Creating Multifunctional Coatings Using Recycled Raw Material Streams

By Gary E. Spilman, Adam W. Emerson, Matthew Beatty, Matthew Brown, Michael Christy, Jack Kovsky, Kevin Rogers, Eric Vrabel, Rick Tabor

Environmental, health, and safety concerns continue to drive rapid growth for environmentally friendly, low volatile organic compound (VOC) coatings. This growth, further compounded by increased social awareness of mega trends—namely depleting finite resources, the growing world population, and constrained food resources—has companies seeking highly sustainable feedstock solutions. Although biobased materials have provided feed-stock options, which are more sustainable than fossil petroleum alternatives, use of recycled content has remained relatively unexplored. With the U.S. production of plastic bottle containers at an amazing 9.4 billion pounds in 2013, and the total plastic bottle recycling collection rate at only 30.9%, there is a wide gap in unclaimed, uncollected, and discarded plastic bottles.1 The math is staggering when one considers that the remaining 69.1% amounts to 6.5 billion pounds. Where is the unclaimed material going? Landfills and incinerators take in much of the excess. We have markets and supply chains for recycled poly(ethylene terephthalate), or PET bottles, to take another life as a bottle, but this option is operating inadequately, and competing with virgin material for demand. There is a real need for other options to become available for the used PET material, to essentially reincarnate; to live a second life as high performance polyester,