Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part B (2024)

The use of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as products has increased in recent years, resulting in the production of a large amount of PET waste. Unfortunately, the polymer industry is C-intensive and the accumulation of plastics in the environment has become a major problem. Vaporizing plastic waste into fresh monomers for the production of primary plastic can reduce both the consumption of fossil raw materials and environmental pollution, making the plastic economy more sustainable. Recently, the chemical recycling of plastics has begun to be explored as an innovative solution to achieve a completely sustainable cycle. In this Paper, we reported the Glycolysis assisted by catalysts is the most popular and industrially recognised chemical recycling process of PET. Characterization has been done of recycled poly (Ethylene terephthalate) (RPET) obtained from the chemical recycling of post-consumer PET bottles by glycolysis method. In this way, plastics are depolymerised into monomers and/or oligomers suitable for re-polymerization, closing the chain. In this work, PET was depolymerised to its bis (2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET) monomer by glycolysis using propylene glycol (PG) in the presence of catalysts. The PET synthesis was studied through infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The PET synthesized were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), FT-IR, TGA/DSC and the effect of temperature is investigation.