Cycle for strapping bands
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The Christmas holidays generate a lot of waste in private households: Presents ordered online arrive at home in many cardboard packages and parcels, and large quantities of packaged food are often bought in advance for the festive feast. Students at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a process that enables plastics from food packaging that were previously almost impossible to recycle to be turned into reusable shipping boxes.
Whether milk, juice or sliced cheese: food supplies stay fresh, flavoursome and protected for a long time thanks to ingenious packaging. These covers are usually made from a combination of different plastics, which are bonded together. This multilayer packaging consists of individual millimetre- to nanometre-thin layers of different plastics such as polyethylene, polypropylene or PET. The individual layers are held together with the help of plastic adhesives such as polyurethane. They cannot be separated using conventional methods such as crushing, sieving and centrifuging and cannot be separated by heat, as their melting points are too close together.
"Our idea is to use a process in which solvents dissolve the adhesive between the films in order to separate them by type“ says Paul Neugebauer, Master's student in Chemical Engineering and Process Engineering at KIT. He and four other young engineers from the same semester have developed a recycling process that uses the principle described to recover pure plastics from multilayer packaging. Recycled Polymer Packaging Karlsruhe, RepoPaK for short, is what the students call the sustainable shipping box, which is made from used plastics.
Their concept won over the nationwide chemPLANT competition of creative young process engineers (kjVI) in the Process and Chemical Engineering Society of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) and was awarded first prize in 2021. The challenge was to develop an innovative, sustainable and economical concept for recycling into a higher-quality product. The starting point for this was the household waste mix of a typical large city. Plastic packaging is lightweight packaging, which, according to the Federal Statistical Office, accounted for the largest share of packaging waste collected from private households in 2019 at 32 kilograms per person.
Foldable reusable shipping box
„With the second part of our approach, we are looking to the future, because the RepoPaK can be transported by drone, is waterproof and is stable and lightweight thanks to its honeycomb structure. This makes it ideal for the fully automated shipping of the future compared to today's cardboard boxes,“ says Philipp Beeskow from the RepoPaK team. Another highlight is the foldability of the boxes: once the Christmas presents delivered by the mail order company have been removed, the boxes can be stowed away at home to save space until the next use.
The boxes of different sizes - from shoe boxes to large commercial parcels - could be made from a recycled plastic suitable for the respective volume, emphasise the young engineers. Thanks to their homogeneity, the boxes themselves are easy to recycle at the end of their service life. Compared to disposable shipping boxes, the product idea could be Save manufacturing costs, energy and CO2, and avoid waste. In this way, waste can be avoided and a further step can be taken towards a circular economy, according to the team.
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