Do Recycled Plastic Products Stink? Yes, No, Maybe, a little, every so often, often ... uncertainty applies to this field

The post-consumer recycled plastic is increasingly entering the production of objects that we use every day and that we find on store shelves, in the distribution chains of furniture or objects for the home, in the interiors of our cars and in many products that we handle every day.

The use of post-consumer plastic has not always been a voluntary choice by manufacturers of plastic articles, as its origin from separate collection, brings with it odorous problems which, if not managed well, can compromise the final products, creating inconvenience to customers.

But the urgent need to reuse the highest possible amount of recycled plastic in the production of articles, in order to reduce waste, has imposed a new way of looking at mixtures for making plastic products.

The large distribution chains of household items , for example, have turned to the production of their articles with a percentage of plastic recycled post-consumer, but require that the raw material does not bring with it unpleasant odors.

The verification of the acceptability or otherwise of the raw material is done, normally with a system of tests carried out by people who put their nose at their disposal to endorse the purchases of raw materials and the marketing of products.

Normally they are empirical, subjective and personal evaluations that leave ample room for discussion on what is an annoying smell and what a fragrance can be.

Between the producer of raw material and the distributor of household products there is constant uncertainty as to what will be salable in terms of material first and what will be purchased by the end customer if the smell were to be perceived differently than the testers.

It is therefore necessary to scientifically and analytically establish the odor gradients and their chemical origin to establish, among the parts, a range that protects both the production and the final sale of household products.

Today technology comes to meet us through a laboratory machine which analytically intercepts the odorous substances of liquid, solid or powder samples, returning an exact evaluation of the chemical components present and their quantities, compared with an archive of 80,000 odorous substances.

The control system is useful to the raw material producer , not only at the end of the process, through technical level analysis odorous of the plastic granules that it will sell, but it will also be very useful for analyzing the raw material , to classify its behavior in the following recipes.

Knowing with certainty the odor contribution of the incoming waste or semi-finished product allows you to manage recipes in a simpler way which will lead to the production of a granule with the established odor gradients.

The utility of the machine is also tangible for those who buy the raw material and transform it into final products, as they have the certainty to introduce in the circuit a certified granule from the odor point and can carry out a quality control, from the point of view of the odor impact, on the products that it will propose to the public.

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Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.