Preparation of wood plastic composite from flax fibers and post consumed polystyrene foam based on environmental and economical scales

Due to the high cost of transportation and the lack of established, affordable recycling routes, the rate of recycling of previously used polystyrene foam is extremely low. In this study, a novel treatment technique will be used to examine the feasibility of using waste polystyrene foam as a raw material to produce wood plastic composite (WPC). Where, the recycled polystyrene (rPS) foam waste was first dissolved in methylene chloride and compounded directly with flax fiber (FF) and additives forming a composite paste. The composite paste was then passes through vacuum distillation process for drying the composite paste and also for solvent recovery to reuse it in a further process. The dried composite was processed through thermal mixer extruding and compression molding processes to form the final WPC. The study discovered that WPC with 60 parts per hundred parts of resins (phr) of FF and 2 phr of dioctylphthalate (DOP) may be used to create rPS/FF composite with a proper tensile strength of 19.3 MPa, flexural strength of 78 MPa and compressive strength of 173 MPa compared to another WPS,s based on PVC, HDPE and PP . In addition of that the resulted composite possesses a great potential in manufacturing WPC with environmental and economical demanding application as wooden furniture and as a wooden panels for cladding the exterior building faces.

Automated summary

Due to high transportation cost and lack of affordable recycling routes, the rate of recycling polystyrene foam is very low. This study examines the feasibility of using waste polystyrene foam to produce wood plastic composite (WPC) through a novel treatment technique. The results show that WPC with 60 parts per hundred parts of resins (phr) of flax fiber and 2 phr of dioctylphthalate (DOP) can create rPS/FF composite with proper tensile, flexural, and compressive strengths.