What is the principal advantage of the P-Fuel process over conventional mechanical recycling of plastics?
Post-consumer plastics are often commingled and contaminated with extraneous materials such as soil, dirt, aluminium foils, paper labels and food remnants. While soil, dirt and glue can be removed from post-consumer plastics by washing, this is a fairly expensive operation and it leads to secondary waste streams such as waste-water. The major advantage of the P-Fuel process is its ability to handle unsorted, unwashed used plastic. This means that heavily contaminated plastics such as mulch film (which sometimes contains as much as 20% adherent dirt/soil) can be processed without difficulty. Significantly, other normally hard to recycle plastics such as laminates of incompatible polymers, multilayer films or polymer mixtures can also be processed with ease, unlike conventional plastic recycling techniques.
