The Expanded Polystyrene is a material that comes from the expansion of plastic called polystyrene (PS)
And Polystyrene is a material widely used in different products daily. It’s refined from crude oil and a member of thermoplastics family.
It is a clear, lightweight plastic where you can find in store or supermarket, as packaging or protection of a fragile product. Most of EPS is white and built with pre-expanded polystyrene beads and looks like a rigid, hard material.
The expanded polystyrene beads is mixed with a blowing agent , and additives other pentane chemicals that give vitality expansion accounts and allow them to be processed and molded articles low density foam. so after the expanding process, the final EPS products contains 98% air.
The strong and light EPS make itself become the best packaging and insulation material, compared with other material like EPE, EPP. But these advantages also make EPS become a big problem when people need to recycle waste EPS. The waste EPS is too light to transport, looks like a chicken ribs, “tasteless but wasteful to discard”
However, if there is a way that can make EPS not expanded, it’s not a problem anymore.
This way we call it densification.