With the improvement of people’s living standards, the consumption of automobiles, clothes and household textiles is increasing. According to statistics, 99% of textiles can be recycled.
The traditional methods of recycling waste textiles are mainly incineration and burial, but the decomposition process of synthetic fibers such as polyester, acrylic and polypropylene fibers is very slow, burying in the soil will endanger the growth of plants and waste materials. Chemical fibers with high calorific value in waste textiles can be converted into heat by incineration for thermal power generation, which is suitable for waste textiles that can not be recycled, but toxic substances will be released during the incineration process, resulting in environmental pollution.
Reuse after chemical degradation
Chemical degradation recovery is a method to realize material recycling. It is used to depolymerize the macromolecule polymer in waste textiles at high temperature to obtain monomers or oligomers, and then use these monomers to produce new chemical fibers. For polymer synthesized by polycondensation, such as polyester and nylon fibers, depolymerizer should be added in the degradation process. Olefin polymers, such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene, need to be degraded in a reducing gas atmosphere. At present, this method has achieved large-scale production in the recycling and reuse of some high value chemical polymer materials.