Polyethylenes and Polystyrenes with Carbazole Fluorescent Tags

The increasingly intense consumption of plastics and, above all, their improper disposal in the environment are causing serious environmental concerns. Great efforts have been made for development new methods aimed at facilitating and speeding up identification sorting different materials plastic recycling process. In this field, strategies based on fluorescent tagging developed. This work concerns synthesis characterization copolymers polyethylene (PE) polystyrene (PS), which among most produced consumed materials. synthesized potentially suitable use as markers PE PS. Ethylene-co-N-pentenyl carbazole (P(E-co-PK)) styrene-co-4-(N-carbazolyl)methyl styrene (P(S-co-SK)) were prepared by Ziegler–Natta free radical polymerization, respectively. If excited 300 nm, both P(E-co-PK)s P(S-co-SK)s give fluorescence emissions resulting them being optically active. Moreover, due to low amount units, they show chemico-physical properties such those corresponding homopolymers (PE PS). also tested experimental results demonstrate that from PE/P(E-co-PK) PS/P(S-co-SK) blends using only 1% weight copolymer, distinguishable can be still detected.