Fabrication of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) based Thin Film Composite Membranes from Waste Plastic Bottles

Abstract

Fresh water scarcity and pollution are the major issues all over the world and millions of people do not have access to clean water. Plastic waste is also a major pollutant of fresh water. In this study, PET is recycled and extracted from waste PET bottles. Forward osmosis (FO) is an efficient technique employed to treat water pollution by converting wastewater into clean water. The TFC membranes have shown great potential for high performance water purification, while the FO process has proved to be an energy efficient process compared with the RO process. This study employed a unique approach where the support layer of the TFC membranes was prepared using waste PET bottles. The support was optimized to give additional separation efficiency by incorporating MOF, i.e., MIL-100, into the support layer. MM supports with different loadings of MIL-100 (0wt%, 1wt%, 3wt%, 6wt% and 12wt%) were fabricated. Then TFC membranes were fabricated via Interfacial polymerization to produce top active polyamide layer. Finally, the performance of TFC membranes for desalination was assessed in the FO process. It was estimated that TFC membrane with 3wt% loading of MIL-100 showed high water flux and rejection as compared to other TFC membranes