The complexity of any plastic recycling initiative lies in the heterogeneous nature of the post‐consumer commingled plastic waste stream: recycling treatments are challenging without prior reliable sorting. A suitable identification system should be able to recognize different plastics and blends. Nowadays, the main technique used as quality control in plastic waste sorting centers is differential scanning calorimetry, whose result can be purely qualitative or semi‐quantitative, since only the crystalline fraction is evaluated. Moreover, the time required for data acquisition is relatively long. Infrared spectroscopy is an alternative, faster technique extensively used in applied research, but not widely utilized in industry. In this work, the cross‐use of infrared spectroscopy and calorimetry is tested in a real, practical case: the quality control of recycled pellets (namely composed of polyolefins only), which represent the output of a commingled plastic recycling plant and are used as secondary raw materials for different applications. Appropriate infrared spectroscopy calibration curves were built to allow the quantitative analysis with respect to the most common polymers found in the commingled plastic waste stream; the composition and contaminants in the recycled pellets were thereby determined and tracked through different production batches through the cross‐use of the two techniques outlined above.

The production of glass foams obtained by recycling post-consumer glass and textile industry processing waste is presented. The mechanical, thermal and acoustic properties were characterized as a function of process temperature and time. The results showed that it is possible to produce glass foams with thermal and acoustic insulation properties from a mixture consisting of 96.5% of glass waste, 1% of textile waste and 2.5% of manganese dioxide, processed at temperatures between 800 and 900 °C for a time between 30 and 90 min. The samples had density in the range of 200–300 kg m⁻³, porosity of 87–92%, thermal conductivity of 85–105 mW m⁻¹ K⁻¹, noise-reducing factors of 0.15–0.40 and compressive strength of 1.2–3.0 MPa. Although their insulation performance was not as outstanding as that of polymer foams, these materials can emerge as competitive candidates for applications requiring non-flammability and high-temperature load bearing capacity in combination with low weight, mechanical strength, and thermal and acoustic insulation properties. The use of secondary raw materials (which accounted for 97.5% by weight of the synthetic blend) limits the energy required compared to that needed for the extraction, transportation and processing of primary raw materials, making these foams attractive also in terms of environmental footprint.

The use of single-use or disposable plastic objects has massively increased during the last few decades, and plastic has become the main type of litter found in marine environments. The Adriatic Sea is seriously prone to marine litter pollution, and it collects about one-third of all the freshwater flowing into the Mediterranean, mainly via the river Po. This study investigated the type and composition of large microplastic debris collected in different sites in the Po Delta area. Visual classification was performed by relevant criteria, while chemical composition was assessed by infrared spectroscopy. The main plastic fraction is composed of polyolefin (76%), followed by polystyrene (19%). This proportion roughly matches global plastic production, rescaled after excluding plastics with negative buoyancy: all the identified compounds have a specific gravity lower than that of the seawater. Fragments (irregularly shaped debris) represent the most abundant category fraction (85%), followed by pellets, which represent roughly 10% of the total. Overall, the results provided an insight into large microplastic pollution in beach sediments in the Po delta area.