Enhanced properties from mixing natural rubber with recycled polyvinyl chloride by melt blending

The growing consumption of polymer products has created large quantities of waste materials resulting in environmental issues. Researchers have started to focus on recycling materials, not only for environmental reasons but also to decrease the cost. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a universal non-biodegradable polymer which can be processed into a variety of long-life and short-life products. Blending with biodegradable natural rubber is a nice combination to convert composites into biodegradable products. In this study, natural rubber/recycled PVC composites, with different percentage loadings of each material, were produced using a two-roll mill to ascertain the optimum properties of the blends by analyzing the mechanical and thermal properties. The hardness and the modulus were enhanced with the increasing r-PVC loading. The elongation at break increased with the r-PVC loading but decreased dramatically after 40% r-PVC loading while the tensile strength decreased after the 60% r-PVC loading. In the thermal analysis, the crystallization temperature and melting point increased with the r-PVC loading