No abstract

Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle is used as beverage packaging, which is very convenient as one time use packaging. However, the huge amount of PET bottle waste has been becoming a serious problem for the environment. The utilization of PET bottle waste is very important to reduce the environmental problem. In this work, PET bottle waste was used a raw material to develop an ultrafiltration (UF) membrane. The membrane was prepared by using a phase inversion technique. The effect of the type of solvent, additive, and non-solvent on the microstructure and ultrafiltration performance of the membrane was studied. Different type of solvent, phenol, m-cresol, and DMSO were used to dissolve PET bottle as the source of membrane polymer. Two different additives, Polyethylene Glycol (PEG) and Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone (PVP) were used. Membrane 3 with the composition of PET, phenol as solvent, and PEG as additive was prepared successfully. The variation of aqueous alcohol solutions as non-solvent resulted in different microstructures of the membranes as shown by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The permeation experiment result using pure water as the feed showed that membrane 3 using aqueous butanol as non-solvent (membrane 3-ButOH) exhibited the highest permeate flux compared to that of membrane 3 using aqueous propanol (membrane 3-PrOH) or ethanol as non-solvent (membrane 3-EtOH). The ultrafiltration experiment was carried out using a feed solution of water containing polyethylene glycol (PEG) 20,000. The membrane 3-EtOH showed the lowest permeate flux of 3.24 kg/m h, but the highest rejection of PEG 20,000 of 65.87%. The membrane 3-PrOH had a permeate flux of 11.57 kg/m h and a rejection of 64.73%. Whereas the membrane 3-ButOH showed the highest permeate flux of 27.78 kg/m h, but the lowest rejection 16.93%. This result was obtained due to the different membrane microstructures which were strongly affected by the type of non-solvent.