Solvent-based recycling is a promising approach for closed-loop recovery of plastic-containing waste. It avoids the energy cost to depolymerize the plastic but still allows to clean the polymer of contaminants and additives. However, viscosity plays an important role in handling the polymer solutions at high concentrations and in the cleaning steps. This Review addresses the viscosity behavior of polymer solutions, available data, and (mostly algebraic) models developed. The non-Newtonian viscosity models, such as the Carreau and Yasuda-Cohen-Armstrong models, pragmatically describe the viscosity of polymer solutions at different concentrations and shear rate ranges. This Review also describes how viscosity influences filtration and centrifugation processes, which are crucial steps in the cleaning of the polymer and includes a polystyrene/ styrene case study.

There is an urgent need to close the loop of plastic waste. One of the main challenges towards plastic packaging waste recycling is the presence of a variety of contaminants. These contaminants include organic residues, additives, labels, inks and also other plastic types that can be present in the waste stream due to missorting or in multimaterial structures (e.g. multilayer films in packaging). In this context, pre-treatment processes are a promising route to tackle the difficulties that are encountered in mechanical and chemical recycling due to these contaminants. This chapter gives better insight on the already existing pre-treatment techniques and on the advances that are being developed and/or optimized in order to achieve closed-loop recycling. Some of these advanced pre-treatments include chemical washing to remove inks (deinking), extraction methods to remove undesired plastic additives and dissolution-based pre-treatments, such as delamination and dissolution-precipitation techniques.

The viscosity of polymer solutions is important for both polymer synthesis and recycling. Polymerization reactions can become hampered by diffusional limitations once a viscosity threshold is reached, and viscous solutions complicate the cleaning steps during the dissolution−precipitation technique. Available experimental data is limited, which is more severe for green solvents, justifying dedicated viscosity data recording and interpretation. In this work, a systematic study is therefore performed on the viscosity of polystyrene solutions, considering different concentrations, temperatures, and conventional and green solvents. The results show that for the shear rate range of 1−1000 s −1 , the solutions with concentrations between 5 and 39 wt % display mainly Newtonian behavior, which is further confirmed by the applicability of the segment-based Eyring-NRTL and Eyring-mNRF models. Moreover, multivariate data analysis successfully predicts the viscosity of polystyrene solutions under different conditions. This approach will facilitate future data recording for other polymer−solvent combinations while minimizing experimental effort.