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Toyota Central R&D Labs., Inc. has been conducting “Material Recycle Project” in order to develop fundamental technology for automotive plastics recycle. The project has developed the bumper to bumper recycle technology for the painted thermoplastic bumper. Toyota Motor Corporation has developed the recycle system based on the technology and started the post consumer bumper recycling. Furthermore, the project has been developing new technologies for polyurethane bumper recycling, rubber recycling, floor carpet recycling, and plastics discrimination. This paper describes briefly the achievements of the new technologies and proposed the key technology to the plastics recycling based on the reactive extrusion processing.

ϵ-caprolactam was polymerized in the interlayer space of montmorillonite, the clay mineral yielding a nylon-clay hybrid (NCH). X-ray and TEM measurements revealed that each template of the silicate, which was 1 nm thick, was dispersed in the nylon 6 matrix, and that the interlayer distance of clay increased continuously from 1.2 nm for the unintercalated material to 21.4 nm for the intercalated material. Thus, NCH is a polymer-based molecular composite or a nano-composite. NCH contains 1-15 vol% of monolayer clay. Injection-molded NCH showed excellent mechanical properties compared with nylon 6 in terms of tensile strength, tensile modulus and heat resistance. The tensile modulus of NCH was twice that of Nylon 6, and the heat distortion temperature increased from 65°C for nylon 6 to 145°C for the NCH containing only 1.6 vol% of a clay mineral. It was found that such excellent properties of an NCH system was due to the strong ionic interaction between nylon 6 and the silicate layer.