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1) Development of scalable and environment friendly process and reactor for delamination and demetallization of MLPs at 10-20 Kgs per batch and upto 500 kgs/day.

2) Utilization of neat MLPs for production of fuels, hydrogen and carbon nanostructures or for further recycling.

3) Recovery, regeneration and reutilization of spent chemical.

The MLPs due to its complicated stacked structure, can’t be recycled via conventional thermoplastic recycling pathway and any effort to melt process it leads to formation of completed immiscible blend of no commercial value and practical utility. Similarly, efforts to convert it into fuels and carbon materials via catalytic pyrolysis process are unsuccessful due to presence of metal impurity and melt flow issues. Therefore, often MLPs are incinerated openly or dumped in landfills or used as fuels in brick/cement kilns, ultimately resulting in environmental pollution. The present proposal is expected to overcome these drawbacks by recycling MLPs and even deriving valuable materials using the same thus enabling waste to wealth, circular economy and reduction of carbon footprints, which support its great socio-economic effect.

1) A 500 Kgs/day process for recycling of MLPs via wet chemical route for delamination and demetallization

2) Optimized processes for conversion into fuels and carbon nanostructures

3) Patents, technology development, high impact publications, skilled manpower.

Globally, the single use plastics used for packaging is considered as major environmental thereat due to related pollution, health hazards and ecological disturbances across land and oceans. Among them, multilayered plastics (MLPs) that consist of sandwich or stack of several polymer layers and aluminium base barrier interlayer, often used for food packaging (pouches, bags, shrink films, other pliable products) is considered as challenging waste stream due to inability of recycling industry to identify, sort and separate the diverse layers with current standard technologies. As a result, they have no commercial value and often ended up either at landfills (occupying space, causing landfill instability or supporting anaerobically generated greenhouse gas emissions) or incinerated at cement/brick kilns as fuels (causing severe environmental pollution). Any attempt of processing them via recycling route tends to produce complex blend having aluminium, thus no immediate commercial applicability. Herein, we aim to developed a scalable process to obtain aluminium free delaminated plastics from the MLPs, thus making it suitable feedstock for recycling, pyrolytic conversion to fuels and/or as precursors for carbon nanostructures. The developed MLPs delamination process is expected to fill the existing lacuna between MLPs and already commercialized recycling or waste to fuel (fuels like gasoline, diesel, LPG or even hydrogen) technologies for other thermoplastics. The development of such integrated process will provide an effective and viable solution for handling MLPs waste streams, enabling realization of waste to wealth, circular economy and reduced carbon footprint.