{"id":150338,"date":"2024-09-12T07:37:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-12T05:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=150338"},"modified":"2024-09-08T18:04:30","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T16:04:30","slug":"new-process-vaporizes-plastic-bags-and-bottles-yielding-gases-to-make-new-recycled-plastics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/new-process-vaporizes-plastic-bags-and-bottles-yielding-gases-to-make-new-recycled-plastics\/","title":{"rendered":"New Process Vaporizes Plastic Bags and Bottles, Yielding Gases to Make New, Recycled Plastics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. \u00a9 Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Adapted from a release by Robert Sanders at UC Berkeley<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The catalytic process, developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, works equally well with the two dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene, the component of most single-use plastic bags; and polypropylene, the stuff of hard plastics, from microwavable dishes to luggage. It also efficiently degrades a mix of these types of plastics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The process, if scaled up, could help bring about a circular economy for many throwaway plastics, with the plastic waste converted back into the monomers used to make polymers, thereby reducing the fossil fuels used to make new plastics. Clear plastic water bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a polyester, were designed in the 1980s to be recycled this way. But the volume of polyester plastics is minuscule compared to that of polyethylene and polypropylene plastics, referred to as polyolefins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWe have an enormous amount of polyethylene and polypropylene in everyday objects, from lunch bags to laundry soap bottles to milk jugs \u2014 so much of what\u2019s around us is made of these polyolefins,\u201d said\u00a0John Hartwig, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab<\/strong>\u2019s Chemical Sciences Division and a UC Berkeley professor of chemistry who led the research. \u201cWhat we can now do, in principle, is take those objects and bring them back to the starting monomer by chemical reactions we\u2019ve devised that cleave the typically stable carbon-carbon bonds. By doing so, we\u2019ve come closer than anyone to give the same kind of circularity to polyethylene and polypropylene that you have for polyesters in water bottles.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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