ABSTRACT
Chemical recycling of polyurethane (PU) waste is essential to displace the need for virgin polyol production and enable sustainable PU production. Currently, less than 20% of PU waste is downcycled through rebinding to lower value products than the original PU. Chemical recycling of PU waste often requires significant input of materials like solvents and slow reaction rates. Here, we report the fast (<10 min) and solvent-free acidolysis of a model toluene diisocyanate (TDI)-based flexible polyurethane foam (PUF) at <200 °C using maleic acid (MA) with a recovery of recycled polyol (repolyol) in 95% isolated yield. After workup (hydrolysis of repolyl ester and separations), the repolyol exhibits favorable physical properties that are comparable to the virgin polyol; these include 54.1 mg KOH/g OH number and 624 cSt viscosity. Overall, 80% by weight of the input PUF is isolated into two clean-cut fractions containing the repolyol and toluene diamine (TDA). Finally, end-of-life (EOL) mattress PUF waste is recycled successfully with high recovery of repolyol using MA acidolysis. The solvent-free and fast acidolysis with MA demonstrated in this work with both model and EOL PUF provides a potential pathway for sustainable and closed-loop PU production.
ABSTRACT
Polyurethane (PU) is the sixth most used plastic in the world. Because many PU derived materials are thermosets and the monomers are valuable, chemical recycling to recover the polyol component is the most viable pathway to utilizing postconsumer PU waste in a closed-loop fashion. Acidolysis is an effective method to recover polyol from PU waste. Previous studies of PU acidolysis rely on the use of dicarboxylic acid (DCA) in high temperature reactions (>200 °C) in the liquid phase and result in unwanted byproducts, high energy consumption, complex separations of excess organic acid, and an overall process that is difficult to scale up. In this work, we demonstrate selective PU acidolysis with DCA vapor to release polyol at temperatures below the melting points of the DCAs (<150 °C). Notably, acidolysis with DCA vapor adheres to the principles of green chemistry and prevents in part esterification of the polyol product, eliminating the need for additional hydrolysis/processing to obtain the desired product. The methodology was successfully applied to a commercial PU foam (PUF) postconsumer waste.
