Study of waste tyre granulates and polypropylene (PP) fibre as oil sorbent

Abstract There were various types of sorbent materials that exist in the current market that dealing with the oil spill incidents. However, because of high cost and incapable of repeated use, make it harder to combating oil spillage effectively and to suite environment friendly material. This study was done to assess waste tyre granulates and polypropylene (PP) fibre as oil sorbent in terms of its capacity, different type of oil absorbs and durability. Two different types of oil where used in this study in measuring the durability of the materials which are diesel and used engine oil. The sorbent capacity and re-usability tests were used to evaluate the practical sorption of each material. From the result it was found that waste tyre granulates had low oil practical sorption than PP fibre with almost 50% different. However, waste tyre granulates had high elasticity compared to PP fibre which enable it to be used repeatedly without losing its oil sorption capability. Therefore, both waste tyre granulates and PP fibre were combined to develop a new composite material sorbent that capable of recovering greater amounts of oil than using waste tyre granulates alone. The result shows that these composite material sorbent can be used repeatedly for at least 25 times.