Research progress for plastic waste management and manufacture of value-added products

Nowadays, plastic products are closely related to human life. While it brings convenience to human beings, there are also great health and environmental threats. Most of the plastic products are polymer compounds obtained by addition polymerization or condensation polymerization. It will cause chronic poisoning to humans if long-term use plastic products are used. In addition, due to the relatively low production cost and short service life of plastic products, a large amount of waste plastics is discarded every year, which causes serious environmental problems. Traditional disposal technologies such as landfill and incineration not only waste a lot of resources but also accompany serious secondary pollution problems. In order to meet the needs of sustainable development and green environmental protection, various recycling methods have been explored for waste plastics, which have been used to develop economic and environmentally friendly value-added products. This paper reviews a range of management methods for the increasingly severe problem of discarded plastics and briefly summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of some methods, lists some examples of more valuable recycled products and materials, and finally puts forward the improvement direction and challenge to solve this problem.