Modeling the Energy Needed to Recycle Plastic Waste

Our research project is about modeling the amount of energy it takes to melt a variety of recycled plastics. From our research, we found out that in 2018, the US produced over 35 million tons of plastic waste. The most common types of plastic were milk bottles and other types of containers. Reprocessing and melting plastics usually requires between 2.3 to 22.5 megajoules of energy per kilogram, but it heavily depends on the specific processing method used. Recycling plastic takes 75% - 88% less energy than producing new plastic from raw petroleum. Our research question is do plastics take different amounts of energy to melt down because of their chemical composition? Our hypothesis is if we compare the melting points of 3 different types of plastics like PET, HDPE, or PVC then they will each require different amounts of energy to melt, because each of the plastics have a different chemical composition. We will build a model in netlogo or python and it will use open source data that has documented heat and plastic melting points, so we can model how much energy it takes to melt down each recycled plastic.