As an extremely popular material, silicone is widely used in various fields. But have you ever wondered: How to recycle silicone? Here, we will provide you with relevant knowledge about silicone recycling.
What Are the Benefits of Silicone Recycling?
Recycling silicone offers multiple benefits for your business, including:
Environmental Compliance & Eco-Friendly
Recycling silicone can help you reduce waste production and achieve environmental goals. If silicone is discarded randomly, it will pollute the soil and groundwater. This will expose your enterprise to the risk of violating emission regulations and incurring environmental penalties.
Cost Savings & Economic Benefits
Recycling and reusing silicone scraps can significantly reduce your procurement costs. Moreover, cleaning and incinerating silicone waste materials require high costs. If you recycle them, you can save a lot of money on garbage transportation and disposal.
Sustainable Resource Use
If you choose to recycle silicone, you can achieve multiple uses of the silicone. This greatly enhances the utilization rate of resources and helps you achieve sustainable development. Meanwhile, if the price of silicone fluctuates, you can also use recycled materials as a stable supplement. This can effectively enhance your risk-resistance ability.
Enhance Corporate Image
Just imagine, if you take the initiative to recycle silicone, you will surely receive recognition from the government, the industry, and the public. This means that you attach importance to environmental protection and have a sense of social responsibility. At the same time, you can achieve a green cycle, which can enhance your competitiveness in the industry.
Can all Silicone Be Recycled?
You need to know that not all silicone can be recycled. The following types are silicone waste that can and cannot be recycled.
Recyclable Silicone
Raw silicone: If it is a raw material or silicone scraps from the production process, you can recycle them. This type of silicone is not cured or vulcanized and is the most common type of recycling.
Clean pure silicone products: If your products are daily necessities such as silicone pacifiers, silicone buttons, and silicone wristbands, you can recycle them. But you need to ensure they are not contaminated and are 100% silicone.
Industrial waste silicone: Products such as mechanical seals, conductive silicone, etc., are also recyclable. They belong to the HTV and can be processed into reusable silicone materials. And they have no impurities, so your processing cost is very low.
Non-recyclable Silicone
Dry RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanized)silicone: Common types of RTV include glass glue, waterproof sealant, and black and white glue for fixing electrical accessories, etc. Once this silicone dries at room temperature, it can no longer be softened, so you cannot recycle it.
Severely contaminated silicone: Some silicone products, although of high purity, should not be recycled if they are contaminated. For instance, silicone with its surface covered with oil stains, glue, or paint is of poor quality if recycled.
Non-separable composite silicone: You also need to check whether the silicone is combined with other materials. If they cannot be peeled off from metals, plastics, etc., you should not consider recycling them either.
How to Recycle Silicone?
In-House Mechanical Silicone Recycling Process
If you are doing simple physical recycling and have your own recycling equipment and site, you can recycle yourself. The specific steps are as follows:
Prepare Silicone Scrap
First, you need to collect qualified silicone waste. These include clean scraps and uncured, not severely contaminated silicone. Additionally, if you find that they are adhered or mixed with other plastics, metals, etc., you need to sort and separate them. After collecting the waste, you should store them uniformly in the designated area. It is forbidden to pile them in the open.
Crushing and Shredding
To facilitate subsequent cleaning and grinding, you need to put the prepared silicone scrap into a silicone crusher for crushing. To ensure the crushing effect, we recommend you keep the temperature below 35℃ and not exceed 40℃ at most. Because once the temperature is too high, the silicone particles will appear sticky and thus be unable to continue processing.
Cleaning and Drying
Cleaning the broken silicone can remove the dust and minor contaminants on its surface, which can help you gain purer recycled materials. After that, you need to put the silicone particles into a dryer with a temperature below 150℃ to completely remove the moisture. This can prevent moisture residue from affecting the grinding effect.
Grinding into Powder
You need to further grind the dried silicone particles into fine and uniform powders. You also can change the coarseness of the grinding according to your own needs.
For example, if it is for a low-standard industrial product, you can grind it into coarse powder. If it needs to be mixed into new materials to produce higher-quality products, you have to grind it into powder. This ensures that the recycled powder can be fully mixed with the new silicone raw material.
Reusing in Production
You’d better put the recycled silicone powder into the internal mixer at a ratio of 10% to 30% and mix it with the new silicone. After that, you send the mixed raw materials into the molding equipment to reproduce various products. However, due to the lower purity, you can generally only use them to manufacture industrial seals, foot pads, etc.
Industrial Silicone Recycling
If you find it too troublesome to deal with silicone waste materials and you don’t have recycling equipment, you can consider looking for a professional silicone recycling plant. It not only reduces your silicone recycling costs but also makes sure your waste materials are handled properly. The following are the processing steps:
Prepare Silicone Scrap
You need to do a simple disposal of your silicone waste first. Just like handling it by yourself, you also need to collect the uncured and not severely contaminated silicone first. Then, you need to pack them up and store them uniformly. After that, you need to contact a qualified silicone recycling plant and ask it to professionally recycle and process your silicone waste.
Crushing and Shredding
The recycling plant will break the large and thick pieces of silicone you transported into smaller pieces to facilitate subsequent processing.
Deep Cleaning
The waste materials you provided have only undergone simple decontamination work. However, a qualified recycling plant will carry out a deep cleaning on them to improve the pyrolysis efficiency and the purity of the products. This enables you to avoid excessive sorting and deep decontamination, which significantly saves your time, space, and labor costs.
Drying Treatment
To ensure the cleaned silicone does not mold or deteriorate, it will undergo a professional drying process. This can enable their moisture to meet the process standards, thereby ensuring the high-temperature pyrolysis process can operate safely.
High-Temperature Pyrolysis
This is the most crucial step. The dried silicone will be placed in a closed high-temperature pyrolysis furnace. Under high temperatures, the original silicone will gradually split and break, and eventually transform into silicon-based raw materials like silicone oil and silicone powder.
You need to choose a recycling plant that has this core technology. This advanced silicone pyrolysis process will expand the recycling scope of waste silicone, making your waste materials easier to sell.
Refining and Purifying
The silicone oil and silicon powder obtained through pyrolysis are crude and cannot be directly applied in industrial production. Only through further purification can the raw material performance be significantly improved, thereby ensuring the product’s quality.
Through these formal and complex processes, your waste silicone can truly be transformed into high-quality raw materials. And you can write these environmental protection achievements into your ESG reports to enhance the image and market competitiveness of your enterprise.
Selling Recycled Materials
After purification, these recycled raw materials will be shaped and packaged in accordance with industry standards and customer requirements. You can maximize resources by purchasing these recycled materials. Moreover, this entire process is legal, which enables your enterprise to smoothly pass the environmental protection review.
FAQ
Why Is It Hard to Recycle Silicone?
Firstly, silicone is often mixed with other materials, which makes it difficult for you to separate it.
Secondly, silicone has stable chemical properties and cannot be simply reshaped by melting. To achieve high-quality recycling, you must use professional mechanical grinding or high-temperature pyrolysis processes.
Moreover, in many cases, even if silicone is recycled, its tensile effect, hardness, and other properties may still be affected. This will prevent you from using them in high-end products.
What’s the Difference Between Mechanical and Chemical Recycling of Silicone?
- Mechanical recycling turns waste silicone into granules or powder through crushing and grinding. Although the process is simple and the cost is lower, it’s a form of downcycling. This means you need to apply it to industrial filling materials, low-end silicone products, etc.
- Chemical recycling involves high-temperature pyrolysis to decompose silicone into silicone oil, silicone powder, etc., and purify them. Therefore, you can obtain raw materials close to new ones and achieve recyclability.
Can Recycled Silicone Be Used in Food or Medical Applications?
Generally, it is not possible. Food-grade, medical-grade silicone needs high purity and no impurities. Regenerated silicone cannot completely avoid trace impurities during the recycling process, so it cannot meet food contact and medical grade standards. Therefore, you can only use recycled silicone in the industrial field per FDA, LFGB, or global industry regulations.
What Should I Pay Attention to When Recycling Silicone?
Firstly, you must avoid mixing different materials for recycling, and you need to store the silicone separately. If the waste is contaminated by oil, glue, etc., you also have to classify it separately.
Secondly, you should choose a reputable and qualified recycling company with pyrolysis technology. And you also need to keep the recycling vouchers to deal with environmental inspections.
At the same time, if you choose to use recycled silicone, you need to mark its grade of application and cannot use it randomly in food and medical products.
How to Find a Reliable Silicone Recycling Plant？
The first step you need to take is to check its certifications. You need to ensure the recycling plant has a legal processing formal waste disposal qualification to prevent you from violating environmental protection requirements.
Secondly, you need to check if it has professional silicone pyrolysis furnaces and recycling equipment that can achieve standardized processing.
In addition, you can ask it to provide past success cases. You’d better choose a manufacturer that specializes in silicone recycling, as they have more professional processing.
And don’t forget to ask them to issue a formal waste disposal document, which can ensure you pass subsequent REACH and ESG inspections, etc.
Final Thought
Silicone recycling is a win-win option for you, because it combines environmental protection and economic benefits. If you are looking for a high-quality silicone supplier to reduce the difficulty of your silicone recycling process, please choose Legensilicone. We will provide you with qualified silicone products. Just contact us!
