Question

PLEASE HELP!!!!
would be greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

ok

Answer 2

5. Two plastics that are targeted for recycling from household waste are polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE). One of the problems of recycling such materials is separating them. Suppose you have been hired to set up a process for separating large quantities of waste plastic that is a mixture of PETE and HDPE. Describe how you might perform this separation.

Answer 3

@ballahgirl42

Answer 4

Hello!

Hopefully, this will not forfeit my rights to any potential patents..... this is a guess anyway :)


I would say separate the two on the basis of their density, meaning that if you ground up a mixture of the two plastics and shook them sufficiently, the heavier HDPE chips would sink to the bottom and the PETE would be concentrated around the top of the mixture.

The obvious problems would be telling where the HDPE region turned to PETE.

An idea might be to withdraw "samples" at fixed depths and then carry out thermochemical analysis to determine the percentage composition Analytically, it should be easy to tell the two apart. Then one could separate from fixed heights.


This process would only "work" if there was a substantial quantity of both polymers and the purity of the fractions would be optimal if they were present in roughly equal proportions.

Answer 5

@nessachole02

Answer 6

that helped a lot thanks!
@ballahgirl42

Answer 7

np