ABSTRACT
In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. In 2017, Chinese government banned to import plastic waste. Much of the waste plastic will be disposed to the local landfill. Jenna Jambeck (University of Georgia) estimated that China’s new policy could displace as much as 111 million metric tons of plastic waste by 2030. Over 5.2 million plastic bottles were thrown away in Hong Kong every day. Most of plastic bottles were made of PE, PP and PET materials. Facilities lack recollection and recycling of the waste plastic bottles to create useful materials for other manufacturing purpose. The material extrusion was applied to develop Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), which is now available to domestic users. The polymeric material such as polylactic acid or polylactide (PLA) is widely used to make the filaments for making the product. Due to low cost of FDM machine and PLA filament material, the waste materials has rapidly increased. Three-dimensional printing filaments were made by the extrusion process. The current extrusion machine uses a single screw to apply the high temperature and pressure to melt the material and push the material through the die to make the filaments. This chapter firstly describes the feasibility study of using PET materials for 3D printing. Then both physical and chemical properties of PET materials and two different recycling PET materials methods will be discussed. The recycled PET filaments are used for making the testing pieces and carrying out different tests. Finally, the testing result will be presented. In the long term, recycling PET filaments have significant implication for local, mainland China and even the international recycle plastic filaments manufacturing industry and help in reducing the quantity of polymeric materials.
