Recycling of Thermosetting Plastics

Covalent crosslinking point within the conventional thermosetting plastics routinely results in outstanding performance in mechanical property and solvent resistance yet leads to poor degradability and limited recyclability. In light of the context of sustainable development and the demand of environment protection, new methods for disposable thermosetting wastes have been brought out, including thermal and mechanical processing, to replace simply landfilling. However, these methods generally suffer large energy consumption, complicated product component, untoward separation, and low economic feasibility. Aiming to reduce energy inputs and improve circularity in recycling process, chemical recycling strategy has been widely studied as an alternative, which employs dynamic covalent bonds to rearrange whole crosslinking network. This chapter summarized some important dynamic covalent bonds in establishing exchangeable crosslinking networks based on detailed analyze of the polymer rearrangement mechanisms. With comprehensive understanding of dynamic polymer networks, we introduce some typical applications of recyclable thermosetting plastics that might reach the market in the near future.