SPI Recycling Committee releases report on compatibilizers

The Recycling Committee of SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association, Washington, has released a paper titled “Compatibilizers: Creating New Opportunity for Mixed Plastics,” in which it details the potential for compatibilizers and provides information about commercially available compatibilizers that can help recyclers create value out of mixed plastic streams. 

Compatibilizers are additives designed to make disparate, traditionally incompatible varieties of postconsumer recycled plastic materials compatible, SPI explains.

“Relying on the expertise and range of experience in the plastics supply chain, the SPI Recycling Committee has created yet another product that provides the concrete tools and insight every company in the plastics recycling value stream needs in order to move toward a truly circular economy for all plastic materials,” says SPI President and CEO William Carteaux.

“Compatibilizers, long used by the prime industry, offer the potential to create new mechanical recycling solutions for postindustrial and postconsumer scrap plastics,” he continues. “This project demonstrates the innovation that can happen in recycling when you engage all segments of the supply chain. This is a real-world solution being offered, one which is currently being used today by a number of our members to recover mixed resin streams that would otherwise be landfilled.”

The Recycling Committee’s report found that widespread use and understanding of compatibilizers could present recyclers with the opportunity to convert multilayer flexible packaging and highly mixed streams, such as the yield loss from increasingly contaminated bales (bales comprised of several different types of plastics rather than one variety), into valuable recycled resin.

“Recent findings suggest HDPE (high-density polyethylene) recyclers are suffering a 20 percent yield loss, while their PET (polyethylene terephthalate) recycling counterparts are experiencing upwards of 40 percent yield loss,” the report says. “This rate of material loss can quickly change the economics of an operation from black to red.

“If that yield loss could be put to use as another valuable feed stream, it can dramatically change the economics of an operation, as well as further divert valuable plastics from the landfill,” the report adds, noting that compatibilizers are one means by which those mixed plastics could provide a greater source of profit for recyclers.

“Compatibilizers: Creating New Opportunity for Mixed Plastics” provides a list of the products available. A full copy of the paper can be found here.