A diverse group of specialty chemicals incorporated into plastic formulations before or during processing, or to the surfaces of finished products after processing. Their primary purpose is to modify the behavior of plastics during processing or to impart useful properties to fabricated plastic articles. Processes that yield a variety of versatile and marketable end-products that are the building blocks from which new plastics and a variety of other products can be manufactured. This is achieved by converting or recycling plastics back into the raw materials from which they were made.
ART includes such processes as methanolysis, glycolysis , hydrolysis, and thermal depolymerization.
These technologies augment existing mechanical systems as part of an integrated approach to plastics recycling designed to increase the volume of post-consumer plastic plastics diverted from the waste stream and expand the variety of plastics that are recycled into new and useful products. A complete depolymerization process that breaks nylon into its building blocks or monomers that can then be repolymerized to make nylon in any form and for any market.