End-of-Life Decision Hierarchies for Photopolymer Products: Reuse, Repair, Recycling, Recovery and Disposal

End-of-life decisions for photopolymer products should not begin with a preferred recycling technology. They should begin with the residual function, material identity, contamination state, disassembly options and available recovery infrastructure of the actual product. Conventional crosslinked photopolymers often cannot be remelted, while emerging dynamic or cleavable networks may support repair, depolymerisation or reprinting under bounded conditions. This review develops a non-compensatory hierarchy: continued use and reuse are considered before repair, component harvesting, material recycling, chemical recovery, energy recovery and final disposal, but a nominally higher route is not selected when it cannot meet safety, quality or legal constraints. The framework distinguishes technical feasibility from environmental benefit and requires recovered material to be qualified for its next use rather than credited by mass alone. Recent work on mechanical recycling and closed-loop photopolymer chemistry demonstrates that multiple pathways are technically possible, while also showing degradation, impurity and property-retention constraints. The central conclusion is that circularity is a verified chain of retained value and performance, not a label attached to a waste stream.

ER-280 · Version 0.3.