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The United States Council of Automotive Research (USCAR) under the Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP) along with our collaborators Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), American Plastic Council (APC) and the Association of Plastic Manufactures in Europe (APME) has been conducting research on automated recovery of plastics from shredder residue. A Belgium company Salyp NV located in Ypres, Belgium has been contracted by the VRP to demonstrate a recovery process that can separate several plastic types including polyurethane foam out of the shredder residue waste stream. One hundred metric tons of shredder residue was supplied from three different metal recycling companies (shredders) including a US metal recycler as well as two different European metal recyclers/shredders. This shredder residue was evaluated and processed by Salyp. This paper explains the separation processes along with processing efficiencies, material characterization, mass balances and the amount of plastics recovered.

Tons of shredder residue (SR), a complex mixture of plastics, foams, rubber, metals, and glass, are generated each year as a by-product from the recycling of obsolete vehicles. The Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP), along with our CRADA partners, is investigating ways to enable the optimum recovery and recycling of these materials. This study investigates the feasibility of recycling (PU) foam using a new chemical process by glycolysing [1, 2] two types of polyurethane (PU) foams, “dirty” and “clean”, which were recovered from SR via an industrial scale process specifically designed to separate PU foams from SR [3, 4]. In stage one of this process, the polyurethane foam is subjected to glycolysis, followed by filtration of the liquid glycolyzed product. In stage two, the glycolyzed products are used as initiators in reaction with propylene oxide to prepare novel polyurethane polyols.