Abstract
Strategies for Recycling Multi-Layer Plastic Materials
Each year, approximately 8 million tons of produced plastic packaging are multi-layer. The layers in these materials cannot be separated from one another, and thus cannot be recycled, contributing to plastic waste accumulation in the environment. This presentation describes our efforts to address this problem. The results suggest that self-immolative polymers incorporated into multi-layer materials enables clean separation of the layers using conditions already practiced by industry. This work demonstrates the impact of using self-immolative polymers in plastic packaging to enable recycling of multilayer materials.