Recycling and Reutilizing Polymer Waste via Electrospun Micro/Nanofibers: A Review

The accumulation of plastic waste resulting from the increasing demand for non-degradable plastics has led to a global environmental crisis. The severe environmental and economic drawbacks of inefficient, expensive, and impractical traditional waste disposal methods, such as landfills, incineration, plastic recycling, and energy production, limit the expansion of their applications to solving the plastic waste problem. Finding novel ways to manage the large amount of disposed plastic waste is urgent. Until now, one of the most valuable strategies for the handling of plastic waste has been to reutilize the waste as raw material for the preparation of functional and high-value products. Electrospun micro/nanofibers have drawn much attention in recent years due to their advantages of small diameter, large specific area, and excellent physicochemical features. Thus, electrospinning recycled plastic waste into micro/nanofibers creates diverse opportunities to deal with the environmental issue caused by the growing accumulation of plastic waste. This paper presents a review of recycling and reutilizing polymer waste via electrospinning. Firstly, the advantages of the electrospinning approach to recycling plastic waste are summarized. Then, the studies of electrospun recycled plastic waste are concluded. Finally, the challenges and future perspectives of electrospun recycled plastic waste are provided. In conclusion, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of electrospun recycled plastic waste for researchers to develop further studies.

Filtration application from recycled expanded polystyrene

Water-in-oil emulsion with drop size less than 100 mum is difficult to separate. Coalescence filtration is economical and effective for separation of secondary dispersions. Coalescence performance depends on flow rate, bed depth, fiber surface properties, and drop size. The amount of surface area of the fibers directly affects the efficiency. A new recycling method was investigated in the previous work in which polystyrene (PS) sub-mum fibers were electro-spun from recycled expanded polystyrene (EPS). These fibers are mixed with micro glass fibers to modify the glass fiber filter media. The filter media are tested in the separation of water droplets from an emulsion of water droplets in oil. The experimental results in this work show that adding nanofibers to conventional micron sized fibrous filter media improves the separation efficiency of the filter media but also increases the pressure drop. An optimum in the performance occurs (significant increase in efficiency with minimal increase in pressure drop) with the addition of about 4% by mass of 500 nm diameter PS nanofibers to glass fibers for the filters.