In the summer semester 2020, student Lukas Vesely from the Ecology and Environmental Protection course successfully completed his practical semester on the topic of "Sampling and characterization of plastics in the real waste stream of a recycling company" as part of the LaNDER³ project.
At the end of the life of a refrigerator, washing machine, car or train, a large shredder awaits. After shredding, several sorting steps follow. The refuse-derived fuel (RDF) material stream is a mixture of plastic, rubber and wood that remains after all metal-containing components have been separated during the processing of end-of-life vehicles and mixed and collected scrap at our practice partner SCHOLZ Recycling GmbH.
Natural fiber-reinforced plastics are expected in this material stream in the future, should they have reached the end of their life as door panels or hat racks (the typical current applications of natural fiber-reinforced plastics).
Mr. Vesely was able to start his work on site in Espenhain at the practice partner's company in March 2020, with a delay due to corona measures. He sampled various waste streams there over a period of one month and then further processed the material using zigzag sifting and float-sink separation processes. In Zittau, he is now determining basic process engineering parameters (e.g. grain size distribution) and analyzing the composition of the material.
The aim of Mr. Vesely's work was to evaluate which plastic fractions from the investigated material flow could be considered for mechanical recycling in order to reduce the proportion that is thermally recycled. This is followed by the Bachelor's thesis, in which various sorting processes for separating the target fractions are further investigated.
This is the 5th student project in Research Focus 2 - Materials-oriented recycling of NFRP waste. As part of the research projects, students are given the opportunity to work together with researchers at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences on the current challenges facing commercial enterprises. If you are interested in topics for student work, please contact the project managers and research staff directly.
