RESUMO
Plastic waste and air pollution are becoming a great concern due to their adverse effect on human health and the environment. There is increasing number of evidence showing that recycling plastic and filtering harmful air pollutants are one of the most effective and promising way to eliminate their hazard on the environment. In this purpose, we developed eco-friendly filtration materials from recycled PET by electrospinning method to be used in air filtration and compared them with conventional PVA membranes. Filtration efficiency of prepared membranes were tested homemade membrane system using cigarette smoke source. Characterization results and smoke filtration performance of recycled PET and PVA membranes before and after smoke filtration were examined. The results demonstrated that the removal efficiencies of PVA-5 wt.%, PVA-10 wt.%, and PVA-15 wt.% were 4.11%, 11.32%, and 12.14%, respectively. A similar trend was also observed in recycled PET-5 wt.%, PET-10 wt.%, and PET-15 wt.% membranes with 4.32%, 10.79%, and 11.68% of filtration efficiency, respectively. Based on this result, using recycled PET can be an alternative way to produce a higher value product compared to traditional polymer membranes used commercially. This result is also supported by the neural network model of this study.