2019-05

Tishk International University

(Designing small unit reactor for recycling of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) waste bottles). Due to the lack of recycling companies, for several years the Kurdistan region have been allowing the exportation of cardboard and plastic to Turkey to keep the environment clean .the Kurdistan Region sells thousands of tons of plastic and cardboard waste to Turkish companies who recycle it and sell the products back to Kurdistan. Turkish factories sell back one ton of cardboard or plasticfor $500 to $1000, depending on the quality, this price is nearly 5 to 10 times the price of what the Kurdish regionsells them which can be very expensive in the long term. We hope that this project opens the eyes of our beloved Kurdistan to think about building their own recycling factories withoutthe dependents of any other country’s to recycle for them. This project shows the design and the process of a small unit reactor whichbrings incredible results of recycle waste plastic bottles not just to make plastic bottles again,but also to process them into other useful products like video tapes ,recording tapes, as a raw material for industry’s etc.The aim of this project is to recover terephthalic acid from PET waste bottlesby designingand using asmall unit reactor for reprocess the terephthalicacid into new useful product. Thisprocess has been done in two stages:At the first stage, thereaction between PET waste bottles and potassium hydroxide in non-aqueous solution of ethylene glycol (as a solvent) leads for the production of sodium terephthalate solution that carried out in a stainless-steel mix reactorAt the second stage, thereaction between produced sodium terephthalate and hydrochloric acid leads to Terephthalic acid production