The coatings industry continues to amplify the importance of providing sustainable answers to high-performance applications. With continued strides, the three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, social) are being addressed. Environmental gains from increasing the amount of recycled material usage and increasing the effectiveness and awareness of recycling programs are examples of these strides. However, the recycling programs in place are not enough - a staggering 50% of plastics used today are in single-use disposable applications such as packaging, agricultural films and disposable consumer items.1 In order to recapture more of these single-use materials, additional processes need to be put in place for reuse of these molecules. Here we incorporate variable recycled PET (rPET) content and report on the observed effects in coatings and adhesives.
The Resinate® A0351-12 polyol was the basis for the work outlined in this article. A0351-12 is an aliphatic 3,000 Da molecular weight diol that has found utility in multiple coating and adhesive applications. To properly design an extended polyol family for use in waterborne technology, the molecular weight target was reduced and brought closer in line with typical urethane dispersion polyols. This low-molecular-weight version of A0351-12 was our starting point for this work and is referenced as PEP-0 (polyester polyol, 0% rPET), shown in Table 1. Using Resinate technology, we incorporated increasing levels of rPET to observe the effects on film performance.