In recent years, the growing public awareness of environmental issues has revealed the fact that natural resources in the world are declining and there is limited capacity to manage the volume of waste generated by human activities. Nowadays, the recycling of polymeric materials, especially polyurethane foam, is very important due to its extensive usage in the most of the industrial fields and, in parallel, the production of massive amount of wastes.
Among the various types of polyurethane waste recycling methods, the glycolysis process is considered as a chemical recovery method. Due to its ease of use and the conversion of waste into the raw materials, especially polyol, the main route is polyurethane foam recycling. The process involves split phase recycling one in which the phases consisting of upper recovered polyol composition and the lower one is containing heavy aromatic contained complex composition materials. Evidence showed that with increasing the amount of catalyst, the rate of foam dissolution increased and the urethane bonds cleavage take place in the short reaction times.
In this study, various weight percentages of Mo/MgO composite catalyst is used to recover flexible polyurethane foam wastes. After complete dissolution of the foam particles, the chemical structure of recovered products was identified and characterized by different spectroscopic and analytical methods, respectively. Obtained results showed the successful recycling of polyurethane wastes to the firstly used virgin poly in combination with other complicated compositions namely aromatics, unreacted reagents etc. in addition our founds shown that by increasing the weight of the catalyst led to the high recovery yields and decreases the percentage of aromatic compounds.