Recycling and Environmental Aspects

Abstract

Recycling and environmental aspects of adhesion technology are discussed in this chapter. Adhesively bonded adherends should be often separated before they can be recycled. For this purpose, dismantlable adhesives, which can be separated with stimulations, have been developed recently. There are lots of technical processes to realize such adhesives. For example, softening of adhesive, expansion force due to blowing agents or thermally expandable microcapsules, chemical degradation, electrochemical reaction, and taking advantage of interfacial phenomena can be applied to dismantlable adhesives. These adhesives have many applications such as temporary joints of work materials, shoe making, integrated circuits (IC) chip fabrication, electronics, housing construction, car fabrication, and so on. The most used trigger to start the separation of these adhesives is heating. Many kinds of methods including infrared, induction, and microwave heating