(Interview) CHIMEI turns waste PMMAs into high-quality optical grade materials
Circular economy is gaining momentum with the emergence of novel recycled materials, from recycled PC, recycled PET to recycled PP. But have you heard of recycled PMMA? At CHINAPLAS Virtual Show 2022, performance materials supplier CHIMEI introduces its MMA recycling technologies.
According to Steven Chang, Manager, Functional Material Business Dept of CHIMEI, PMMA is an ideal plastic product with outstanding optical performance. Thanks to its good light transmitting property and easy processability, it is mostly used in products that require high optical or transparent performance. Among PMMA products, optical grade PMMA pellets and light guide plates are known for their high cleanliness and good optical parameters, and are widely used in electronic display products.
Currently, as important optical components, optical-grade PMMA light guide plates made of MMAs are used for about 50% of monitors and laptops. Affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, telecommuting and virtual teaching have become the new normal, which has driven the strong market demand for laptops and monitors, and in turn increased the demand for MMAs at the same time. “CHIMEI's PMMA product sales increased by 20% year-on-year in 2021,” Chang said.
CHIMEI highlights the company’s MMA recycling technologies.
Electronic products are upgraded quickly. After consumption, the discarded light guide plates become electronic waste, generating waste burden on the environment. “As the world's leading manufacturer of optical grade sheets and pellets, we should not only launch new products, but also find ways to recycle waste materials,” he said. “We are now promoting the recycling of light guide plate materials and processing them into optical-grade materials or light guide plates.”
He pointed out that when processing by mechanical recycling, the recycled PMMA materials have deficiencies in terms of cleanliness and transparency. But if chemical recycling is adopted, the quality of recycled materials can be improved and the same-level recycling can be achieved.
To obtain monomers, instead of adopting the current mainstream petrochemical cracking technology, CHIMEI collects post-consumer recycled PMMA light guide plates and uses chemical recycling technology to achieve this. Then, the monomers are returned to the process, reducing the use of petrochemical raw materials and carbon emissions.
In the chemical recycling process of PMMA, raw material sorting, crushing, cleaning and regeneration processing play a decisive role in the quality of the final recycled materials. “In the future, we will strengthen our cooperation with upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry chain and continue to increase the proportion of recycled PMMA,” Chang added.
