Remarkable role of experimental olefin-maleic-anhydride copolymer based compatibilizing additives in PET bottle recycling

Over the past 50 years demand for plastics drastically increased worldwide resulting in plastic wastes causing serious environmental problems. The main market sector of european plastics industry is the packaging industry most of which is polyolefins and poly(ethythylene-terephtalate). Polymer blends based on waste resources can solve the issues of recycling. We have studied rheological and tensile properties of three types of PET/engineering thermoplastic blends (PET/PC, PET/PA and PET/ABS) produced with different processing techniques. Miscibility of components of blends is limited leading to weak mechanical properties such as low tensile strength and/or elongation at break. Due to that phenomenon compatibilizing additives are also required. As compatibilizing additives olefin-maleic-anhydride copolymer based additives have been used in our experiments. Structure of additives differed from each other both in ratio and length of carbon chains of compounds linked to maleic-anhydride groups . Blends have been studied with PET content ranging from 10 % to 90 %. As an outstanding result we have managed to achieve improving mechanical properties, for example almost 400 % growth was observed in elongation at break of extruded 80/20 PET/PA blends in the presence of 0.2 % compatibilizing additive compared to the sample without additive, meanwhile its strength has also improved.