Abstract

"Abstract This chapter describes the principal conventional polymers and bioplastics used in food packaging in terms of their resources or raw materials, properties, uses and applications. Food packaging plastics represent an important part of total plastic waste that ends up in landfills or accumulates in the environment when they are not properly managed. For counteracting this contamination problem, plastic recycling is the best alternative. Nonetheless, one of the challenges to guarantee recycling efficiency is the adequate polymer separation of plastic waste streams because of contaminants or the presence of polymers different than the target recycled plastic, which can cause processability problems or variation of its original properties. This chapter presents the principal polymer identification techniques applied to post-consumer plastic streams in order to improve the sorting and separation of plastics before recycling. Likewise, plastic waste recycling methods associated with single and multilayer polymer systems and their stages are described. Finally, a comparative analysis of the