Mechanical recycling is currently the most common form of recycling. Mechanical recycling involves reprocessing plastic waste into new materials.¹⁰

Unfortunately, mechanically recycled plastics tend to show inferior properties in durability and stability to clean plastics. This is due to deterioration of the polymer backbone during the melting and reprocessing process.

Energy recovery, rather than recycling plastics, focuses on regaining energy which can be put into the production of new plastics or other activities. 

Energy recovery involves incinerating plastics to generate heat, electricity, or fuel. While this process is advantageous as it does not require specific plastic sorting, it does not preserve any monomers or useful chemicals and releases carbon dioxide and other potentially toxic byproducts.¹¹

Chemical recycling breaks polymers down into smaller molecules using heat, solvents, or catalysts. This is a promising recycling method as monomers or other valuable chemicals can be obtained to use as building blocks in other processes.

Whilst chemical recycling shows great promise as a green recycling technique, it has limitations to the types of polymers that can be recycled. Chemical recycling works well on chemically cleavable polymers like polyesters and polyamides, but is less effective on chemically inert polymers like polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride.³

Chemical recycling also remains insufficient for industrial scaling as it typically requires many catalysts, extractions, and purifications.¹²

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