Quality Improvement of Recycled Plastic Products Using Mixture Experiment

Recycling plastic has several advantages such as reducing consumption of energy, non-renewable fossil fuels use, and global emissions of carbon dioxide. In this study, the manufacturer would like to improve product quality and decrease cost of the products by recycling polycarbonates. The optimal amounts of mixture components to produce recycled plastic products should be determined. Thus, this research aims to study the effect of recycled polycarbonates with different colors and virgin polycarbonates on tensile strength and heat distortion temperature. By performing systematic experimentation, using mixture experiment, response surface methodology (RSM), and propagation of error (POE), the quality of the recycled plastic products can be improved and becomes more robust to variations at the optimal amounts of mixture components. Hence the manufacturer can use these settings of recycled plastics and virgin polycarbonate to produce quality products with low cost and environmental impact reduction.