Business Field Manager Polymers at NETZSCH. She was previously Director of R&D in Composites at AREVO, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering, and Team Leader at the Fraunhofer Institute ICT, Germany. Raphael Kiesel, M.S. is a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology, Germany. He was previously a Research Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Chuanchom Aumnate, Ph.D. is a Researcher at the Metallurgy and Materials Science Research Institute, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. She was previously Research Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Contents: PlasticsIncreasing Value, Decreasing Lifetime Plastics RecyclingConservation of Valuable Resources Economic Analysis of Plastic Waste Handling Environmental Analysis of Plastic Waste Handling Optimization of Plastics Recycling Plastic Waste around the World: Increasing Potential of Recycling Details of Economic Analyses and Optimizations Leseprobe