Recycling Methods of Plastic Materials for Circular and Sustainable Production Design: A Review

Plastic materials are one of the most widely used fabricated products in humans. However, a significant amount of plastic materials accumulates in the environment via multiple routes, and less than 10% of the plastics generated globally are recycled, thus, plastic waste mismanagement and plastic pollution can cause significant risk to the environment and living-systems. The urgent need to find solutions that turn discarded plastic products into part of the production process or generate new uses for them to resource high-value applications for a circular and sustainable production design. However, the studies in this field have mainly some limitations; for instance, at first, terminology is confused, and it is important to understand available knowledge in the field of recycling processes of plastic materials in all aspects. Therefore, this review summarizes the available recycling models and technologies (e.g. mechanical, thermal, solvent-based, chemical) and highlights their main advantages and disadvantages. In addition to a summary of available recycling models, the barriers for plastic recycling for a circular and sustainable production design were filtered from research and review studies. This review contributes to circular and sustainable production design revealing pros and cons of available and new models and technologies using energy, economic, and methodology concepts.