Utilization of used polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles for the development of ultrafiltration membrane

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle is commonly used as a single-use packaging for beverages. The recycling of used PET bottles is very important since the huge amount of used PET bottles creates serious environmental concerns. In this work, used PET bottles were utilized as a raw material to develop ultrafiltration membranes by phase inversion technique. The results of this study revealed that lowering the polarity of the non-solvent by using various types of non-solvents, namely water-ethanol, water-n-propanol, and water-n-butanol, resulted in an increase in the water permeate flux of the membrane. The membranes also exhibited higher water permeate fluxes by increasing the molecular weight and the concentration of the additive for the membrane casting solution. Ultrafiltration experiment using aqueous solution containing Bovine Serum Albumin as a model feed solution showed rejection values of up to 91 %.