Using the glass fibres in recycling agricultural plastic waste.

The wide-spread presence of plastic material in municipal and agricultural waste has significantly raised the ecology concern in Europe leading to laws and regulations aimed at controlling and reducing waste production, encouraging recycling and reuse as well. Recycling of plastic waste is not new but is a slowly developing process because using recycled materials is limited due to worse properties of recycled plastics if compared to virgin ones. The mechanical recycling of polymers determines a loss of some of their original chemical, physical and mechanical properties due to the role played by some of the degradation factors they were subjected to during their working life. One of the possibilities to improve the properties of plastic products is using diverse fillers like glass or carbon fibres. In this paper, the properties of plastic profiles obtained through mechanical recycling of agricultural plastic material mixed with glass fibres (70% LDPE + 30% glass fibres) were analyzed. The results of the tensile, bending and compression tests here reported show that the mixture of recycled plastic from agricultural application with a suitable different material could be considered as an interesting option for the improvement of the mechanical characteristics of these new regenerated products, paving the way to an increase in the sustainability of the agricultural applications.