Assessing changes on poly(ethylene terephthalate) properties after recycling: Mechanical recycling in laboratory versus postconsumer recycled material

• Combination of multiple techniques to characterize the effects of recycling in PET.
• Cleavage of ester bonds reduced viscosity, Mw, toughness in mechanical recycled PET.
• Virgin, mechanical recycled and commercial recycled PET differ in crystal populations.
• Cyclic oligomers [GTc]n and [GTc]n-G increase from the fourth extrusion cycle onwards.

Keeping rheological, mechanical and thermal properties of virgin poly(ethylene terephthalate), PET, is necessary to assure the quality of second-market applications. A comparative study of these properties has been undertaken in virgin, mechanical recycled and commercial recycled PET samples.Viscoelastic characterization was carried out by rheological measurements. Mechanical properties were estimated by tensile and Charpy impact strength tests. Thermal properties and crystallinity were evaluated by differential scanning calorimetry and a deconvolution procedure was applied to study the population of the different crystals. Molecular conformational changes related to crystallinity values were studied by FTIR spectroscopy. Variations in average molecular weight were predicted from rheology. Besides, the presence-absence of linear and cyclic oligomeric species was measured by mass spectrometry techniques, as MALDI-TOF.Mechanical recycled PET undergoes a significant decline in rheological, mechanical and thermal properties upon increasing the number of reprocessing steps. This is due to the cleavage of the ester bonds with reduction in molar mass and raise in cyclic oligomeric species, in particular [GTc]n and [GTc]n-G type. Chain shortening plus enrichment in trans conformers favour the crystallization process which occurs earlier and faster with modification in crystal populations. Additional physicochemical steps are necessary to preserve the main benefits of PET.

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