Intermix Performance Materials (Accelerator)

Company Description: Our polymer additive enables the valorization of mixed plastics at low cost producing a high quality alloy. Polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) account for about 2/3 of all plastics in post-consumer waste. Due to their different structures, they are not miscible, resulting in plastic mixtures with unacceptably poor strength. One way to create higher quality recycled materials is to perform careful manual separation, but this is expensive and the separated materials still exhibit performance that is inferior to pure PP and PE unless separation is near perfect. Intermix has developed a polymer additive that when added to a stream of mixed PP and PE enables these two polymers to be combined, yielding a polymer alloy that is mechanically comparable to pure PE and PP samples. This obviates laborious and expensive sorting. The polymer additive is particularly potent - as little as 0.5 wt% effectively compatibilizes mixtures with as much as 30% PP contamination.